You may come into counselling with an idea of how you're supposed to do therapy.
Maybe you think you should know what you want to talk about before the session starts, answer questions thoughtfully, have insights, remember what we talked about last time, and leave with something meaningful to work on. You may even have an idea of what progress is supposed to look like, especially if you’ve seen someone online talk about setting boundaries, recognizing a pattern, having a breakthrough, or reaching a point where something finally stopped bothering them.
Then your own counselling feels much messier. You spend half the session talking about something you didn’t expect to bring up. I ask a question and you have no idea how to answer it. You change the subject without realizing it. A topic we thought was important turns out not to be where the conversation needs to go at all.
That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing counselling wrong. There isn’t one correct way to do therapy, and you don’t need to know how therapy is supposed to work before you come in. I know how to do therapy. Part of my job is to bring that knowledge into the room, pay attention to what’s happening between us, and make decisions about how I can be useful.
It can be easy to start people pleasing in the counselling room
People pleasing can show up in therapy. You may find yourself trying to give me the answer you think I’m looking for, agreeing with something because it sounds reasonable, or wanting me to know that you really are trying.
Sometimes I’ll offer a thought and and the client agrees with it very quickly, and as we keep talking it becomes clearer that the client's answer is actually, "No, that isn’t quite it". Counselling is collaborative, but collaboration doesn’t mean agreeing with your counsellor or figuring out how to make the session go well. I can carry my part of the process. You don’t need to anticipate what I want from you.
You may not immediately know what you need instead, either. Sometimes you can tell me clearly that you want more structure, more time to think, a more direct question, or some practical help alongside the emotional work. Other times all you know is that something in the session isn’t quite landing. That’s still information I can use. Remember, you’re allowed to learn what you need from counselling while you’re actually doing counselling.
Your counselling doesn’t need to look like someone else’s counselling
I think social media can make this especially confusing. There’s a lot of therapy language online now, and some of it can be genuinely useful, but seeing the finished version of someone else’s insight is very different from being in the middle of your own counselling.
You may hear someone say they learned to set boundaries and wonder why you’re still trying to figure out what a boundary would even look like in a particular relationship. Someone else may describe understanding exactly why they behave a certain way while you’re still saying, "I don’t know. Something about how I acted just feels off".
That’s not a lesser version of counselling, and you're not doing therapy worse that than someone else. Your work may move slowly in one area and surprisingly quickly in another. You may circle around the same question several times before you know what you think, or discover six months later that a conversation in session you barely noticed at the time was more important than you realized.
Trusting the process of your own counselling journey is important.
You can trust the process and still have input into what’s happening
When I talk about trusting the counselling process, I don’t mean assuming that whatever technique, topic, or direction I suggest in counselling must be helpful just because I’m the therapist.
My knowing how to do therapy doesn’t mean I know your experience better than you do. You can question something I suggest, tell me you don’t understand where I’m going, decide an idea doesn’t fit, or bring us back to a topic we left twenty minutes ago because you’ve just realized that was actually the important part.
I bring training, experience, clinical judgement, recommendations, and responsibility for paying attention to what may be useful. You bring your experience of actually living your life, including what fits, what doesn’t, what matters to you, and what you notice as we work together.
For me, trusting the process is closer to allowing some uncertainty about where a conversation or session has to end up. We can start somewhere without already knowing exactly where we’re going. Sometimes we come to understand something while we’re talking about it. Sometimes the useful part of a session isn’t a conclusion at all; it’s finally being able to name the question we need to keep working with.
You’re allowed to have your own pace
Counselling doesn’t need to produce a breakthrough every week. There may be sessions where something shifts noticeably and others that feel quieter. There may be things you understand intellectually long before they feel different in your life, or parts of something you’re ready to work with while other parts need more time.
That doesn’t mean we never look at whether counselling is helping. We should. But "Is this counselling useful to me?" is a different question from "Am I progressing the way I’m 'supposed' to?"
If you find yourself wondering whether you’re doing counselling correctly, that question itself may be worth bringing into the room. We can look at what you think you’re supposed to be doing, where those expectations came from, and what happens when your actual experience doesn’t match them. Sometimes there’ll be something genuinely useful to change, and sometimes part of the work is letting go of a version of counselling you thought you were supposed to have.
Your counselling doesn’t need to follow someone else’s script. It gets to be your own work, with room for us to figure some of it out as we go.
This blog shares general information and is not counselling or psychotherapy.
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