How does Counselling help with feeling stuck?

As a Person Centred Counsellor, I see people all the time who are stuck. They feel unhappy, but they don't know why. They feel disconnected from themselves and others. Throughout my training as a therapist what I learnt was that we don't really know ourselves. We are trundling through life making decisions and feeling feelings, but with no real understanding of what's underneath them. As a therapist, I see the light bulb moments people have when they connect the dots up. It's very powerful and very liberating.

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Fear and Shame

Underneath all our negative feelings, if we peeled away the layers, lies fear and shame. These two 'states' are what our uncomfortable feelings come from. We tell our self time and time again that we are not good enough. Not literally, but more on a subconscious level. We are entrenched by fears - fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, fear of achieving (this one mainly feeds from our conflicting feeling of not being good enough). We have a positive voice, and a negative voice in our head, and they are constantly in battle. I'm guessing the negative one is winning if you are seeking Counselling.

In Rogerian Psychology, our fears and feelings of not being good enough come from way back from when we were growing up. As children we are absorbing messages all of the time. We are learning how we should be in the world, and the right and wrong way to behave. We learn if we act a certain way, and we don't get positive regard, we feel a sense of rejection. So we adapt our behaviour so it aligns with receiving positive regard. As children we just want to be liked and loved, even if that means acting in a way that does not align with who we really are. This continues into adult life, bit by bit losing sight of who we really are. We are essentially living our life for others. We get to a place where we don't know who we are anymore, we feel lost, we feel stuck. We may have developed unhealthy behaviours and coping mechanisms to deal with the discomfort of not being who we really are. Drinking, gambling, eating disorders, abusive relationships, perfectionism. What we have done is sacrifice our self to please others, believing it will make us move loveable. Deep down we may feel resentful towards others, but we don't know why.

What is normal?

We want to feel normal, but what is normal? Do we really mean we just don't want to feel this way anymore? Stuck, lost, confused, resentful, angry, depressed. Is depression not just us "de-pressing" our feelings. Have we pushed them down too far, they are at boiling point.

Unpicking in therapy

I see therapy as a plate of spaghetti, we pull out a strand at a time and look at it. The spaghetti is all mixed up, entangled, enmeshed. We don't know where to start, so we pull at the end of one piece, and gently pull it out from the entanglement. It's amazing what things we learn from that one piece of spaghetti. Then we pull at another strand and we learn some more, and actually, how it was connected to the first piece. The plate of spaghetti is everything I have talked about, everything we have learnt from a young age, all the ways we have changed who we are to please others. Therapy will help you pull out the strands, and be clearer in who you are, how you have come to be where you are, and where you want to go next.

If you want to understand yourself better, please contact me.