Can therapy help me?

Yes, it certainly can. Many different techniques come under the general heading of 'therapy', and one of them, or a combination of more than one, is made to deal with what is bothering you - usually far more quickly and easily than you would dream possible!

Here are some of the various ways in which therapy can help you:

Hypnotherapy
Hypnotherapy is the therapeutic use of hypnosis. It is not a therapy as such in itself - people are not treated by the state of hypnosis, but in the state of hypnosis. In other words, the hypnosis does not in itself change anything (although the relaxing experience is very beneficial in its own right), but it makes therapy that is carried out while in hypnosis much more effective. Hence the term 'hypnotherapy'. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with stage hypnosis - it is there purely as a tool for your good.

Every effect has a cause, and the causes of your behaviour (whether desirable or not) lie in your subconscious mind. Usually, though, they are hidden from your conscious awareness, simply dictating your thoughts and actions. It is as though you are continually playing the same tape over and over without having access to the switch - in a lot of cases, not being consciously aware that the tape or switch even exist.

Hypnosis is used to access the subconscious mind through bypassing temporarily the conscious mind, the controlling part that normally forbids this access, in order to 'change the tape'. Normally, of course, this control is for perfectly good reasons, bur it can also get in the way of desirable changes as well. While in hypnosis, new ideas - 'suggestions' - are given which tend to be accepted because the critical conscious mind is, for the moment, not filtering them out.

There are two basic forms of hypnotherapy: suggestion therapy and analytical therapy (hypnoanlysis).
Suggestion therapy is used when the issue, its cause, and the goal are clear. This would include things like confidence, exam nerves, smoking etc.
Hypnoanalysis is used in more deep-seated issues, where the likely cause is not so easy to establish. Typical examples are anger management, panic attacks and general anxiety.
Don't read too much into the term 'hypnoanlysis', though. It simply means that you will be answering questions (many of them the same ones used at other times) under hypnosis, where the old, outdated but still powerful, thinking patterns that we all have will not get in the way. This makes it much easier, and quicker, to find the real, underlying causes of the issue.

Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP)
NLP is an extremely powerful technique for change. The name consists of three parts: neuro, meaning the brain and nervous system; linguistic, referring to language; and programming. It deals with changing the programming that dictates what you say to yourself about the world - in other words, how you 'represent' the world to yourself. This can be in the form of words, images or feelings, but, whichever of these 'representational modalities' is your main one, it colours everything you come to believe about how the world is, and your mood at any particular time.

For instance, when you look out of the window in the morning, isn't your mood influenced by the weather (especially if you have to go out)? If you think about it, you will realise that your mental state is similarly influenced by the words someone uses when they speak to you - or by anything else that comes to you through your senses.

This principle still applies, perhaps even more so, to the words and pictures you experience internally - your 'internal dialogue'. Think about the example above, regarding the weather: Even if you had not actually looked out of the window yet, and the image of the storm, sunshine or whatever was simply in your imagination, it would still affect your mood. Add to this the ease with which these things become habit, and it is not difficult to see how our internal world can shape the way we experience life.

The good news in all this is that, even though you can't change the weather, or (usually) what others say to you, you can change what is going on in your mind - simply put, you can change what you say to yourself, or see, inside. NLP is designed to use these principles positively and in a structured way, in order to change your internal representations to ones that produce the results you want. It has been described as the 'science of personal excellence', and that is exactly what it is.

Psychotherapy
The term psychotherapy is a broad one. There are many different kinds of treatment that come under this heading - cognitive therapy (CT), cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), brief therapy, solution-focused therapy, choice therapy, transactional analysis (TA), object-relations therapy, existential therapy, and a lot more.

They all have one common purpose, though - to change the way you think and relate to the world.
How you see the world is dictated by your beliefs - whether or not they are actually true. These become self-fulfilling prophecies, because we are all constantly seeking to prove that what we believe about the world, and ourselves, is true - meaning that we either ignore, or distort, anything that doesn't fit in with this. This leads us to behave in ways that actually ensure that our view of the world is right.

So, for instance, if you had a belief that other people didn't like you, then you would usually tend to withdraw from company because of this belief. This would result, of course, in others not speaking to you - not because they didn't like you, but simply because they reached the conclusion that you didn't want them to. To you, however, it would look as though they didn't like you - thereby reinforcing what you already believed and 'proving' it to be true. The old saying "I'll believe it when I see it" should be rewritten as "I'll see it when I believe it", because that is exactly how it is.
Changing your beliefs about yourself and the world, and consequently what you see, will result in a whole new life revealing itself to you.

There is always a way that is just right for you
It is certain that, whatever you want to achieve or become, there are techniques that are designed to take you there.