Since setting up Four Pillars Counselling in Howick, one thing I have noticed again and again is how long people often wait before reaching out for support. It is not usually because they have no idea something is wrong. More often, they know they have been struggling for quite a while. They might be more anxious than usual, sleeping badly, feeling flat, becoming more irritable, withdrawing from a partner, losing motivation, or finding that the same problem keeps coming back no matter how much they try to think their way through it.
What often follows is some version of, “It’s not that bad though,” or, “Other people have it much worse than I do.”
I have heard people describe months or years of stress, anxiety, relationship problems or low mood and then almost immediately explain why they probably should not be struggling in the first place. They have a job. They have a partner. They have somewhere to live. Their childhood was not as bad as somebody else’s. Nobody has died. Someone they know is dealing with something much more serious.
So they keep going, often until the problem becomes difficult enough that it can no longer be ignored.
This is not just something I am seeing in Howick
There is a wider New Zealand context to this. The latest New Zealand Health Survey found that 14.3% of adults experienced high or very high psychological distress in the previous four weeks. That is roughly one in seven adults, and is up from 7.4% in 2019/20. Among people aged 15 to 24, the figure was even higher at 22.9%. Ministry of Health NZ
Perhaps just as importantly, 10.5% of New Zealand adults reported wanting professional help for their emotions, stress, mental health or substance use during the previous year but not receiving it. At the same time, 9.3% reported speaking with a psychologist, counsellor or psychotherapist about their mental health or substance use. Ministry of Health NZ
The Auckland data is interesting too, particularly given what I have been noticing while establishing a counselling practice here in East Auckland.
In the 2024 Auckland Quality of Life Survey, 31% of Auckland respondents rated their mental health and wellbeing as either fair or poor. East Auckland was actually quite close to the Auckland-wide figure. Of the East Auckland respondents, 10% rated their mental health as poor and another 19% rated it as fair. In other words, almost three in ten people surveyed in East Auckland were not describing their mental health positively. Knowledge Auckland
I would not take that to mean Howick or East Auckland has some uniquely severe mental health problem. The data does not suggest that. What it does show is that the difficulties people bring into counselling in Howick are hardly unusual or isolated. A fairly substantial number of people across East Auckland and the wider Auckland region are struggling with their mental health and wellbeing to some degree.
There are plenty of practical reasons people do not seek support. Cost matters. Availability matters. Some people simply do not know where to start, while others are unsure whether counselling will actually help or whether they will find someone they feel comfortable talking to.
But there is another barrier I find particularly interesting because it can happen entirely internally: comparing our own problems with other people’s and deciding ours are not serious enough to count.
When someone else always has it worse
You sometimes hear this called “comparative suffering.” The research literature tends to use terms such as social comparison of distress, which is probably a more precise description of what is happening.
Essentially, we are not only judging how we feel. We are judging how we feel relative to how we think everybody else feels.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Perspective can be useful, and so can gratitude. The difficulty comes when comparison becomes a way of dismissing our own experience.
The thinking might go something like this: someone else has experienced something worse than I have, so my problem is not really that serious. If it is not that serious, I should be able to deal with it myself. If I cannot, perhaps that says something negative about me.
Research into social comparison and mental health help-seeking suggests that the way people judge their distress relative to other people is associated with whether they believe they need professional support and whether they actually seek it. One large population study involving more than 36,000 adults found that people who considered themselves more worried, nervous or anxious than others were more likely both to perceive a need for professional help and to seek it. PubMed
That makes sense to me. Before someone ever contacts a counsellor, they usually have to make an earlier judgement: does what I am experiencing actually justify asking someone for help?
Comparison can make that a surprisingly difficult question.
The problem is that there will almost always be somebody who has it worse. If someone is struggling with anxiety every day, sleeping badly and becoming increasingly withdrawn, the fact that another person is experiencing something more severe does not make the first problem disappear. Suffering does not work particularly well as a ranking system.
Why do we wait for a crisis?
I sometimes think we apply a strange standard to mental health that we would not use in most other parts of life. You do not need to become completely unfit before starting to exercise. You do not have to wait until a relationship is falling apart before working on communication. You would not usually watch a manageable problem slowly get worse simply because it has not become disastrous yet.
Yet when it comes to counselling, people can sometimes feel that seeking support too early proves the problem was never serious enough to justify counselling in the first place.
I think that has things backwards.
Counselling is obviously appropriate when someone is experiencing significant distress, trauma, addiction, serious relationship problems or a major life crisis. But those things are not entry requirements.
It can also be useful when anxiety has started influencing your decisions, when the same argument keeps happening in your relationship, when work stress follows you home every night, when a breakup or life transition is proving harder than expected, or when your confidence has gradually taken a hit.
Sometimes the reason is much less dramatic. Someone simply feels that they are not quite themselves anymore and cannot really explain why.
That is still worth paying attention to.
For anyone unsure what sorts of concerns people actually bring to counselling, I have outlined the different types of counselling services I offer in Howick and online across New Zealand, including individual counselling, couples counselling and support for young people.
“I’m not sure this is serious enough to be here”
This is probably one of the comments that has stood out most to me since working with people in Howick and across East Auckland. Someone will wonder whether their problem is really serious enough for counselling, and quite often that comes shortly before describing something that has been affecting them every day.
I do not think that means everybody needs counselling. They do not. Stress, sadness, anxiety and uncertainty are all normal parts of being human, and people are often perfectly capable of working through difficult periods without professional support.
I just do not think “Is this bad enough?” is always the most useful question.
It might be more useful to ask: Has this been bothering me for a while? Is it starting to affect my relationships, work, sleep or confidence? Have I tried to change it and found myself returning to the same place? Am I avoiding things because of it? Would understanding it better make some part of my life easier?
If the answer to some of those questions is yes, talking with someone may be worthwhile even if things have not reached breaking point.
I wrote more specifically about this in Do I Need Counselling? 8 Signs It May Be Time to Talk to Someone, including some of the common signs that counselling might be useful even when there is no obvious crisis.
Counselling in Howick before things reach breaking point
There are at least some encouraging signs in the New Zealand data. In 2024/25, 22.5% of adults said they had spoken with family, whānau or friends about their mental health or substance use during the previous year, up from 16% the year before. Ministry of Health NZ
Hopefully that reflects a gradual shift in how we think about asking for support.
For people I work with at Four Pillars Counselling in Howick, across East Auckland, and through online counselling elsewhere in New Zealand, some of the most useful work begins well before somebody would describe their situation as a crisis. Often it starts with something much simpler: something has been bothering them for a while, they have tried to deal with it themselves, and they are tired of going around in circles with it.
If you are considering counselling but are unsure what actually happens when you start, the Four Pillars counselling FAQs cover things like the first session, referrals, confidentiality and finding the right fit.
You do not need to prove that your situation is worse than somebody else’s before you are allowed to take it seriously. You also do not need to wait until things are “bad enough” before trying to make them better.
If you are looking for a counsellor in Howick or East Auckland and you are unsure whether counselling makes sense for what you are dealing with, you are welcome to contact Four Pillars Counselling with any questions before booking.
