Some people become very good at being the person others rely on.
You might be the one who stays calm when things go wrong. The person who sorts things out, makes decisions, keeps going and makes sure everyone else is OK.
Perhaps that is part of your job. You may work in the emergency services, healthcare, education or another role where other people routinely look to you for help. Or perhaps it happens outside work. You might be the person friends and family turn to when something goes wrong.
Being dependable can be something you value about yourself. But there can also be a cost when there is rarely space for you to be anything other than capable.
When “I’m fine” becomes automatic
When someone asks how you are, how often do you answer “I’m fine” almost without thinking?
Sometimes we become so accustomed to carrying on that we stop noticing what is happening for us underneath.
Stress, worry, frustration, sadness or exhaustion do not necessarily arrive dramatically. They can accumulate gradually. You may still be going to work, looking after your family, seeing friends and doing everything that needs doing. From the outside, everything might appear perfectly normal.
Inside, however, things can feel very different.
You might notice that you are more irritable than usual, struggling to switch off, thinking about things repeatedly, sleeping badly or simply feeling exhausted by having to keep everything together.
And because you are still functioning, it can be tempting to tell yourself that there isn’t really a problem.
The pressure to be the strong one
Person-centred counselling has an interesting way of understanding this.
Carl Rogers, who developed the person-centred approach, suggested that as we move through life we can begin to absorb messages about the kind of person we need to be in order to be accepted or valued.
In person-centred theory these are often described as conditions of worth.
They might sound something like:
“I should be able to cope.”
“I shouldn’t let people down.”
“Other people have it worse than me.”
“I need to stay in control.”
“I shouldn’t need help.”
These are not necessarily things anybody has explicitly said to us. They can develop gradually through families, relationships, workplaces, culture and our experiences of life.
Over time, they can become so familiar that they no longer feel like expectations. They simply feel like who we are.
The difficulty comes when what we believe we should feel becomes different from what we actually experience.
Rogers described this as incongruence.
You might therefore have an idea of yourself as someone who is strong, dependable and able to cope, while another part of you feels overwhelmed, frightened, angry, uncertain or exhausted.
The greater the distance between those experiences becomes, the harder it can be simply to be yourself.
Counselling isn’t about telling you what to do
This is one of the reasons I was drawn to person-centred counselling.
There is no assumption that the counsellor knows your life better than you do.
I am not there to diagnose what is “wrong” with you, tell you what decisions you should make or provide a list of instructions for fixing your life.
Instead, person-centred counselling begins from a very different position: that you are the person who has lived your life and that your experiences deserve to be understood from your perspective.
That may sound simple, but being genuinely listened to without judgement, interruption or somebody immediately trying to solve the problem can be surprisingly unfamiliar.
For someone who spends much of their life attending to everybody else, counselling can provide something quite different.
For fifty minutes, the attention is on you.
A space where you don’t have to perform
You do not have to arrive at counselling knowing exactly what you want to talk about.
You do not need to organise everything into a coherent story beforehand.
You do not even need to know precisely what is wrong.
Sometimes people begin counselling with little more than a sense that something isn’t quite right.
That is enough.
Person-centred counselling offers a confidential relationship in which we can begin exploring whatever feels important to you, at your pace.
Rogers believed that when a person experiences a relationship characterised by empathy, genuineness and acceptance, something important can happen. Rather than becoming dependent upon the counsellor’s answers, the person can gradually become more able to hear and trust their own experience.
In person-centred theory this connects with the idea of moving away from an external locus of evaluation, where our sense of what is right or acceptable is heavily influenced by the expectations and judgements of others, towards greater trust in our own internal experience.
That does not mean becoming selfish or disregarding other people.
It means that your experience gets a place in the conversation too.
You don’t have to wait until things fall apart
There can be a tendency to think counselling is something we should only consider when we can no longer cope.
I don’t believe it needs to be that way.
You can be functioning well and still be struggling.
You can love your family and still feel overwhelmed.
You can be successful at work and still experience anxiety or self-doubt.
You can be the person everybody relies upon and still sometimes need somewhere that you don’t have to be that person.
Seeking counselling does not require you to prove that things are “bad enough”.
Sometimes it begins with something much simpler:
I’d like somewhere I can talk honestly about how things are for me.
For people who spend much of their lives being available to everybody else, having that space can matter.
At Acoustic Counselling, I offer confidential, person-centred counselling for adults in Lancaster and online. If you’re considering counselling and would like to find out whether working together might feel right for you, you’re welcome to get in touch.