The word counsellor is slightly misleading.
In ordinary language, to counsel someone means to advise them. We might imagine an elder listening to someone younger, drawing on their experience and offering some wise guidance about what to do next.
Then you come to counselling and discover something rather strange.
Your counsellor probably isn’t going to tell you what to do.
If you are struggling with anxiety, this can seem particularly puzzling. You already know you are anxious. You may have spent months trying to understand why. You may have read about anxiety, listened to podcasts, tried breathing exercises or challenged your thoughts.
So what is going to change by sitting in a room and telling another person about it?
It is a reasonable question.
Perhaps the easiest way to answer it is to meet Ruth.
Ruth comes to counselling
Ruth is 38. She has a good job, two children and a husband she describes as lovely.
Nothing is obviously wrong.
And yet for the past year she has become increasingly anxious. She worries about the children. She lies awake replaying conversations from work. Small decisions can occupy her mind for hours. Sometimes she wakes in the morning already carrying a feeling of dread, although she cannot tell you what she is dreading.
She has come to counselling because she wants to stop feeling like this.
During her first session she says:
“It’s ridiculous, really. Nothing terrible has happened. I’ve got a good job, my husband is lovely, the children are fine. Other people have actual problems. I don’t know why I’m like this.”
Ruth thinks she is telling her counsellor about her anxiety.
Her counsellor is listening to the anxiety too.
But she is also listening to how Ruth talks about herself.
Before Ruth has really allowed herself to describe how difficult things have become, she has already explained why she shouldn’t find them difficult at all.
So her counsellor becomes curious.
“You’ve given me quite a few reasons why you shouldn’t feel the way you feel, before you’ve really told me what it feels like.”
Ruth laughs.
“I suppose I have.”
Nothing dramatic has happened.
Her counsellor hasn’t interpreted her childhood. She hasn’t diagnosed anything. She hasn’t given Ruth a technique to practise at home.
But something very small has shifted.
For a moment, Ruth has noticed herself while being herself.
A counsellor may be listening to something you can’t yet hear
A few weeks later, Ruth comes to her session exhausted.
Her youngest child has been waking during the night. Work has been relentless and she has taken on an additional project because somebody in her team is off sick.
She talks about how tired she is.
Then she adds:
“But my husband has it worse. He’s incredibly busy at work at the moment.”
Another week, she talks about something her mother said that hurt her.
Almost immediately:
“She doesn’t mean anything by it. She had a difficult childhood herself.”
Later, she describes lying awake until three in the morning worrying about a mistake she might have made at work.
Then she smiles.
“Anyway. I’m fine.”
None of these sentences sounds particularly important.
Ruth doesn’t come into the room thinking, Today I shall demonstrate one of the ways I organise my emotional world.
She thinks she is simply telling her counsellor what happened that week.
But her counsellor begins to notice something.
Whenever Ruth moves towards her own distress, something seems to pull her away again.
Someone else has it worse.
Someone else has a good reason for behaving as they do.
She should be coping.
She shouldn’t complain.
She’s fine.
Her counsellor doesn’t need to decide immediately what this means.
They can simply begin to notice it together.
The sentences we hardly notice
We all have them.
I’m probably overreacting.
It wasn’t that bad.
I shouldn’t complain.
I’m just being silly.
Other people cope with much worse.
That’s just what I’m like.
They can seem like throwaway sentences. Sometimes we barely notice ourselves saying them.
But those little sentences can contain something important about the rules we have learned to live by.
Perhaps there are feelings we have learned are acceptable and others that aren’t.
Perhaps we have become very good at understanding everyone except ourselves.
Perhaps needing something feels uncomfortable.
Perhaps anger feels dangerous.
Perhaps being easy-going, useful, capable or undemanding has become so familiar that it no longer feels like something we do. It simply feels like who we are.
And this is one of the difficulties of trying to understand ourselves entirely by thinking.
We are trying to examine the world while standing inside the very assumptions through which we see it.
So what is the counsellor doing?
This is where counselling begins to look rather different from advice.
If Ruth’s counsellor simply told her:
“You need to prioritise yourself more.”
Ruth might agree completely.
She might even write it down.
And then she could go home and continue organising her life in exactly the same way.
Because knowing something and seeing ourselves doing it are not quite the same thing.
A counsellor is listening not only to what happened, but to how you understand what happened.
The words you choose.
What you explain away.
What you take responsibility for.
What you dismiss.
Where you become angry.
Where you suddenly laugh.
Where you change the subject.
Where you can offer endless compassion to somebody else but very little to yourself.
These are the places where a counsellor might become curious.
Over time, things that once felt like unquestionable facts can begin to look different.
Perhaps I am not overreacting.
Perhaps I am hurt.
Perhaps understanding why my mother behaves this way doesn’t mean that it doesn’t affect me.
Perhaps being exhausted is enough reason to rest.
Perhaps “I’m fine” isn’t always true.
And something that had been invisible begins to become visible.
Perhaps counselling begins there
People often come to counselling wanting answers.
Sometimes there are practical things that can help, and counselling does not require us to sit mysteriously in silence while somebody desperately waits for us to say something useful.
But much of the deeper work is different.
The counsellor is not standing outside your life holding the correct instructions for how you should live it.
Instead, two people begin looking together at a world that, until now, you have mostly had to see from the inside.
And sometimes the first change is remarkably small.
A sentence you have said a thousand times leaves your mouth.
Only this time, you hear it.
And perhaps, for the first time, you wonder:
Why do I always say that?
That question may be worth considerably more than advice.
Understanding Counselling
This is the first article in a series exploring what actually happens in counselling — from the things we say without noticing, to the patterns we bring into relationships, and eventually to what happens between counsellor and client.
If something in this article has touched something inside you — perhaps a sentence you recognised, or a way of relating to yourself that suddenly felt familiar — you may be wondering whether it is time to look a little more closely. I offer a free initial conversation where we can talk about what is bringing you towards counselling and whether working together feels like the right next step.