What to expect from the counselling process.

The First Session.

Typically, the first session addresses why you have come in for counselling, some of your background and what you hope to achieve. People often experience a sense of relief to begin talking to someone about their life.  It can be useful to think about what you want to learn/understand/change in order to live a more fulfilling life before you come in for the first session. The following points highlight important aspects of ongoing therapy.

Psychotherapy is about relationship.

Through the relationship with a therapist you will discover aspects of yourself that have been denied or lost. The relationship with your therapist allows you to become conscious of your experience through the reflection and attention that is given to you. You may have developed ways of dealing with emotional pain that has separated you from your experience in order to cope. Typically people report a mixture of feelings at the beginning of therapy. There is often relief from feeling supported and safe to express oneself, and uncomfortable with the experiences you have defended against.

Therapy is a process of inward focusing.

Over time you will feel more comfortable to experience more of your feelings, thoughts, sensations as you become at ease with your self. Each session is an opportunity to become conscious by the process of focusing inward and sharing that with the therapist. As you express your innermost thoughts and feelings this validates your experience and allows you to relax more into your experience. One way of looking at emotional and mental health is the ability to integrate what we experience in the world around us with our internal reality.

Therapy increases self-awareness.

Through therapy the illusions we may have constructed to deal with pain and disappointment begin to fall away. This happens slowly so that we can absorb new information about our self. Therapy is full of these transformative moments. Part of this awareness involves what happens between you and your therapist. How we experience each other is important therapeutic material that is used to bring into awareness dynamics that reflect your experience and self protections. Direct feedback about this experience is part of the process. A skilled therapist will be able to pace this feedback in line with each client’s needs.
 
Therapy, therefore, involves an ongoing self-examination into the internal processes that prevent you from living the way you wish.

We naturally want to prevent suffering, but the ways we try to hold back actually create more suffering.

So, as you become conscious and connect more fully with who you are, you can begin to have a different relationship with yourself. There will be more ease with difficult experiences and less defensiveness to others opinions or reactions.

Therapy is also about encouragement.

Only you can change things in your life. Therapy provides a place to rehearse and prepare with the support of your counsellor. As you experience a different kind of relationship with your counsellor this can encourage you to have that with other people. For example, if you have experienced people dismissing you and developed a belief that ‘everyone’ is not interested in what you have to say, the experience of your counsellor paying attention to you can change that belief. As you change this belief your interactions will change with other people.

A Word about short term counselling vs. long term …

The above process takes time and speaks to a longer-term process. In this society taking time goes against the general ethos. We want things fixed quickly and easily. We expect things instantly and at 'high speed' This puts pressure on all of us to come up with a 'solution' to fix the difficulty at hand. There is nothing wrong with solutions but 'becoming conscious' may not seem like a 'solution' in a quick fix world.

In the short term we will learn things, and we can gain control over a situation or process a decision. Where it becomes problematic is where our difficulties are causing ongoing problems and we are conscious of deep unhappiness or internal struggles that we are still looking to fix in the short term.