Goals and Psychotherapy
The outcome we look for when first approaching a counsellor is often not the resolution we find. Feelings including pain and grief are a natural part of life. Psychotherapy may help to fully experience them and to find a place for them in your life.
Consider the following passage...
"But I like the inconveniences."
"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer
to do things comfortably."
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry,
I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want
sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're
claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right then," said the Savage defiantly,
"I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and
impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to
have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live
in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right
to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains
of every kind." There was a long silence.
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.
Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. "You're
welcome," he said.
--from Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
On a similar theme, here is an interesting passage on an interesting site - a quote from William James's Varieties of religious Experience.