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Counselling for Toads is a book that shouldn't be taken too serious, especially concerning how therapies in real life work. I saw myself agreeing to many aspects of what the Heron (the therapist) said, but I often had the feeling like it could have been said and structured in a better way for the therapy.

The therapy methods aren't ones you will find in a real therapy session. The methods are a bit unrealistic as one can not accomplish a full recovery (especially if they feel suicidal) in just ten sessions. Of course it depends how good the methods work, but it felt a bit rushed that Toad just felt great again after the therapy sessions had just a few of many ways to help someone discussed (I do understand that depending on the needs of the client that each therapy session can look individually different, but this just looked like a book that tries to have a happy ending even though Toads development made a jump that made no sense for me). The methods were on such a surface level as I already knew about them and I believe many others do too without having to read this book and it just felt to me personally like it wouldn't really help anyone. (Read below to find out which methods there are).

The whole book is about three different egos, which explains how one acts towards other people and oneself and the way they might progress with their life or stop learning. (The child ego, the parent ego and the adult ego). After that Toad is getting teached of ‘games�� that form ones own life position. Either they are using it to either make themselves feel smaller and more miserable or by taking power and control over someone else (or by not playing games at all, which means taking no advantage of anyone). The way these methods were described were unprofessional and sometimes seemed to be even false. There were unprofessional words that seemed to be made-up for the novel and not truly psychological, for instance,

‘N���ҳ۳۳�������.
‘What on earth is that?�� asked Toad.
‘It is the initial letters of the name of the game. They stand for “Now I’ve Got You, You Son of a Bitch��.��

It just couldn't be taken seriously by me and it felt so odd that I couldn't but dislike this. Also, the way each method got introduced and explained was a bit odd too. The so called 'games' was a wrong wording in my opinion. The 'games' can be games, but isn't excluded to be just games. As one needs to do it intentionally for it to be called a game and since many people talk bad about themselves it's not really a game but more of a wrong mindset and wrong response to certain feelings of oneself. In general, I would have phrased many things differently as the way it got phrased sometimes gave me the feeling like they were wrongly interpreted from the author who wrote this.

Lastly, I think it's wrong to say that one ‘chooses�� how to feel. Yes, we all can develop if wanted emotional control, but that still doesn't mean that you can ‘choose�� how you feel. Feelings or rather emotions are the result of chemical reactions to the brain. You can not ‘choose�� how you want to feel in the moment therefore as it's a chemical reaction that can't be stopped just controlled to not have an emotional outburst for example.

(+ Why did the therapist say that children can't think logical. That makes no sense. Without being able to think logical it wouldn't make sense to send them to Kindergarten to learn things since they are ‘just emotionally thinking and can't turn on their brain to think logically��. Yes, children are quite emotional but that doesn't mean that they can't learn, otherwise their brain wouldn't develop and they wouldn't be able to speak or walk.)