How counselling can help you to look objectively, kindly, on your current feelings and needs
The fact is we live in a connected world, with relationships, obligations and consequences. The key benefit of counselling is to be able to air out our fears and wishes to someone who has no connection to our bubble. Their needs don’t concern us.
In my experience counselling those who have been bereaved, they are always concerned about someone else’s needs, above their own. Even the act of taking sessions can feel selfish, that they’re taking time away from someone who needs it more. But I’ve seen counselling as a catalyst for the whole collective, a permission to grieve. The mother who allows herself to be a daughter, not just the executor of the will, encourages her own children to share their loss with her.
Clients come to counselling because they feel stuck. Some feel that they ought to have moved on and can’t express how they feel to family or friends. Others are flooded out-of-the-blue with feelings that they can’t hold during work. Both are struggling to feel the full extent of their loss, and understandably so. That devastation has no bounds. You don’t know that when you get upset, whether you’ll be able to pick yourself back up again – in time to make dinner for your family, in time to turn up for work. When you allow yourself to feel the full impact of the devastation, it can swallow you whole.
A counsellor is a companion. Not the lifeboat to rescue you, but someone who can thrash in the water with you. You don’t need to be rescued. What you need is to actually feel what you feel. It’s not pretty, it’s not at all comfortable, and that’s why often well-meaning family and friends, and ourselves, move away from the pain. Whatever change you want, that will come after. To me, the stuckness happens because we’re trying to bypass a process that is necessary and natural. When we don’t allow it to happen, this bottleneck hinders all other events.
There is no right way or wrong way to grieve. When the time is right, you feel that loss. Most likely it’ll be in waves of varying strength at different moments. Sometimes it’ll catch you in the most mundane situation, or sometimes when you’re watching a film with a character going through something like you.
There is a good reason why people become stuck. Our responsibilities and obligations to others are a priority. We have to function, to put things in some form of order, to put money on the table, to get dressed. But when we have the opportunity to, we can give that loss the space it needs.
