The magic that happens in the counselling room (free)
Once a month or so I remove the paywall from a post I’m particularly proud of. This is one of those posts.
Magic happens in the counselling room. Or at last, it can happen. It's happened for me.
I've experienced true care in a counselling room. Not only a space for me to be with myself, but with someone else. My therapist helps me stay grounded and holds me in place when I want to run. I've noticed my patterns changing in response to this care.
The way I used to work is that I'd explore my feelings, sit with them for a bit, then move into planning mode. I can now see the way I treated my feelings flippantly. My current counsellor actually called me on it, wondering why I moved on so quickly from strong feelings.
I was giving myself crumbs, placating my feelings be letting them out, but only when I could move through them and learn from them.
What I'm learning is that there is a child part of me who is scared still. They're carrying everything they were made to carry as a child - my mother's stress and sadness, my sibling's needs, and my own disregarded feelings, shoved down so as to not show any weakness.
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As a child I learned to not be a burden, to be good, quiet, and useful. My feelings were not useful, and often a cause of stress for others around me (or a reason for me to be mocked). So I shoved them down and kept them even from myself.
There's a part of me still holding all of those feelings, and they're scared.
The thing is, I've built a life where none of those things are true any more. I can have my feelings, I don't need to be useful to be loved, and I don't need to be afraid.
By itself, that's not enough to heal. It's a good start, but I'm learning evidence alone isn't enough to heal those wounds. I need to hear myself out, and let myself be scared.
Essentially I need to be the trusted adult that I didn't have growing up.
I've only been doing this work for a few weeks, but I've noticed the changes starting to come through. It's not all the time, of course, but it's there.
I'm more gentle with myself. I'm having to learn to sit with that anxiety and that discomfort, and not use it to drive action. It does mean I'm needing to learn new ways to motivate myself, which has had some false starts, but I'm learning to engage with myself.
There are still some things I'm finding myself doing that aren't serving me - avoidance of certain anxieties and some thought patterns I know aren't actually me.
But overall, I'm more easily grateful for my life and the people in it. I'm feeling less pressure to earn love and support, which is also making it easier for me to reach out and be in contact with my community. When you allow yourself to receive love that's given freely, you can give it a lot easier, I've found. I don't just disappear until I'm 'able to provide value'. Not as much, anyway.
My counsellor is there every step of this way, both affirming me, but also gently challenging me when needed. She asks me what feelings are coming up, where they are in my body. She helps me give space to those feelings.
I’m finding myself slowing down a bit in general, willing to let myself take time, and not worry about ‘wasting time’.
I'm slowly falling back in love with my voice. This newsletter was meant to be about why I want to be a counsellor, and instead it's veered into something else. It's what I want to write, I feel happy with it, and I can't wait to share it with you all.
I don't think I'd have been able to do this a few weeks ago, because I was avoidant and scared. I'm still slightly both of those, but I'm learning how to be with myself, and ground myself. I'm not doing this despite my anxiety in the same way as i had previously.
It's more like I'm taking responsibility for that anxiety. I know that child me is anxious, especially about being perceived, because that was unsafe for me. Previously, I was open, but filtered through a series of analyses that I wasn't even really fully aware of. I'm aware of it now, and know that it's not needed. But I also can't expect myself to shed it all immediately. But I can at least look at it with my secure adult eyes and see what's going on there.
I need to show that I can trust myself, and child me can trust adult me, and the first step in that is really listening to my feelings, not to find a reason or an action, but to show myself that I can sit with myself and not feel like a burden. And that for me, is starting in the counselling room.