What is Well

When clients arrive in the counselling room they are there because they are finding life difficult to deal with, they have found that life has stopped working as well as it has done previously, or that they are feeling very hopeless indeed. Explaining what has brought them in some senses is the easy part. Explaining where exactly they want to get to is often more difficult.

The usual answer to the question: ‘so what are your objectives from counselling’ is simply ‘to feel well’ or ‘to be my old self’ or ‘to be myself’. I have wondered to myself just what this actually means because at a top level while they can make sense in terms of our general understanding of what this might mean it does not really stand up to scrutiny. So, ‘to be my old self’ implies that there is an old way of being that clearly felt as though it worked but yet is part of the same being that has now presented for counselling. And what does ‘to feel well’ actually look and feel like? Especially one might wonder how we might now when we have arrived.

This is all really a long winded prompt to thinking about what we really want from life, to think about what we may mean when want to be fulfilled, contented, at peace and all those other descriptions of the qualities of life that we would like. How seriously are we prepared to take them? Would we turn our life up side down when we realise that earning enough money to live in such and such a house driving such and such a car simply represents the measuring our satisfaction based on an external source of judging our success.

What, as a counsellor, I really believe with all my being is that this journey can only be accomplished when we have developed and can hold a sense of our own intrinsic worth derived from an internal perspective and assessment. When we really believe in ourselves as unique creations with our own unique talents. This is the essence of counselling: to help people get back to, find the source of and help others along that road.

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