Coming from someone who's suggested therapy to others, attended sessions, but never used it for personal reasons. It's really quite arbitrary.. sometimes, people just need a third party person to talk to to sort their thoughts out. But the main motivators I've seen:
- Major life event.. losing a loved one very close to you, experiencing a traumatic event, being forced to move to a new place or starting a whole new life.
- Having someone toxic in your life change your baseline... having low self esteem due to other people pushing you down for example, or oppression, bullying, or having a lifestyle that is not currently accepted by mainstream people will sometimes cause this as well.
- Addiction
- Anger issues
- Lack of coping mechanisms.. if anxiety hits you from the small stuff (aka you see people handle it no problem but you cannot), you likely lack the ability to cope with what life is throwing at you, and you probably need help developing those things in your life.
- Having come from a shitty past and not knowing how to move forward.
- Having someone tell you that you can benefit from counseling.. Seriously, I see a lot of people ignore this one, but if someone who cares about you says that this is outside of their scope, it probably is.
- Being diagnosed with a mental illness of any sort usually requires periodic management through CBT and counseling to get an outsider perspective on how you're doing.
- Happy events that have a nasty way of going bad... marriage counseling is a fairly routine thing that even healthy happy individuals should go through to ensure they are where they want to be before taking such a major step.
I tell everyone that counseling usually doesn't hurt. Of course there's bad counselors just like there's bad anythings out in the world, but to speak generally and not to the small percentage, counseling is there because people have a passion to help others help themselves and study hard to do just that. Counseling gives you what you put into it, and most of the time people are far more cautious with counseling than they should be... this, to me, should be the first in line to try for most things. If you're debating going, go. If you have no one to talk to, go.