Making people happy is only a prelude to counseling; making people grow is the main theme of counseling. Counseling seeks to make individuals use unpleasant experiences as opportunities for self-growth, and it tries to make people look positively at the setbacks and trials they have experienced.

Counseling is not only about happiness, but also about growth. Growth in this context means that through the counseling process, the counselee is able to figure out the nature of the problem and know what to do about it.

Therefore, making people happy is only the prelude to counseling, while making people grow is the main theme of counseling. Counseling seeks to make individuals take unpleasant experiences as a good opportunity for self-growth, and it tries its best to make people look positively at the setbacks and trials they have experienced, and to see vitality in crises and hope in difficulties. In this sense, psychological counseling is also about helping people learn to look at life's sorrows and troubles in a discriminatory way. However, this is not achieved by teaching and persuasion, but by inspiration and realization.

In Maslow's words, psychological counseling is to enable people to obtain a "peak experience" , which is the realm that psychological counseling seeks.