If you’ve never had any experience of counselling it can be quite a daunting thing to undertake, you might have lots of questions like, ‘What’s it all about?’, ‘How can counselling help me?’, ‘What goes on in a session?’. I’m going to use this space to explain how my orientation of counselling (person-centred) works, and how it can help you, and hopefully dispel any fears that you may have of undertaking counselling.
When setting up my private counselling practice in Hull, I was really keen to minimise any feelings of shame/embarrassment that someone might feel when undertaking counselling for the first time. For that reason, my room is located within a Chiropody and Foot Health Centre which has two chiropodists and a sports massage therapist also located there. It is a busy, friendly practice with people coming in for chiropody treatments and sports massage so there are always different people in the waiting area and no one knows if you’re waiting for a chiropody, massage or counselling appointment. This was really important to me as going to counselling can be a difficult first step so I wanted to make it as stress free as possible.
Counselling, free initial chat
I take initial enquiries from clients in a number of ways, either via phone call, text, email or via the contact form on my website. I am happy to offer a free initial chat over the telephone to help you to decide if counselling is right for you and if I’m the right counsellor for you. There is no commitment to a set number of sessions, you may find that just one or two sessions are enough to help you to work through a current issue that is troubling you, however, most people find that they benefit from at least 6 sessions, or more if it is a particularly long-standing issue. Counselling works by helping you to get to the root cause of the ‘hurt’, the thing that is causing you discomfort, and to help you to sit with that feeling and explore it in a safe environment at a pace that feels right for you.
It’s really important that counselling is undertaken at a pace that feels safe for you. Counselling is often likened to peeling back the layers of an onion; you need to peel them back one by one in order to get each consecutive layer. Person-centred counsellors believe that the client is the expert in how they feel, so we work with whatever a client chooses to bring into the room. You don’t have to talk about anything that you don’t feel ready to, you’re completely in control of what you want to bring to counselling.
One of the underlying principles of person-centred counselling (which was developed by Carl Rogers), is that of unconditional positive regard, meaning being loved for simply being you, rather than for your actions.
It’s unusual for someone to grow up in a household purely with unconditional positive regard, more often we are offered conditional love, which means that we received love or positive regard only when we behaved in a certain way. This results in us having what Rogers called ‘conditions of worth’, or as I like to think of it, our ‘rules for living’. So we only feel that we are ‘good’ if we are behaving in a way that fits within those rules. The problem comes when our internal experience doesn’t fit with what we have learnt about these ‘rules for living’. For example, if we sometimes feel angry but weren’t allowed to feel angry in our formative years, the anger can feel overwhelming and ‘wrong’.This discord between the internal experience and the rules for living can cause real discomfort and can manifest as stress, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, OCD or feelings of general dissatisfaction or unhappiness. One of the underlying beliefs of person-centred counselling is that, given the right conditions, people can solve their own problems and heal their own psychological hurts.
How we came to have these ‘rules for living’ can sometimes be really easy to pinpoint with hindsight, for example if we receive praise when we do well in academic subjects but are not given any praise for more creative subjects, we could grow up with the belief that a job in the artistic/creative field is not a worthwhile job, we should get a ‘proper’ job as an accountant/lawyer. One of the key things to watch out for is the word ‘should’ – try to notice when you have used this word and it’s likely that it’s coming from an old belief that you may or may not still want to hold on to.
Counselling helps by allowing us to explore these conditions of worth in a non-judgemental way to see if they are still serving us. Some of them probably are, such as ‘Look both ways before you cross the road’ but others may not be, even if they appear on the surface to be helpful. For example a belief of ‘I should be nice to others’ seems to be a healthy way of thinking, but if that belief means that you always dismiss or put your own feelings to one side because you have to be nice to other people could lead to you living a life where you feel afraid to challenge other people, or say ‘no’ to others or even just voice your opinion because it could be perceived as not being nice to others. This type of thinking can be really hard to unpick on our own because it’s often out of our awareness and counselling helps by enabling us to work through it and unpick how we think and feel about things and gain some insight into the reasons behind it. Once things are in our awareness, then we are able to work on them. If things are not in our awareness it’s almost impossible to be able to work through them and to start to resolve them.
One of the other main principles of person-centred counselling is that of empathy. Empathy is the ability to be able to see a person’s world from their own viewpoint, using your own experience. Empathy is about being vulnerable and being able to use your own feelings and experiences to try to understand what it is like for the other person. It’s not about feeling sympathy for them or trying to ‘fix’ it or make things better, it’s about acknowledging how things are for that person and being able to say, ‘I’m here with you’. Vulnerability and shame researcher Brené Brown has an excellent video which explains what empathy is, and what it is not – you can watch it here: https://vimeo.com/81492863
The third principle of person-centred counselling is that of congruence. It really fits in well with the idea explained above of our ‘conditions of worth’ – if we are not able to express our thoughts and feelings (or even just acknowledge them), then we are not being congruent. If we think and feel differently to how we behave, then we are being incongruent which can cause dissatisfaction, unhappiness, stress, anxiety and depression. Counselling can help by enabling you to work through those feelings of dissatisfaction and helping you to see where you are being incongruent in your life. This awareness then allows you to be able to work on those areas, both in the counselling room and out of it. It also helps you to have the courage to be congruent as this can sometimes be really challenging, particularly if you are literally changing the habit of a lifetime.
The healing process of person-centred counselling is based upon the relationship between the counsellor and client. The counsellor provides unconditional positive regard, empathy and congruence to the client which in turn leads to the client being able to accept that and provide it for themselves.
Counselling is not an easy thing to undertake but the rewards from it can be life-changing.
Victoria Palmer
Registered Member of BACP (British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy),
