Choosing a therapist, and type of therapy, can be bewildering.
There are many different approaches to therapy: from a Rogerian person centred approach, to CBT; from approaches that look at our roles in our families or other systems, to approaches that look at how our early years influence our lives now. And then there are the approaches, such as my own, that combine elements from these.
Looked at from a different angle, different types of therapy (and ways of practising those therapies) make different assumptions about how people’s difficulties come about and what might help them to change things. Some ask what people are lacking, and how that’s contributing to their problems. Others ask what strengths people have that might help them to overcome their struggles. There are types of therapy that have historically asked what’s wrong with people and offered them labels or diagnoses, and there are those that have sought to ask instead, ‘What’s happened to you?’
Thinking about all this sparked a memory from back from before I retrained as a counsellor, from when I was doing my first degree. I was studying ethnomusicology and we were sitting in a circle in a chilly breezeblock studio. We were thinking about ways of meeting and greeting, and ways of coming together with others. Our tutor was talking about the Aboriginal Australian aboriginal garaabara or corroboree. He asked,
‘Who are you? How did you travel here? And what do you bring?’
I struggled to answer as a nervous nineteen year old. I simply hadn’t thought about it much before, and in the there-and-then moment I was nervous about saying the right thing in front of my sophisticated new peers. But the questions stuck with me.
I encountered them again, in a different form, when I began training to be a therapist.
My training encouraged me to explore my answers to these questions once again. Once again, I found myself thinking, Who is this person that is sitting down with clients? How did I get here? What’s led to me training, and what are my motivations? What do I bring that could help, or harm, the people I work with? Do I bring care, compassion, curiosity? Do I bring my own (healed or healing) wounds? Do I carry cultural baggage and my own prejudices? As therapists, exploring our own beliefs and motivations can help us to practice more safely and ethically, and so I thought about those questions again on meeting a different group of people and at a different stage in my own life.
Now that I’ve been in practice for a few years, these questions show up in another way too. They speak to my work with clients. They sum up something about my approach to counselling. I might ask a client, directly, or using different language: Who are you? How did you get here? What do you bring?
I’m curious about who has come to sit with me. I encourage them to share something of themselves. Sometimes the people who choose to work with me are unsure of who they are, and part of our work together might be to explore that. I look forward to getting to know them and helping them to get to know themselves.
I’m interested, too, in what brings people to counselling. What’s led them to get in touch? I don’t diagnose, though I’m respectful of people who find having a diagnosis helpful, and I don’t think in terms of what’s ‘wrong’ with people. Instead, I’m curious about what might have happened to them along the way. What roads led to their current difficulties and what’s the impact for them?
Finally, I’ll ask clients, ‘What did you bring?’ I often help people to identify their strengths, resources and resilience, but I also offer them a space where they can lay down some of the burdens that they might have been carrying. I welcome clients to bring themselves, their stories and their strengths; their skills, their sadness, their shame; their hope, their humour, their hearts. Together we can make space for it all.
About me:
I’m an integrative counsellor based in Devon. I offer individual counselling online and in person in Plymouth. Get in touch if you’d like to find out more about working with me.
Stacey Sewell Counselling 