Counselling is a process. It is a journey. It is about being accompanied on that journey. Society places a lot of emphasis on completing tasks, on achieving goals, on finding answers ... on getting it right. Although counselling often leads to a resolution of problems, there are other benefits as well.

It can be about simply opening up and allowing our thoughts and emotions to pour out in the presence of someone who is not judging us, to whom we don’t have to justify ourselves and who will not try to impose their own values or solutions on us.

We might have suffered a loss, we might be feeling confused about a challenge we are facing, we might be experiencing an emptiness at the very core of ourselves. There may not be an answer; there may not be a way of dealing with it - it is simply our unique life and our unique experience of that life. The act of trying to find the words to express that experience, to share it with another person, even to simply be with someone while we struggle internally, is different to suffering alone and  puts us in a different place. We have been heard. We have made contact.

I once had a client who sat in total silence for almost the whole of a 50-minute session. In the middle of the session, he said “I’m so exhausted” but that was all. At the end, he told me that that was exactly what he had needed: to sit in silence but to have his silence heard, or witnessed, by another person.

Facing incredibly difficult challenges in life is hard enough. If we believe that we must find solutions or answers as quickly as possible , we may be adding to the pressure on ourselves.