Seeking counselling support can be a pivotal step towards healing. Counselling provides a safe space to explore your thoughts and feelings, helping you to find your way through life’s challenges. Counselling often means exploring difficult feelings and looking at yourself, others and the world through a new lense. This process is frequently illuminating and almost always rewarding, but it can also be a hard path to tread. Those who take their first step on that path show strength, not weakness. The decision to bring about change shows fortitude and hope even if the going has got beyond tough. Remember, it really is okay to ask for help. And you’re not alone on the journey.
Why don’t counsellors give direct advice?
Even the most resilient and balanced people seek counselling, or stay in counselling once their original goals are reached. This is usually because they continue to strive for their continued personal growth by talking to someone who doesn’t judge them or tell them what they think is best. Instead they become empowered to know what is best for them and to feel good about it.
I’ve been asked “Why don’t you give advice?” and my answer is always the same. If I told you what to do, even if it turned out to be the right course of action, once that particular situation was resolved, would you be really be any better off, than before you walked through the counselling door? The point being – would anything have actually changed for you as a person? Would you feel confident and able to tackle similar or other difficult situations or feelings. My role is not to take away people’s agency. Instead is to support them in its development in a way that is lasting and meaningful for them.
So what’s personal growth?
An important part of a counsellor’s job is to equip clients with what they need to feel comfortable in making their own choices and decisions. This involves working WITH the client to find out what they personally need as a unique individual. And what might be getting in the way of getting those needs met. Clients are gently encouraged and supported to check in with themselves to look at what’s really going on for them personally and as an individual.
Maybe someone feels held back by something they can’t quite name or understand. Or they feel that a particular relationship in their life could be better. Or the emotional toolbox they learned to rummage through and use during their initial counselling journey has gone a bit rusty, or gets forgotten more times than they would like.
Whatever a client’s motivation for counselling, if I had to choose a few of the positive outcomes of the many that I’ve witnessed, it would be these: a certain comfort that comes from making better choices that serve rather than hinder; a firm sense of renewal so the person can be who they are without the limitations of self-judgment or damage by the judgment of others; to experience more satisfying relationships; to develop an inner peace and a way of being that allows them to enjoy being who they are; to face life’s stresses, injustices and difficulties with resilience, renewed inner faith and true self-compassion. That’s personal growth.
Counselling in Chatham and Medway with Lisa