The Joy in Counselling

Counselling is a place to experience intense emotions. It’s where you take your darkness - the experiences that have hurt you, the thoughts that worry and confuse you, the emotions that feel too heavy to carry alone.

But something that doesn’t get spoken about enough is the joy in therapy, the moments of realisation that feel profound and the immense feelings of pride, bravery, gratitude and self-love that can come from the therapeutic process.

It is normal to feel vulnerable when you open yourself up to someone you don’t know in a professional setting. That hour can feel scary and painful. You then leave the session, but you still have to be with yourself. Those difficult feelings can linger and sometimes talking about it exacerbates your issues - it feels like it gets worse, before it gets better.

I have often heard people saying about Counselling, that it is self indulgent. That going to therapy is just focusing on the problem, staying stuck in the negativity and holding on to the victim mentality and identity. In my experience, that is not the case at all. Ignoring your troubles allows them to fester and grow; it is a form of dissociation from the reality of your experiences.

Hiding how you feel; the grief, resentment or concern, does not rid you of it. It forces you to detach from an important part of yourself. One that needs to be witnessed and validated, before it is processed and healed. Fighting your thoughts to turn them into something different to what they are, something more positive or sanitised, is often for the comfort of others, not your own authenticity. Changing the narrative of your experiences can obscure your reality in a detrimental way, simply to make them more palatable to others.

Reframing is a useful tool in Counselling to support you to view your experiences from a variety of angles. Some of those perspectives can put a positive spin on things which allows for the extraction of wisdom and strength. That does not mean turning all the negatives into positives. It means making room for both.

How can you know what happiness and safety feel like, if you haven’t examined your sadness and fear? We need that contrast to be able to tell the difference and decide which one is appropriate in a particular context. Counselling provides you with a contained space to befriend the hardest parts of yourself and your life, so you can transform them into the best version of you. The joy in Counselling comes from that courage - doing the scary thing anyway, not pretending you were never scared.

And there are moments in therapy where unbridled joy occurs spontaneously. Especially when a robust therapeutic relationship develops between the Counsellor and the Client, the connection allows for the ridiculous, the ironic and even the hilarious to emerge.

Attending Counselling to unpack the painful things that you have experienced lets you safely confront them, so that you can understand what and why things happened, what you have learned and how to prevent hardship in the future. More importantly, it allows you to identify, create and preserve the version of yourself and your life that is filled with prosperity, wellbeing and happiness.

A good Counsellor meets you in the darkness and walks beside you while you confront it. They ensure you stay present with the rawness of your thoughts and emotions, without judgement or restriction. A good Counsellor also makes the most of opportunities for lightness to enter the process, for laughter and love to be present alongside the devastation.

It is also important to close a session thoroughly. This means that there is some sort of process or discussion that acknowledges the tension of the session and the emotions that have been released, and then makes sure you leave that behind and proceed into life with a clear sense of optimism, direction and understanding that there is no shame in feeling joy, even when bad things have happened.

Counselling can feel contradictory but that is what is most liberating about therapy. That sometimes opposing things can be true and coexist at the same time. That we can find stillness and peace in chaos, and that the complexity of the human experience can be more than just bearable, it can be exhilarating.

Try a FREE session today and discover how dynamic your lived experience has been and can be.

I look forward to meeting you.