About fifteen years ago whilst working as a teacher of English, with a workload that ultimately proved to be unmanageable, I was signed off work. I was experiencing great stress and was greatly distressed. I had begun to behave in obsessive ways and was experiencing a constant, high level of anxiety. The GP identified my state as “mental exhaustion” and explained that while I did seem to have some of the symptoms associated with depression, it wasn’t clearly diagnosable as depression. They also refrained from prescribing me any medication, saying that in the first instance they would leave me to see how I got on with what she described as my “own considerable resources.” She also mentioned that if I felt it would help, she could arrange for me to “talk to somebody.”
At this point I am not going to describe my experiences in detail. However, I was fairly guarded in what I described to the doctor and left out the more lurid and frightening details of what I was experiencing. It was a great relief to be signed off work, and I didn’t want to push my luck, dimly imagining that I might be “taken away” and perhaps even be hospitalised if the full extent of my distress was to become apparent. After a while, on a return visit to the doctor, I revisited the idea of talking to somebody, and she said that she would arrange for me to see the counsellor who worked with the practice. Eventually I got a letter in the post, offering an appointment, also containing a leaflet explaining what counselling is and a CORE form, asking me to complete the form and either to send it back or bring it with me to the first session (memory of these little details is now sketchy.)
The first session is a dim memory. One thing I remember now is that I really didn’t know what to expect and the assumptions that other people had helpfully offered me by way of what to expect didn’t really have very much to do with what was happening. Another thing I remember is that the counsellor didn’t seem at all perturbed by anything I did have to say and true to his word he never offered any judgement, nor did he offer any platitudes. Also although he didn’t offer any reassurances about anything, I did find the process of talking to him to be reassuring. I did leave feeling better than I had done when I went in and this turned out to be the case as the process went on. In fact, the effect was as if I had imbibed some magical drug – I soon learned to look forward to the sessions and would be hugely disappointed if a session was postponed or changed. I was lucky because at that time NHS counselling was not limited to six sessions and so I benefitted from the support I got for at least a year.
I think (almost) for the first time in my life I felt that I was being completely listened to and understood – or, if not understood, the counsellor would take the time to check out what I meant by something I had said that he wasn’t sure that he understood. And I felt valued, unconditionally, just for being me, with no expectation or pressure to think or be in any particular way. As time went on, I grew more confident and shared more. In fact, as time went on, stuff started to come up out of the darkness and I became conscious as if for the first time of experiences that I had completely forgotten about, that I had unconsciously locked away. This was both frightening and exhilarating. Although what was locked away became much less scary once it had been uncovered. The important thing is that it was I who did the uncovering – I was able to work at my own pace. If the counsellor had any theories about what was going on, he kept them to himself. I wasn’t treated like something broken that needed to be fixed. Some of the biggest and most important things that came up, came up between sessions rather than during them. I learned that the things I was experiencing that I found distressing and frankly weird, had their roots in experiences from my past, that I had lost connection with. The bits of myself that had been left unattended were calling for the attention they needed – that I needed. I developed a fuller understanding of myself: I also began to learn to value myself in ways I had not previously done as an adult. I became able to let go of the negative self-image and became less likely to own all the blame. I became more understanding and more aware and just… more.
The year of counselling wasn’t the end of it – I did go back for more a couple of years later, and several years after that I was required to do 20 hours of therapy as part of my training, which led to an even deeper level of understanding – I uncovered the stuff that was underneath the stuff I had uncovered in the first sessions. In some sessions I was actually working with things that I had experienced in very early childhood. I haven’t felt the need to go into therapy ever since – although I do take part in a personal development group, which has allowed me the space and support to work on things and to continue to develop and grow.
dacounselling.com 