Is counselling always a good thing?

[AutumnOrange]

I am currently 4 sessions in counselling via work and am starting to wonder how helpful it is. I feel so shit after each session. Stuff is dredged up by the counsellor that I had successfully buried. Talking about it won’t change it. So what is the point? I feel lower now than I did before counselling! Does anyone understand what I mean?

"I want to move forward but at the moment all I am doing is looking back."

How do you think you move forward? What do you think moving forward means? Often you can't until you've dealt with the issues that are causing the problem.

But what you can say to her, by email or at the very start of the next session, tell her this. Ask her how she sees you moving forward, in the next 2 sessions.

Absolute cheapest counselling is £60 an hour where I am, and that says “starts from”.

I had CBT via the drs and basically she signposted me here there and everywhere but didn’t actually help. Can’t even get a face to face apt with the drs but they just keep signing me off work 🙄
I want to change the past and I can’t 🤷🏻‍♀️
I like speaking to my counsellor - we laugh and talk honestly but I don’t know how much it is actually helping

I don't claim to have much experience here but I absolutely see how dredging stuff up can be unhelpful.

I can't help feeling it just makes them more money. A friend had therapy after her mum died. She told she me felt terrible after each session and then after the "recommended number" had been done -
surprise, surprise - the therapist said "I think you might have unresolved trauma from your father's death and it's affecting how you process this".

He had died 30 years prior. At this point, my friend realised it was not a good idea.

I think one of the great things about time passing can be that certain things get forgotten. As a society, I think there's an obsession with counselling, therapy, 'processing" stuff.

I guess it has good and bad sides.

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interesting that you get on well and still feel it's damaging. I'd stop tbh.

Counselling is the wrong therapy for trauma for precisely this reason. The evidence shows counselling actually makes trauma worse, that's why it's not an approved treatment.

you need the right person, and you can tell if that person is right or not within a few sessions. I'd say 4 - 5 of hard work going round in circles, then things might start changing. Then again trust your instinct if you feel the person is not your cup of tea, you have every right to withdraw sooner (it's so expensive).

Trauma-focused CBT (not generic CBT), cognitive trauma therapy, EMDR, family system therapy, trauma-informed yoga... all have an evidence base showing they are effective in healing trauma.

Counselling has an evidence base showing it makes trauma worse and stops people healing. It's not an approved treatment and any professional worth their credentials would know that and have declined to proceed further.

Any therapy can have a destabilising effect initially, that's why people who are very distressed/unwell aren't offered therapy until they're more stable and have the right support to keep them safe. Destabilising is a different phenomenon to merely causing harm, though - it's equivalent to the way that physical therapy can be exhausting and painful etc.

I’m a therapist. Without blowing my own trumpet and all that, I’ve seen absolutely life changing results with many clients.

That doesn’t mean it’s for everyone though, it’s not.if you only have time limited sessions it’s good to use a ‘beach ball’ analogy, if it’s not popping up to the surface then leave it where it is.

you can do a lot of good work in say 6 sessions without going anywhere near into the heavy detail.

what were your goals for therapy? There needs to be a shared understanding of what you’re hoping to gain from the start.

I want to change the past and I can’t

Ain’t that the truth!

@midairchallenger What is an approved treatment for trauma?

Sorry that was a cross post! I see you answered my question already 🙂

@Heartoverheadheadoverheart thats a lovely thing you do, but most counsellors are paid quite a high rate per hour.

I have mixed feelings about it all. I don’t think it’s always helpful, and I don’t like the way it’s often pushed as a solution.

For me, I would never do it. I cope with my grief by ' putting it in a box '. It sits there, inside me, and that enables me to live a fairly happy life. Nothing will changed by talking about it, the worst thing I could do is go over it all again. I can talk to my DH anytime I need to, and he totally understands when a few tears escape.

“@midairchallenger What is an approved treatment for trauma?”

In the NICE guidelines it’s TFCBT or EMDR.

Oh my god I honestly thought I was crazy and odd for not finding it helpful! I have dredged up so much stuff the last few weeks that has just made me feel worse and seen me get signed off work! No amount of counselling will change the fact my mum killed herself when I was 16!
I need help with my day to day skills - there - I have said it. I am chaotic with bills and paperwork.
I don’t need to be asked how I felt when my dad battered my mum. I obviously felt shit. What should I say? That I felt good about it?
I struggle with routine and organisation and in dark days I look back and wish my mum was here. But focussing on that time of my life isn’t helping me NOW!
My counsellor is so so lovely but in 4 sessions time it will come to an abrupt end (I can’t afford to pay for her privately) and then where will I be?
I am so glad you all get it!

I need to put it in a box. I don’t have a partner to talk it through when I feel the need to - I have some great friends but obviously they have their own lives. I want to lock it away not open it up further!

I had a private therapist for a few sessions and found similar to you. My first session felt great but after that I felt terrible after each one which wasn't great when I was being treated primarily for anxiety. In the end I jacked it in, read a few books to tide me over while waiting for an nhs cbt group session to come up. It was much better.

I can understand your thoughts as to whether counselling makes it worse but could it be mostly that it's the wrong dynamic? The wrong counsellor?

Sorry posted too soon.

Would you say you need to be able to take charge of your own counselling iyswim? That's what I felt was hard about my private counselling.

You might be better with a life coach which is more forward looking

I know people swear by it but EDMR just substantially lowered my bank balance and got me nowhere.

How do you learn to value yourself and feel worthwhile? I wish I knew too. I've tried quite a lot of things to change my sense of self.
I'm not sure it's always possible if too much has happened or been done to you. But, one thing I've learnt is just because I'm unable to value myself, doesn't give others the right to treat me as worthless. Adopting that didn't change how I felt about myself, but it did help to get me treated a bit better.

In order for therapy to be helpful, you need to be clear from the outset what your goals are (I know you have been, just responding to those asking what the point is of "dredging things up"). People who want to tell their story, make sense of what happened to them and have their life experiences validated might very well benefit from a counselling approach. Not everyone is looking for that, however. The reason why exploratory questions are asked is that in order to make positive change in life, your have to bring unconscious patterns of interaction to the surface. Only when these are clear, is it possible to notice what needs to change and how you might do this.

Following as I had my first counselling session last week. Lots of stuff I'd buried came up and I'm not sure going over it again is going to solve my seemingly unrelated problem. I have 4 more sessions booked and in debating whether to cancel or not. Fortunately I'm not paying.

I think it maybe hit and miss. I had counselling and I don't know how she did it but one day she told me she thinks I'm done and no longer need her. I agreed.

However both my sister and SIL have had counselling which has pretty much blamed everything on both sets of parents and now they are no contact. Literally blaming everything that has gone wrong in their lives on their childhood. I'm not talking physical or sexual abuse just parenting choices/styles that happened in 80s. They are still as miserable as sin now.

For all those feeling like this about dragging up the past you would be better off with solution based therapies

This.

So sorry for the traumatic life experiences you’ve gone through, OP. You’re in short-term therapy which is evoking deeply rooted issues that would probably benefit from longer-term work where you have time to process what comes up. One of the inherent conundrums of therapy is that the therapist will be trained to create conditions where you (the client) open up your internal world and begin to make connections between things. That can be powerful but disconcerting and it’s not at all uncommon to feel worse initially.

As a pp has suggested, I’d ask to review with your therapist in light of the fact you are halfway through short-term work. Would your employer fund an extension to the therapy? Could you use the remaining sessions to explore options for longer-term work? Various approaches work for trauma, EMDR included.

I’m a therapist myself and I do get the dilemma of short-term work. It can be useful but it sounds as though the rapport with the therapist is good and is leading you into the deeper areas very quickly. Does your therapist suggest grounding and stabilising exercises you can do when distressed? If not, ask about that, too.