Five Subtle Benefits Gained from Seeing a Person Centred Counsellor

During my healing process from complex OCD, phobias and panic attacks I saw three Person-Centred Counsellors spread out over a six year period.

The third counsellor I still see on a monthly basis for emotional maintenance - I find the experience so beneficial (even lottery winners can benefit from seeing a counsellor every now and again!) and as a part of their professional practice counsellors themselves are required to have professional counselling sessions in order to remain emotionally clear for their clients.

The first two counsellors I saw were provided for short periods by my doctor but the third I met through work and this coincided with my being ready to start the healing plan I had designed for myself.  In my day-job I act as a referrer, occasionally passing people on to a counselling team and I have an Intermediate Certificate in Person-Centred Counselling - this qualification is enough to understand the role of a Counsellor but not to practice professionally as one.

Trained, experienced counsellors of this type are guided by a number of ethical principles, one of the most important being the principle of client autonomy. This principle establishes that you decide the direction of your counselling sessions. Person-centred counsellors may suggest options for you to consider when you get stuck or when you ask them for advice, but they are unlikely to make final decisions for you or design and recommend a healing plan for you - that is your job.

The role of a counsellor of this type is to help you learn to become expert in understanding and working with yourself, rather than in your coming to regard them as the 'wise and wonderful guru of the inner me' who can give you the secrets you need for self-governance (they may well be this amazing character but it is not what they are employed to do).

There are a number of ethical and professional conduct principles which Person-Centred Counsellors are trained to stick to and at your first meeting they will explain these to you.  In this article I want to highlight five powerful, almost unconscious, services they provide which you will probably not see advertised or even spoken about during your sessions, but which I became increasingly aware of during my healing process:

• Acceptance Coach


• Living Mirror


• De-clutterer


• Personal Cheerleader


• Reliable Milestone Marker.

Acceptance Coach

These Counsellors are trained in the principle of unconditional positive regard (UPR) - this means they spend time entering into your viewpoint of your life and respect your right to be you. Their role is to achieve empathy with your experience - 'wear your shoes to the point they feel where they pinch'. After a couple of sessions with a counsellor who achieves this with you something magical happens. You unconsciously notice this professional person, who you respect, finds your internal horror stories easier to accept than you do. Things you find unacceptable about yourself they find perfectly normal.

In this way a counsellor can lead you towards accepting experiences you previously could not accept in your Unconscious Mind. This affect stays with you long after your counselling sessions have ended and quite often the act of discussing the 'unacceptable' will create an insight for you that prepares you more fully for the next session. The affect is so deep that when you are not with your counsellor and you are facing up to difficult emotional issues alone it is as if that level of acceptance remains with you and you are able to become your own counsellor.

Living Mirror

Summary and reflection skills are used by the Counsellor to demonstrate you are being actively listened to - this professional person has no personal agenda other than to support you in yours.  They will not support you in committing criminal acts or other really harmful behaviour, there are formal boundaries and requirements in place, but equally they will not try to impose their personal beliefs about 'what you should do next' .

Your feelings, and the content of what you say, are taken seriously. Subtle things hardly noticed by you as you say them may be presented back to you as open-ended questions for you to explore further. When this is done in a non-judgemental way it validates your experience of life and helps clarify the realities you live with. You may be lightly challenged where the information reflected back to you appears to conflict. For example if you laugh whilst relating a particularly painful experience the counsellor may ask you to explain what is behind the laughter - this enables you to identify your underlying thinking processes and beliefs more clearly for yourself.

I remember once a relative taped me while I was talking to myself at home and played it back to me - I had no recall at all of this self-talk and was really surprised about how unaware I was of the verbal chat coming out of my mouth.  Sometimes the only person not listening to what you are saying is you.  In counselling what you say and feel is summarised and reflected back to you for clarification.

A good counsellor (and I have never met a bad one) will seem to disappear from your conscious awareness at times because you become so wrapped up in the process and they are so good at being there for you it is as if your minds were fully working together.  The sense of this other mind working with yours can remain in between sessions as you start to pay more and more attention to yourself - you become much more self-aware.

De-clutterer

Sometimes the first ten minutes or so of a session may be used to clear out your emotional baggage of the day before moving on to the longer term issues. The Counsellor will not tell you what to believe or clear out of the way - you will decide this. They are trained to support you, not tell you what to focus on.  On occasion my counsellors were 'emergency support' if something really painful had happened recently and had distracted me from the long term work I was doing on healing my anxiety disorders.

These new emotional emergencies sorted out much quicker with my having counselling support already in place (pity we do not have these folks to hand when our anxiety disorders start to develop, eh, but the truth is we are blind to what is going on inside of us at the pre-disorder stage).

Personal Cheerleader

Counsellors are not just there for the unhappy experiences - they can help you acknowledge yours wins too. There may be things you have recovered from and you wish to celebrate the recovery but it would be inappropriate to do so with the people in your personal life - that relative you have finally forgiven for stealing your christmas present money ten years ago - how appropriate would it be to tell them you had nightmares of cooking them over a slow heat on a gas cooker all that time but they can rest easy now?

Or why not tell your mates how you have overcome obsessive imagery related to the throwing of children out of windows?  Not a good idea, is it?  I have actually lost friends following on from telling them I had recovered from a phobia of lampposts.

It really is important to celebrate your wins and sometimes your counsellor will stop you to make sure you do this.  It is so easy to move straight on to the next emotional issue you have to deal with without acknowledging your progress.  This leads me on to the next benefit of the counselling experience - Milestone Marker.

Reliable Milestone Marker

You may have come a very long way - but have not mentally registered much of it.  This may be partly due to short-term memory loss and also to emotional non-relativity.

When undergoing periods of intense emotional self-work it can be almost impossible to think clearly.  I found myself going through phases where just to put one word down on paper was difficult.  I recorded a lot of my experiences using simple mind maps and these would later remind me of things I noticed during the healing process - which meant going through extended periods of intense emotional exposure therapy.  Intense emotional states blank memory due to your brain being in 'emergency mode' - it works the same for emotional disorders as it does with any other life event triggering an intense emotional response.

Similarly, your Unconscious Mind tends to focus on how you feel right now.  It does not automatically tell itself how great you feel compared to last year.  If you feel a bit rubbish today you may not see any benefit in telling yourself to think back to a time you felt ten times worse - but you will if you do it.

Sometimes my day-job can be quite intellectually stressful.  I just remind myself of a time when I earned a living in a place where people smashed broken bottles over my head when they got drunk - makes my current job look like the best job on Earth.

Your Counsellor has a fully functioning memory and will occasionally remind you of how far you have come - both in terms of your intellectual understanding of yourself and also in terms of how what you feel now and how it relates to how you felt when you first started seeing them.

And there is more ...

Person--Centred Counselling is not just about going and talking to someone - the affects of this process are subtle but over time you will notice fundamental changes in your Unconscious.  Self-criticism fades and is replaced by an acceptance of what it is to be human.  You will find yourself more supportive of others because at some point you decided to better support yourself.

The time and money you put into getting counselling support is an investment in yourself that can benefit you and others for the rest of your life.

Regards - Carl