[codeulike]

Talking to anyone is pretty good, so you're not far wrong.

A counsellor or therapist has training - think of it as a mental toolkit - to help explore things with you. Depends on their exact approach but most of them wont give advice for example, they will just ask question or reflect what you say back to you to encourage you to figure it out yourself. Or they might look for parallels between your early life and current life, as most people follow repeated patterns in their relationships (or so the theory goes). At least 75% of their skillset is just listening and occasionally asking good questions which is an underrated skill.

There are many different flavours of therapy/psychotherapy/counselling and sometimes the adherents get quite religious about it (ask an integrative therapist what they think of CBT for example). But research generally shows that most 'talking therapies' are roughly equal in effectiveness and the main factor for success is the relationship between the client and therapist - i.e. whether they click. (putting aside for the moment the tricky questions about how to measure effectiveness of therapy - what does improvement look like? how do you have a control group?)

There's a thing called the 'Dodo Hypothesis' - that "all empirically validated psychotherapies, regardless of their specific components, produce equivalent outcomes" - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict

People heavily invested in a particular brand of therapy dont like to hear about the Dodo Hypothesis but broadly I think its an optimistic conclusion - talking to people helps, and if you find the right one, talking to a specially trained listener can help more.

[yetihehe]

> Depends on their exact approach but most of them wont give advice for example, they will just ask question

Because general advice is rarely useful in such cases, like you can see in almost all of comments giving advice in this topic. Most of them have at least one "yeah, but in my case...".