How to Maximise Your Counselling Sessions and Your Role in Counselling

You have taken the steps to come to counselling – a huge step towards greater self-awareness and healing. There is much to be appreciated in this decision.

With this commitment and in support of you, it’s important to treat your counselling sessions and the time spent with yourself as precious – this means to make space for yourself, your sessions and any homework. Allow yourself the grace of the healing process. No one can do this for you but you.

As such, coming prepared to a counseling session is truly an important part of the process.

These sessions are about you and for you, and you are taking the time in your life to commit to a process of healing, and paying money to do so. In that, it is your best interest to make a commitment to giving yourself space: space not only for your sessions, but space for yourself in all areas of your life. This often includes a greater level of self-care in all that you do, which often includes things such as more time for self-reflection, journaling, walking, looking after your body, your diet, etc.

Sessions are really a part of a deeper level of self-care, and this includes your ability to devote time to looking after and making space for yourself. This may require a greater adjustment, particularly if you have not done so before.

It is supportive for you to arrive on time to a session – being rushed or frustrated does not allow the space for you to unfold to what will come in the session.

Equally important is to prepare anything that was agreed upon in previous sessions: that is, to do your homework! Coming to counselling unprepared, expecting things to change will not make them change. Only you can enact change in your life. No therapist ever can.

Therefore, the counselling process is not about seeing a professional who ‘has all the answers’. It is not about seeing a professional who can ‘change’ you: YOU must do the work. There is no magic pill. Counselling requires us to take responsibility – responsibility for our own lives and the part we have played in them.

No therapist has all the answers because it is only you who holds all the answers in your own life. No one else. Only you can do the work that is required.

It is extremely important to understand this. No one can ‘fix’ you because:

1. Deep down inside, you are not broken, 2. You hold all the answers which you are seeking.

A therapist is there to guide you on your discovery of these answers, the answers that have always been there inside, waiting to be uncovered. A therapist is there to hold your hand, to be your biggest cheerleader and to call out when a course correction is needed.

Therefore, the best way to maximise the counselling sessions is to be ON: be present, be focused, be gentle with yourself, but at the same time be willing to look at things in your life and consider what part you have played in them. Do your homework, be prepared. Go deep – ask yourself the deeper questions, and be prepared to be uncomfortable. Drop the walls and allow yourself to be vulnerable. Ask yourself the hard questions, without being hard on yourself. Remember, there is zero self-bashing allowed in this process, only the allowing of what is there to unfold with a gentle, loving and caring holding of yourself at all times.