Why That’s a Good Thing
What do you think i should do?
It’s a common moment in therapy — someone pauses mid-sentence, looks up, and asks, “What do you think I should do?”
It’s an honest question. When life feels confusing or unmanageable, it’s natural to look for direction. But therapy isn’t the right place for advice or guidance about housing, finances, or practical life choices.
That might sound strange at first — if a therapist won’t tell you what to do, what’s the point? The short answer is this: therapy helps you find your footing, not your to-do list.
At a glance
- Therapy isn’t financial, legal, or housing advice.
- It focuses on the emotional and psychological impact of what you’re going through.
- Advice services handle logistics; therapy helps you manage the stress around them.
- You can use both — one for action, one for reflection.
- Signposted support: Citizens Advice, Shelter, StepChange, Hub of Hope, Beginnings Partnership.
What Therapy Is — and Isn’t
Therapists aren’t financial advisers, solicitors, or housing officers. We don’t give investment tips, fill in benefit forms, or tell you whether to stay or go. That’s not avoidance — it’s ethics.
Therapy is a confidential space for understanding, not instruction. It’s where you unpack the emotional load that sits behind practical problems: the worry, guilt, self-blame, or numbness that makes everything harder to face.
If you’re in debt, therapy won’t create a payment plan — but it can help you untangle the shame that stops you opening letters.
If your housing feels unstable, therapy can’t find you a new flat — but it can help you process the fear and exhaustion of living in uncertainty.
If your relationship feels unbearable, therapy won’t tell you whether to leave — but it can help you reconnect with your own values so that the choice comes from clarity, not panic.
A therapist’s role isn’t to fix your situation — it’s to help you face it with steadier ground under your feet
If therapy simply handed you solutions, you might never learn to trust your own. Using an old analogy — a therapist doesn’t hand you fish to eat; they help you learn how to fish, so you can feed yourself long after the session ends.
Why Boundaries Matter
Ethical boundaries aren’t red tape; they’re protection. Every professional has limits — a GP can’t write a mortgage, and a solicitor can’t diagnose anxiety. Therapy is no different.
When a therapist strays into giving advice about areas they’re not trained in — finance, law, housing — they step outside their competence. That can do more harm than good, especially when clients act on advice that turns out inaccurate or incomplete.
Boundaries keep therapy clean. They preserve trust, safety, and the focus on your internal world — what it feels like to be you, in your circumstances, right now.
The truth is, advice and therapy can happily coexist; they just need to stay in their lanes.
Where the Two Meet
Think of it like this:
- Advice helps you fix external problems.
- Therapy helps you cope with what those problems do to you internally.
One gives you steps; the other gives you stability.
Someone might meet with a debt charity to restructure payments and come to therapy to work on the anxiety that built up while things were spiralling. Or they might get housing advice from Shelter while using therapy to process the fear and loss tied to eviction.
Both forms of help are valuable — they just work on different layers of the same situation.
Advice tells you what to do. Therapy helps you understand why it matters — and how you feel about doing it.
They’re 2 side of the same coin – one deals with the practical and the other deals with the psychological.
Therapists often have life experience in areas like benefits, housing, or care systems, and may gently signpost where relevant. But that signposting isn’t advice — it’s context, offered so you can connect with the right form of support.
When Life Overlaps with Systems
Therapy often sits beside complex, real-world stressors — housing insecurity, benefit issues, job loss, medical uncertainty.
It’s normal for those to spill into sessions; they shape your emotional landscape. The key is focus: we explore how they affect you, not how to fix them administratively.
If you’re struggling to balance therapy with crisis management, your therapist can help you stabilise emotionally so that you can engage with the right external support. That’s not deflection — it’s triage done ethically.
When the Situation Itself Needs Support
Sometimes what looks like a need for counselling is actually a need for practical support. When life feels unstable — debt, housing issues, benefits delays — it’s natural to feel anxious, angry, or low. Therapy can help you manage those emotional reactions, but if the situation itself is unsafe or overwhelming, practical help may need to come first.
Getting support with finances, housing, or care needs isn’t separate from mental health — it’s part of it. Stress, deprivation, and insecurity all affect the nervous system and can mimic or amplify anxiety, depression, and burnout. Once some stability returns, the psychological world becomes easier to work with; therapy can then focus on meaning and resilience rather than sheer survival.
Practical Help and Trusted Signposts
While therapy stays focused on the psychological and emotional, there are excellent UK organisations that handle the practical side. You don’t have to navigate that alone.
Money and Debt Support
- Citizens Advice – free, confidential advice on money, work, benefits, housing, and legal rights: citizensadvice.org.uk
- StepChange Debt Charity – practical plans for dealing with debt: stepchange.org
- National Debtline – free and independent debt advice: nationaldebtline.org
- Money Helper – budgeting tools, benefits calculators, and financial guidance: moneyhelper.org.uk
Housing and Homelessness
- Shelter – expert housing advice and support if you’re facing eviction or homelessness: shelter.org.uk
- Crisis – support for people who are homeless or at risk: crisis.org.uk
- Local authority housing teams can advise on rights, temporary accommodation, and emergency help.
Employment and Benefits
- ACAS – support for workplace rights and employment disputes: acas.org.uk
- Jobcentre Plus / GOV.UK – information on benefits, Universal Credit, and work support.
Domestic Abuse and Personal Safety
- Refuge – 24-hour National Domestic Abuse Helpline (0808 2000 247): refuge.org.uk
- Men’s Advice Line – confidential support for men experiencing domestic abuse: mensadviceline.org.uk
- Galop – specialist service for LGBTQ+ people facing abuse or violence: galop.org.uk
Broader Mental Health Support
- Mind – mental-health information and support: mind.org.uk
- Hub of Hope – nationwide directory of local mental-health and crisis services: hubofhope.co.uk
- Beginnings Partnership – holistic support for people facing hardship, helping bridge therapy, wellbeing, and practical aid: beginningspartnership.org.uk
- Samaritans – 24-hour emotional support line: 116 123, samaritans.org
Therapists can’t make those calls for you, but they can help you manage the emotional weight that makes those steps difficult.
How Therapy Supports the Emotional Side
Working on the emotional response doesn’t mean you’re ignoring the problem. It means you’re strengthening the foundation you’ll stand on while solving it.
Therapy can help you:
- Regain a sense of agency when you feel stuck.
- Process guilt or shame connected to financial or housing instability.
- Recognise burnout before it leads to collapse.
- Build emotional regulation skills to face difficult conversations.
- Reconnect with self-worth that life stress has eroded.
You can still take practical steps — you’ll just be doing it from a more stable internal place.
Online Therapy and Its Limits
If you’re working with a therapist online, check they’re trained and qualified to practise in that way. Online work involves its own skills — maintaining presence through a screen, ensuring digital confidentiality, and knowing how to manage risk remotely.
A competent online therapist should be able to explain their training, their ethical framework (such as ACTO membership), and how they protect your privacy during remote sessions.
Why People Sometimes Seek Advice Instead
Often, asking for advice is really a way of asking for containment: “Tell me what to do” often means “Tell me I’ll be okay.”
When you feel overwhelmed, certainty feels like safety. But the therapist’s job is to help you find steadiness from within rather than provide temporary reassurance.
Advice might soothe for a day; understanding yourself steadies you for a lifetime.
When Therapy Feels Frustrating
It’s normal to feel disappointed when you realise therapy won’t hand out solutions. That’s part of the work. The process can feel slower, but it leads to change that’s deeper and more sustainable than borrowed answers.
Think of it as the difference between someone holding your map and teaching you to read it yourself. Once you know how to navigate your emotions, you’ll be able to face future challenges without needing someone else to draw the route.
Therapy Isn’t advice & Guidance
Therapy isn’t advice or guidance — and that’s precisely why it works. It trusts that you already hold the capacity to make choices; it simply helps you hear yourself clearly enough to do it.
If you need practical help, reach out to the right organisations. If you need space to breathe, think, and feel, therapy can hold that. Both matter, and both can coexist.
Advice gives direction. Therapy restores direction.
One is for your external world, and the other your internal world.
