Overcorrecting
I talk a lot about balance when supporting clients to achieve stability. When a client seeks therapy, the client and I take many things into consideration during our sessions. We aim to come to an understanding about what the client’s central issues and themes are, and how they can resolve these issues while continuing to function effectively in their day to day life. They can then envisage what their life and health can potentially look like as they go forward into a future they create for themselves.
Balance is all about making sure that relevant aspects of the client’s experience are accounted for. This is then used to extract meaning, resources and courage that improve their ability to make self-determined and beneficial decisions to improve their life. It is not linear or neat, as it relies on the client unpacking and exploring aspects of themselves and their lived experience that they may not have looked closely at before. It could include their early childhood development, attachment and relationships, traumatic or significant events, their own patterns of behaviour, and their emotional responses to things they often have little control over.
The Counsellor’s role is to ensure that the client feels safe and supported. They ensure that there is an establishment of strong trust and rapport, so that the client can navigate their own narrative, needs, desires and goals safely. Meaning is extracted from the interactions and the therapeutic alliance between the client and the Counsellor, that gives clarity and purpose to the client’s identity and wellbeing.
As human beings, this work is important, but it is not easy. Especially because it takes significant time, energy and sometimes expense to give the process the attention it requires and deserves. Often what we tend to do, both as clients and Counsellors, is to look for the quickest, most efficient and least uncomfortable ways to achieve balance. This is practical, empathetic and professional. Of course we want things to feel manageable, effective and nurturing. That is why there are so many standards, boundaries and requirements to being able to facilitate this kind of work in a professional space.
However, the human mind and our being, is not always that co-operative or obedient (and thank goodness!), especially when we consider the systems we have to function within, our obligations to those systems and our need to survive within or alongside them. Our being wants to create it’s own system. One that it intuits and shapes to best serve the wellbeing of its host.
Sometimes, we need to dismantle, distance ourselves, and adjust our relationship to imposed systems, which is destabilising and wrenching work. These systems could include our caretaker responsibilities, our intimate and less personal relationships, and our access to resources for survival through earning an income for example. The basics are important, like keeping a roof over our own and sometimes others’ heads, eating nutritious food, having time for rest, exercise and leisure, spending quality time with others, and engaging in intellectual, emotional and physical pursuits that are stimulating, developmental and pleasurable. That’s a lot of pressure on a person, particularly when going through a crisis or a period of distress. We need to also consider the different life stages we might be at, like being a child, or an adolescent, an adult with unique capacity, or moving into old age. Everything around us tells us (and conditions us!) to achieve this a certain way. There are so many options, influences and pathways to compare ourselves to. Finding our own way can be tricky. How do we choose the things that work for us and discard the noise and the pollution that does not serve our highest good?
If we want our healing journey through Counselling to succeed, we have to take all of this into consideration. It can be frightening to take that first step, and most don’t. It can feel debilitating to pay that much attention to our life, instead, letting it happen to us by chance, rather than taking responsibility to make informed and deliberate decisions to fashion our own present and future. So many of us do nothing. We under-do it, just in case we fail. Who wants to fail, right? So what if that is where all the learning happens!
On the other hand, it is easy to push boundaries into overcorrection, to find solutions quickly and make the best of the process without the risk and effort. We can become obsessed with doing all the things we can, giving our attention to all the distractions so we don’t miss a morsel of information to add to our resources, hoping to find that magic formula, the shortcut everyone else has missed. We put all our energy into absorbing information as a distraction from doing the actual work needed to progress.
Of course sometimes we are in a situation where we have to wait and see. Doing nothing is appropriate and can be a time of recovery, gathering strength and investigating options. Other times we have to overcompensate a little to make up for lost time, lost learning and our own unique capabilities. It’s good to be flexible and Counselling is a fantastic tool to explore and build skills to achieve this balance.
Overcorrecting is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, during a Counselling relationship, it can be seen as a way to test boundaries and their stability, try challenging and scary things as a way of exposure in a safe space, or even perhaps investigate our own limitations and the things we don’t want, to discover what stability and the right path looks like. Sometimes you have to get things wrong and over do it, to have a benchmark for returning to where you need to be.
As we practice testing limits, trying unconventional things can make us better at calculating and intuiting what feels and looks right for us, what we resonate with, what is doable and what will work for our own health.
You could say that the ability to overcorrect is a tool and a very valuable one. It is about taking calculated risks and being prepared to fail. That is where the lessons take shape and where we can extract skills that encourage us to grow. The Counselling space is a safe and supported place to try these things, to assess when this has occurred in real life and what the costs and benefits have been.
Additionally, Counselling is a place to make peace with overcorrecting. Often under doing or over doing things is how we get into trouble in our lives, and more often than not, the situation has either been out of our control, and we have had to simply endure and navigate, or more likely it is an understandable and justified series of events and reactions that we have simply been existing within to survive.
Overcorrecting might also be something that we work hard at avoiding, so the tendency might be to undercorrect or do nothing. In therapy we call this dissociating or avoidance - a way to simply steer clear of anything that feels unsafe, difficult, confrontational and dangerous. This too is a survival mechanism, but can sometimes make the problem bigger, more serious and less manageable in the long run. Sometimes it is an act of self-care and self-preservation too.
Counselling can be the place where these themes can become more clear and less frightening. The more we try different approaches to our lives, the better we get at determining what works best for us.
Try a FREE 30 minute session to get the feel for it. It won’t cost you anything but a little bit of time and courage.
Ad hoc sessions mean you can access support only when you feel you need it. This is the most intuitive way to use talk therapy. You decide when, how often, and for how long to engage in Counselling.
A 10-session commitment is a longer and more in-depth journey you take with yourself and the Counsellor. You will get the opportunity to see patterns and themes emerging over a sustained period of time. You can do this quickly (once a week over 10 weeks) or spread it out over a year (once a month).
The beauty is that you choose what you think will work for you and together we can implement a personalised process to accommodate your unique needs.
I look forward to meeting you.
