Starting counselling can seem quite daunting at first, especially if you’ve never had therapy before. Not all therapists work in the same way but my goal for your first session is to make you feel as comfortable as possible.
When you first arrive in the session, you can sit down and make yourself comfortable. It’s important to remember that this is your space and that you can use the time exactly how you want to. At the first session, I’ll take some information from you so that I know how to contact you and we also talk about the practical things you need to know. After that we can start getting to know each other.
It can be helpful to see counselling a bit like having a cupboard in your mind. All the things that have happened to you during your life, you stuff in the cupboard. Anything difficult, anything you don’t want to think about, anything that’s distressing, rules that you’ve learned to live by, the way that other people treat you; it all goes in the cupboard. Every time you put something in the cupboard you push the door shut but eventually the doors start to bulge and become more difficult to close. This is when you come to therapy.
During each counselling session, we take something out of the cupboard and we examine it. You describe it to me, and we ask some questions about it. Where did it come from? How does it make you feel? Is it even yours? And perhaps most importantly, do you want to keep it? During the process of therapy, we replace the things you want to keep back into your cupboard in a tidy organised way, so that the door closes smoothly and everything in there feels more settled.
The impact of the things in those cupboards are different for everybody. For some people it causes anxiety, for some people it causes sadness, and for some people it causes distress. For some people it damages their confidence, for some people it causes them to keep repeating patterns in relationships, but the process is more or less the same. The role of the counsellor is to guide you but not to give you answers or opinions. These are things that you will figure out yourself during the process. It can be helpful to assume that you will need between 6 and 12 sessions because we don’t want to open the cupboard and then find out that we don’t have the time to put everything back; we don’t want to leave a psychological mess! However, some people only need a few sessions and some people choose to stay for a very long time, enjoying the safe space that they have with me to offload to someone not involved in their day-to-day life.
It is quite common to cry in counselling, especially in the first session. This is not something to be self-conscious or embarrassed about and tissues are always available. Often people apologise for crying when sometimes that is the point of being there. That said, there is nothing wrong with you if you don’t cry, because the most important part of therapy is showing up exactly how you are.
When you’re ready to open the door to your own overcrowded cupboard, get in touch to book a session. I’m ready to meet you. Sally 😊