Counselling for now

Counselling is becoming more recognised for the help it can give people. Reducing the stigma of 'having problems' that has always been around for people, means more are getting the help they need.

Once the domain of the tribal elders, advice, guidance, insights and understanding can now come from a stranger. Yet not a stranger to pain and loss, often, and not a stranger to learning how to develop better strategies to cope or better still, manage, life's ups and downs.

We can't have the ups if we don't have the downs: some harder to bear than others, and some more painful to cope with, but you do. You can.

So many people say that they have 'always coped with whatever life threw at me but now I can't!' as if that is a failure. It isn't. It is that you have been strong for too long, too often and now you have simply reached your capacity for pain and struggling - 'the straw that breaks the camel's back'.

Our glass is half full or half empty but at some point, it will reach full capacity and overflow. You too!

We learn as we go, living life experiences and learning along the way strategies for coping, new and better ways to manage, greater awareness and understanding so we can, in future, use that knowledge to make life happier and easier perhaps.

Some people have so much pain and problem in their life, it's true. Yet mindset is also something you can learn to manage and how you perceive things. Sometimes you have to just give things time and yourself time to work through the process of adaptation and change. With help, too, though, not alone.

Talking things out helps you to put things into context, into perspective. It helps you to clarify the details of the problem(s) and even potential solutions - it’s making the choices that are difficult. It's taking the risk that it is the 'right choice'.  You always have choices even if they may not always be the ideal ones we want and would choose for ourselves!

Perception is how you think about things - the problem, the options and solutions, the ideal versus the possible and your capacity, our ability to make the 'best' choice for the future.

You can only make a choice now based on what we know now. You will, without doubt, know more in future! But right now, we have options and choices to be made.

People, humans, don’t like uncertainty, we prefer to know what is coming and how we can 'best' deal with it. But life is for living and learning, for developing and growing as we learn new and often 'better' ways of dealing with problems, because we have more knowledge about them and our options, from past experience.

Counsellors help you to put these things in place, to see your options, guidance from other's experience too, especially as today, families and 'tribes' are more widespread and not close enough to advise, guide or explain things fully enough. We can build new support networks, different ways to manage and cope, and support to timely work through problems - it's a process of adaptation and learning, always.