Ever thought to yourself as you argue with your partner – “here we go again, same old, same old”? Perhaps you’ve got stuck in a downward spiral of hurt, blame, anger and frustration. And then it will be all right for a while until the whole thing starts up again.…
“Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.” – Mark Twain When people come to counselling with
If, as children, we felt repeatedly hurt, humiliated, abandoned, suffocated or ignored by someone close to us and on whom we depended for survival (usually a parent), we might have made the perfectly logical decision – at least from a four-year-old’s point of view – to keep other people at bay.
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Rumi We all have barriers to protect ourselves from emotional
Any therapist worth their salt will have gone through or be going through many months of their own therapy. Personally, as a client, I wouldn’t want to go to see any practitioner who hadn’t been through this experience and come out the other side – more or less still standing.
Ever so often I take a look through my special “ah-ha!” lenses and see a concept that has been bothering me with completely fresh eyes. Well, sort-of, anyway. Usually, somebody says something and I think to myself: “Yes, of course – why didn’t I think of that?”
I have written about metaphors on this blog before (see my post of 30th August 2012) and I will no doubt write about them again. Describing our lives and how we feel through the use of metaphor is, I believe, a powerful means of exploring and making sense of our world.
I am sometimes asked by potential new clients if I am prepared to see them fortnightly rather than on my usual weekly basis. I understand that counselling or psychotherapy is a major commitment both in terms of time and cost and that on the face of it meeting less frequently…
You’ve met your counsellor and decided to go ahead with some sessions. He or she seems pleasant, competent and interested in what you have to say. You might be feeling rather unsure about what happens next and also perhaps a little wary as to whether you can really trust this…
So now you have a shortlist of suitable sounding counsellors and psychotherapists… What made you choose them? Do they practise close to where you live or work? Did you like the look of them from a photo, or perhaps what they have to say about their approach to therapy on a website or…
