What Counselling in Two Different Countries Taught Me: Hansel Wong on Connection, Curiosity, and Culture

A client mentions a video game you have never heard of.

Another describes a family expectation that does not fit neatly into the frameworks you learned in graduate school. Someone describes work, marriage, identity, religion, or responsibility in values different from your own.

What happens next?

For GoodTherapy member Hansel Wong, the answer begins with curiosity.

“Just be curious.”

It may sound like simple advice, but in Hansel’s work, curiosity is not merely a conversational skill. It is part of how therapists communicate respect, recognize cultural context, and build a relationship in which clients feel understood.

Hansel is a counselor and supervisor based in Adelaide, Australia. Originally from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, he began his practice in one multicultural city before continuing his work in another. Moving between the two required more than adjusting to a new location. It challenged him to reconsider what clients may want from counseling and what therapists may miss when they assume everyone is working toward the same version of healing.

His experience has led him to a central belief:

“Human connection can promote healing and co-regulation.”

For Hansel, techniques and modalities remain important. But therapy becomes meaningful when clinical knowledge is paired with genuine interest in the person sitting across from you.

What Moving Across Cultures Teaches You About Counseling

Hansel began practicing in Kuala Lumpur, a fast-paced urban environment he describes as highly driven and achievement-oriented.

Many of the millennial clients he worked with were trying to reach a particular milestone. They wanted to progress in their careers, prepare for marriage, buy a home, improve their relationships, or move into the next stage of life.

After moving to Adelaide, Hansel encountered clients who were sometimes more interested in acceptance, balance, and understanding their present circumstances. Rather than immediately searching for the next milestone, they might be exploring how to feel more content with where they were.

While these observations were broad and should not be treated as fixed descriptions of either population, the important lesson was recognizing that he had been carrying assumptions about what clients wanted from therapy.

“Coming out of this glass bowl and seeing another side of the world expanded my understanding. Different cultures bring different values.”

A therapist may believe that a client needs to become more independent, set stronger boundaries, slow down, pursue a promotion, leave a relationship, or communicate more openly with family.

But before encouraging any of those outcomes, the therapist needs to understand what independence, family, success, responsibility, and healing mean to that client.

The clinical question is not only, “What would help this person change?”

It is also, “What would meaningful change look like in this person’s life?”

Why Curiosity Belongs in a Therapist’s Clinical Toolkit

A therapist’s professional development often focuses on treatment modalities, certifications, interventions, and clinical techniques.

Hansel encourages the counselors he supervises to think more broadly.

“Understanding the values, beliefs, and history of different cultures can be as valuable, important, and practical in counseling sessions as learning a different modality, tool, or technique.”

This does not mean therapists need to become experts in every cultural background their clients represent. It means they should be willing to learn about the histories, family systems, communities, interests, and everyday realities that shape a client’s life.

For Hansel, that includes learning beyond what is traditionally considered clinical material.

He recalls supervising a counselor whose client had begun talking about video games. The counselor was not a gamer and had limited knowledge on the topic. Hansel’s first response was not to redirect the conversation but to be curious about the game.

“What video game was it? Was it an open-world game? Was it a platform game? What was the name? Go search it up. If you can, play it. When a client starts talking about something niche, being able to pick it up and say, ‘I know what you’re talking about,’ immediately builds connection.”

Without curiosity, a therapist may hear only a hobby. With curiosity, they may recognize an important part of the client’s emotional and social world.

What to Know Before Your First Therapy Session

Curiosity is what a good therapist brings to the room. But what about the person on the other side of it, someone weighing up a first session? Here too, Hansel likes to lower the stakes. He compares starting therapy to seeing a physical therapist, a family doctor, or even going to the gym.

“No one is going to hand you a diagnosis or a label at the door. It is simply time with someone whose job is to hold a safe space for whatever you bring. And if it does not feel right, it was one hour of your life. Think of it like reaching a checkpoint in a game. You get to unload for a bit, pause from life, take a break, and then you click play and go through it again.”

For anyone who has been putting it off, that reframe can be the difference between booking and closing the tab. If you want a fuller picture, here is what to expect in a first therapy session.

What if Nothing Is Wrong, but Something Feels Off

Not everyone arrives with a clear problem. Sometimes nothing is obviously wrong, yet something feels off. Hansel hears this constantly, and his first suggestion may surprise you. He recommends a physical check first, because the body often registers strain before the mind does.

“Often the body can signal things faster than the mind can catch on. You feel the aches and pains before you realize you’re coming down with a fever. Mental health can work the same way.”

From there, he notices two common patterns.

Some people have carried stress for so long that it now feels normal, and they no longer register the weight of it. Others have finally built a stable, safe life, and it is that very safety that lets older, unprocessed experiences rise to the surface. Feeling off, in other words, is rarely random. It is often a signal that something is ready to be looked at.

Therapy is where you can put words to it and make sense of what is underneath.

How to Find a Therapist Who Truly Gets You

If connection is what makes therapy work, how do you find it? Hansel answers from both chairs. As a therapist, he wonders who will walk through his door. As a client, you are looking for someone you can genuinely open up to.

“What’s important at the end of the day is to feel like, hey, I can sit down with this person and have an honest chat about life. That’s really the crux of it.”

Shared background, gender, or faith can help you feel understood, but it is not the only path. Someone quite different from you can offer a fresh perspective. He notes a nuance familiar in smaller communities: sometimes people prefer a therapist from a different background, because a shared one raises the odds of being recognized through a friend or a relative. What matters most, he says, is whether you can imagine that honest conversation.

How to Choose a Therapist from an Online Profile

Choosing from a directory can feel like a lot, since you are often judging someone from a written profile alone. Hansel sees that as an advantage rather than a limitation, because a thorough profile tells you a great deal.

“Comb through the bio and find the therapist who specializes in what you’re looking for, whether that’s a specific approach, an age group, or a particular area they work in.”

Clients often know what they are after, whether that is a method like EMDR or acceptance and commitment therapy, a certain age range, or experience with a specific community. Read closely and match those specifics to your needs. A detailed profile is exactly what makes that possible, a useful reminder for any therapist writing their own. You can compare approaches and specialties across the GoodTherapy directory.

How to Reach Someone Who Does Not Believe in Therapy

Many people run into this wall, often with a parent, a partner, or an older relative who simply will not discuss mental health. Hansel notes that the cultures he has worked in are deeply multicultural, so there is no single attitude to push against. Rather than argue anyone into it, he starts where their interest already is.

“Lean into the things people like to talk about, work, relationships, and slowly weave in. Sounds like anxiety. Sounds like depression. Slowly but surely, people realize it’s not that big a taboo to talk about.”

Work stress, burnout, a breakup, a divorce. These are approachable, everyday topics people are often willing to discuss. The move is to follow that thread and gently name what you hear, rather than leading with a clinical label that closes the conversation down. It is a kind, practical approach for anyone with a loved one who treats therapy as off-limits.

Men’s Mental Health and the Myth That Therapy Is a Sign of Weakness

Ask Hansel which belief about therapy he would most like to correct, and he goes straight to the one that keeps so many people away, especially men: the idea that seeking help means you are weak. It is a stigma he cares about deeply, and one he has watched hold men back from support they need.

“The people I’ve sat across from and spoken with about their emotions, with such brutal honesty, are the strongest people that I know.”

Putting difficult emotions into words is not a failure of strength, Hansel argues. It is one of the hardest and bravest things a person can do. Men seek therapy at lower rates than women, a gap shaped more by cultural expectations around masculinity than by any lower need for support.

Hansel extends the same grace to therapists themselves.

“For therapists, we always feel like we need to be this perfect pillar of mental health. We are not. We are just two human beings sitting in front of each other, talking about life in a way that regulates each other’s emotions.”

The difference a therapist brings is training, ethics, the right questions, and a safe space. Beyond that, the work is human on both sides. That belief also shapes how Hansel guards against burnout, and his approach is refreshingly plain. A supervisor once showed him that decompressing after a hard session could be as simple as playing a game on his phone, no special technique required. For Hansel it is running along Adelaide’s beaches, tending his plants, and time with his wife and daughter.

GoodTherapy explores this in depth in the stigma around men’s mental health, and you can learn more about the challenges men face on our men’s mental health page.

Therapy Is Two People Talking

Across every question, whether about culture, curiosity, a first session, or the courage it takes to walk in, Hansel keeps returning to the same quiet truth. Strip away the fear and the jargon, and therapy is two people talking, one of them trained to make that conversation safe and useful. That is reassuring if you are nervous about starting, and grounding if you are the one holding the space.

“It doesn’t mean you’re weak to come in for therapy. It means you’ve taken a really tough step, and that requires strength.”

Hansel Wong is one of the counselors you will find on GoodTherapy. You can read more from the Member Spotlight series, including spotlights with Brooke Pomerantz and Annette Popernik.