From my point of view counseling is about a person deciding to take responsibility as an adult for their own feelings. No one else is responsible for what you feel in the end if you are an adult. So, there are children both around and under 18 and there are adults: that's all there is in the world of humans. Realizing that no matter what someone else does it is not their fault what you feel.
Now, of course there are times when you need to bring in reinforcements like Police or Army or something like that when you have mass murderers and such or people like Hitler or Stalin or some people like that who kill million and millions of people through their actions.
However, most of the time realizing no one really has any responsibility for what you feel but you. So, if you don't like what you feel around someone you can separate from that person or you can tell that person to stop doing what they are doing to you. However, in the end as an adult whatever you feel is your feelings and has nothing at all to do with them at all.
Understanding this you then can have healthy relationships with people, get counseling from people that actually can help you and separate from people actually harming you physically or emotionally.
This is actually what counseling is all about.
For example, in the early 1990s I was going through a really terrible divorce and custody battle for my then 5 year old daughter. I had taken a job as a counselor of juvenile offenders in San Jose because I was a little self destructive at this point of my divorce. My oldest son had gone into Job Core and I was angry about my wife I was divorcing insisting he did this after he almost died in his truck accident where his pickup truck had flipped 3 times forward and he had almost died. After my now ex-wife and I had broken up for the last time I eventually met my new girlfriend that eventually became my wife and the mother of my daughter who is now graduating high school this year. However, about the time I met my new girlfriend (now my wife of almost 20 years) she said to me regarding my job. "You need to quit this job because it is giving you PTSD. You are telling me you are going to put a zipper in your driver's seat to put a gun in to protect you from gang members. You don't need this much dysfunctional stuff going on in your life, especially because you are going through such an awful divorce." This was exactly what I needed to hear. I quit this job when I was threatened by 6 shanks the same day by the same person (shanks are knife like objects) so when he put a butcher knife in my back and laughed and I had to disarm him I almost was going to kill him in reflex from when I grew up in high school. I realized I couldn't kill a 15 year old that I was trying to save from a life of crime. My new girlfriend had been in counseling about 6 years because she could afford it and knew what I needed and so became in some ways my very intelligent counselor with 2 bachelors degrees and a master's in business administration.
Then we became involved after being together and married about 5 years in co-counseling with other adults about the time her mother died. We went through 2 levels of co-counseling each me with a men's group and her with a women's group.
From this we learned to separate "my bad experiences" from "Your bad experiences". We came to call this "Oh. I'm projecting my stuff on you. I'm sorry!" and she would say the same thing to me if she was projecting her bad experiences in her life on me.
This way we treated each other with respect always and any time we slip we apologize to each other. If you have respect for each other in your relationship and you are best friends often that relationship (if you have enough money to actually live) can go on the rest of your life in a very good way for both of you and for anyone that meets you too. So, by practicing adult behavior always and taking responsibility for whatever you feel you can be a good citizen and be helpful to your family and everyone you know or meet ongoing.
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