There is an old saying that appears in many languages that goes: "A shared problem is a problem divided in half". Somehow, it can be said that this is one of the premises of counseling, a psychotherapeutic practice that helps people to find the best solution for their problems or even for their doubts and uncertainties. However, don't mistake counseling with giving advices. It is not about telling other people how to act, nor making people feel better. Counseling is a humanistic mental health approach that aims at helping people to become the best version they can be of themselves.

This type of therapy is a growing practice in Latin America, although it already has a major recognition in North America and Europe. It is a magnificent tool for teenagers who are at a key transitional stage in life, when many decisions need to be made and many conflicts overcame. The counselor, in this case, is a mature adult, studious of the human mind and spirit, preferably with rich life experiences, who can then encourage the teenager to reflect on their lives in order to make the best decisions for the beginning of adult life.

Whereas counseling as a discipline only emerged between the 19th and 20th centuries, we can make an association of this practice with much older practices of human groups who lived in small communities, such as villages or tribes. Many groups, in fact, continue to live this way, as indigenous and quilombola communities in the Americas. In this sense, counseling can consist of group or individual meetings, where young people receive help from more experienced elders of their community, and thus have a clearer vision of how to act more assertively in the world.

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In the school setting, the counselor becomes a kind of mentor or coach for the teenager, showing him the range of career opportunities to follow, which educational paths are possible to reach the outlined goals, discussions about the importance of a gap year, planning an exchange program, among others. But the therapy does not stop there. The counselor, as a psychotherapist branch, also has the possibility of working socioemotional issues with the adolescent, such as drug use, sexuality, relationship with parents and other adolescents, teenage pregnancy, mental health, depression, violence, bullying, social media, peer pressure, among others.

In the end, the very reflection that the adolescent makes about the future is therapeutic in itself, thus socioemotional issues are nothing more than another indispensable part for the integral development of this young person. In addition, interpersonal skills, which are essential for this teenager to become a fully realized adult and helpful to the community in which he lives, are also worked on during the sessions with the counselor.

Much like a psychologist, a psychotherapist and a psychoanalyst, the counselor does not offer the cure and solution to all the client's problems. In fact, the role of this professional, who also studies theorists such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and the fathers of the counseling practice, Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, is that of an eye-opener whom the patient can trust entirely. Through deeply reflective conversations, practitioners of this kind of speech therapy help clients find within their conscious and unconscious mind the answers to follow their paths to self-actualization and self-realization, always in an empathetic way without judgment and committed to the total secrecy of sessions and information on conversations with the client, even if he or she is underage. There are some exceptions where parents of teenagers will be contacted to discuss details of the conversation, and these are usually when the teenager is at risk to his or her own life or that of others.

Considering that teenagers generally have great difficulties in opening up to parents, close people and even other teenagers, the relationship with a counselor, which despite being immensely empathetic and friendly, is still a professional in which the young person has the absolute trust that there is no possibility of 'leaking conversations', 'gossip' or even 'judgments' by the therapist, which gives them greater freedom and tranquility to expose their insecurities and find the best solutions with the mental health professional.

The gender, geographic origin, race or sexuality of the counseling professional is of little relevance to the therapy, but as mentioned above, it is preferable that this therapist not only reads a lot about the human mind, but also has experienced adverse situations himself, to be able to have the necessary baggage in dealing with the most varied types of situations that the young person may be going through. Diversity issues such as race, sexual orientation, gender identity and the like should always be handled with the utmost empathy and zero judgment, as these are often the issues that young people find it most difficult to open up to. Reinforcing, then, the need for the therapist's circle of friends to be wide, diverse, and that they have lived through complex and challenging life situations.

In short, counseling is an essential tool in the life of a teenager, and can even mark it as a 'rite of passage', in which the young person starts to see life in a more mature and structured way, and where the desire and eagerness to be in danger may still exist, but this teenager will first put his foot in the river to check where its bottom is, before diving into it.