starting Therapy

 Some clients are aware of what is going on and want to make changes. This is not the case for everyone.

Others might just feel the increased pressure building, this can happen with any kind of unrest or trauma (small or large). This can lead to feeling almost helpless, with emotions overflowing; maybe outbursts of frustration or anger, maybe flooding of overwhelm becoming stronger and more frequent so much so that they cause an anxiety. 

Whilst at the other end of the spectrum others are forced into therapy when one day things go too far and intervention is the only option left.

There is no right or wrong time to start therapy. But there may become a point when the risk of an outburst or overwhelm might threaten the status quo, our job, our sense of sanity or the relationships we care about and love, so much, that we make the step into therapy.

Where ever you wish to start, your therapist will start where you want to start and travel as far as you wish to go, on this journey, providing what you present is within their scope of their training.  This can usually be established by looking through the website or asking the question upon enquiry.

I think of the therapeutic journey as similar to a road trip. Even without travel anxiety, if it is a long trip, you might pack a drink and a few essentials, a coat, spade if it is snowing, a snack. 

In counselling the therapist will make sure we have the essentials to keep you safe enough for the journey, especially watching out for any PTSD triggers. 

We then set the sat nav - your destination or goal and press go. As you may have found with most electronic routing apps, you can come off at the wrong junction, take a back road or the main road, it won't matter. Google maps will keep you on track for the end goal. Therapy is like that too. Your therapist is trained to pick up the themes of your work regardless of if you choose to bring past, present or future topics. 

One thing I would like to reassure you is that I will not ask you to talk about any past trauma in detail, especially in the first session. Healing does not need to involve retraumatising you.  In fact any good therapist will know that it is not necessary to go into details about your traumatic events unless you are actually choosing to process that material. It is ok & sometimes helpful to give your therapist bullet point headings about your past. But this does not mean you need to spend lots of time on upsetting subjects.

But when we change the relationship we have with our past we automatically change the present experience.