Understanding the brain in counselling

The underlying principles of offering “counselling” guidance and support can be traced back to ancient times, using storytelling, rituals, and community support to address personal challenges.
Since the mid-20th century, counselling approaches have focused on behaviour, emotions, and feelings without fully understanding the one part of our anatomy that drives everything: the brain.
Over the last 30 years, our knowledge of the brain, how it works, the nature of neural activation and neural plasticity (the adaptability to change), and how cognitive behaviours and memories are created, stored, retrieved, and adapted (memory reconsolidation) has radically changed the art of counselling.
Understanding the brain can help us to learn why we behave in certain ways and why we (as an example) react to danger, fear, love, and isolation. Negative memories of the past do not need to haunt the future with debilitating consequences.
Through the integration of neuroscience and psychotherapy, we better understand the complexity of human anatomy, and for clients struggling with mental health challenges, there are more advanced treatment techniques to work with individual circumstances.
Let’s learn from each other and exchange ideas, even though we are not medical doctors, and counselling remains an art, but an art informed by evidence-based science. How do you see the brain playing a role in addressing mental health challenges?