5 Top tips: getting The most out of counselliNg

So you’ve found a counsellor and they’re going to tell you how to get better? Wrong! I’m afraid it’s not something that someone does TO you. It’s a journey that requires active participation. And whilst some counselling can be short term, we often have years of unhelpful thinking to reshape or experiences to process and it may therefore take time to get the full benefit out of counselling. 

What do I mean by active participation? It’s the reflections you do in sessions and in between sessions that really make a difference to how effective counselling is. So here are just a few tips to help you:

Goal setting 
Think carefully about what you want to get out of counselling so you can share with your counsellor. Be as specific as you can, and be optimistically realistic - consider what you want to be different! I might want to be fitter but running a marathon might not be realistic because of my dodgy knee, so my optimistic realistic goal might be to have sufficient strength and stamina to go on a walk in Delamere Forest for an afternoon.  Having goals can aid our reflections, but hold them loosely as what comes up in counselling can be surprising!

Leave a diary gap after counselling sessions 
There’s a huge amount that can go through our minds in a counselling session and it’s helpful to give ourselves a bit of time and headspace to this. Maybe take a walk, or go for a coffee, rather than going straight into a complex business meeting. Just taking a moment to breathe and reflect on your experience of the counselling session can be helpful.

Identify your key takeaways from counselling sessions 
Sometimes it can be hard to identify one thing from a counselling session but it will help you to remember if you have a key point (or two) to keep reminding yourself about in between sessions. Maybe it will be the memory of how calm you felt when doing a mindfulness exercise, so you want to try that again during the week. Or maybe it was a different way of looking at your experiences. Just having a headline can help your reflections during the week.

Journalling
This might be as simple as writing key takeaways down, or maybe you’re prompted to write a poem in response to your journey. I tend to dump every random thought onto paper for 10 minutes or so, so it gets out of my head. Or maybe, like Karl Jung, you will find drawing or making patterns is your way of letting what you’re learning about yourself sink in. Journalling can look very different for everyone - be as logical or creative as you need to be! But it's making time to reflect that is more important than how you do it.

Watch out for little changes 
Be curious about what you are doing and why in the week and be prepared to wonder why your response, your actions, your emotions are changing - or not. Change is often gradual as we grow in our counselling journey, so it’s great to be able to celebrate the little changes, or identify what is blocking change so we can bring it back to our next counselling session. Just reflecting on what is different can help our awareness grow


Just remember, be kind to yourself and keep practising things you learn in counselling. It isn’t about the big changes you make, but it is often about subtle shifts in the way you think and what you do that give you a clue about your inner growth. 


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