What is counselling?

If you have never had counselling before you probably don’t know what to expect, and may be thinking, “what am I getting myself in to?” At its simplest, counselling is an opportunity to talk stuff through with someone whose job is to listen to you and keep it confidential. You talk, they listen. They will pick up on some of the things you are saying and feed them back to you, asking the occasional question to help you explore what ever it is that you want to explore.

At its deepest it’s a place of healing and rebuilding. Where you come along because you hate feeling the way you are feeling and want that to go away. Where you throw all the pieces of the jigsaw out on the table and see what the picture is. A place where you get to offload, where you get to know who you really are, and start the journey to becoming the person you want to be.

How my clients have used counselling

Most of my clients have come to counselling for help with things like stress, depression, anxiety, poor self worth, toxic relationships, or to calm their nervous system down after experiencing the symptoms of post traumatic stress.

Other client have used it as a space to examine who they are, or to talk through a particular life change event. Examples of this are:

  • A business owner who was earning a lot of money but not spending it. They needed to find the part of them that was stopping that.

  • A boardroom manager who was considering a career change and wanted a space where they could examine who they were and get asked some tough questions.

  • A senior police officer who wanted to better understand how the narcissistic personality operates, which is pretty useful when investigating, and

  • A medical professional who came along to counselling to see how it worked and whether they felt they could recommend it.

So it is different for everyone but importantly, it is what you want it to be, at a pace you are happy to work at.

Most importantly, it works best if you are committed to putting the work in, and get on well with the counsellor. Research shows that the type of counselling is much less important, but obviously it has to be something that makes sense to you.