How did I get here?

“How did I get here, sat in the Counsellors chair in a Counselling room ?” is a question I still ask myself often with a great deal of gratitude attached.

Creating a safe space to hold clients whilst they share aspects of their lives with me, that they are finding challenging, no matter how big or small, is a genuine privilege that I do not take lightly. Along with bucketloads of tears, there are also backloads of laughter (which tends to surprise people!) The highs and lows of life shared in an honest and trusting therapeutic relationship is balm to my soul and I feel incredibly lucky to be a part of the amazing counselling profession.

But back to how I get here!

I have always been what I call a ‘people person’. Always interested in what makes people tick and why. My previous career allowed me to continue this curiosity and to study it.  Working with young people and their families in the most difficult of situations;  how we function as people and how we relate to others and why became my main focus.

I learnt about brain development and function, the latest up to date neuroscience and research into Trauma informed therapies. I began working more therapeutically with young people, using psycho-education with them and their parents to try to enable them to begin to process some of the trauma that had led them to my educational setting.

I developed a real interest in trans-generational trauma and working with parents was the key to that.

But that’s just part of the story…

Like many other people, I have experienced my own mental health issues; Anxiety, stress, and depression, alongside pre and post natal depression and social anxiety have all lived with me. After many years and many struggles, and through many years of medication and various therapeutic inputs I found a private therapist who I felt really ‘got me’. By working regularly with her I was able to move to more awareness, more acceptance and more compassion for myself. This massively transformed how I see some areas of my life and how I react  and relate to those now.

But don’t get me wrong…. I am still a work in progress and always will be. Not all days are sunshine and rainbows, but when the now grey, rather than black clouds descend , I know they are temporary, I know why they came and I now how to help myself to dispel them.

Also…

Around this time, certain major life events led me away from educational settings and, because I had worked therapeutically with young people and their families for a long time, it seemed like a natural progression for me to want to work with individual adults to help them find aspects of themselves that they had lost or never fully found. So I decided to retrain as a professional Counsellor. I knew from my own various therapies that one size doesn’t fit all and so I chose to train as an Integrative Counsellor with a person centred focus because I wanted to be able to offer clients flexible and individual support to meet their needs.  This incorporated two years of study and another year and a half of placement work with a local charity, where I found I was also able to incorporate a lot of my past therapeutic ethos and practice into the role. Once qualified and set up in my own practice, I have never looked back. So here I am, sat in the Counsellors chair in a Counselling room, and that is how I got here!

But that’s not the end of the story…

One of my favourite quote is attributed to Socrates, “ An unexamined life is not worth living”  and although his context was slightly different, from my own experience and that of the clients I have worked with, I think he has a point. I continue to examine my own life on an almost daily basis and to work to help other people to examine theirs in order to become the best versions of ourselves that we can be.  To do this I continue the habit of ‘life long learning’, studying well founded methods and newly researched ideas to keep my practice relevant and effective. One of these being using Nature in Therapy…. More about this in a future blog!

So, as I sit here in the counsellors chair, in my counselling room, my question to YOU now, is “When are you going to come along and examine your life with me ?”