I´ve seen several types of counselors within mental health care, within social services and unemployment programs. In those cases I´ve met with such a person over a longer period of time I always feel I don´t want to stay in touch and I feel very uncomfortable about them having families, friends, interests and so on.

For me personally I see it as more or less harmful to open up about personal stuff to a person who doesn´t live like me and who has a different life situation from mine. All of those I´ve met with, which are a lot of people during the years, have had a family, kids, they had nice flats in better areas than where I live. First and foremost, they have their own contacts, friends, relatives and so on, why should I talk to them about my life? Why should I be constantly reminded of things I don´t have? Even if those counselors never tells about themselves to make me feel deliberately uncomfortable.

It´s not at all that I expect them to be my friend or to call me outside our appointment times but why should I put myself in a situation where I know I´m not their priority? (And can´t be of course, I´m not their family or their friend).

A part of this is that I´ve never received help that actually got me somewhere, if I had met a professional that really could help me in an effective way, then I could ignore the fact that we live very different lives, that they have a family when I don´t and so on.

This isn´t about "but why don´t you go out and look for new friends or a job" as if it had been that easy, then I hadn´t wrote this post in the first place.

Also, as I don´t mean counselors as in professional therapists, the people I´ve talked to don´t understand this. We don´t have access to therapy for a longer period of time within our public mental health care system and I can´t pay for therapy out of my own pocket.