As I look back on 20 years of counseling people and helping them with their lives, I feel so much joy and purpose and fulfillment. And that’s what I want for my clients too—to feel like they’re living lives full of meaning. So often they come to me because they feel the exact opposite of that. They’re asking existential questions like:
What’s the point?”
Why am I here?
Why does anything even matter?
What is the meaning of life?
Life does have a point. It does matter. I’m here to help them see that. If I had to sum up my goal as a counselor in one sentence, it would be this: I want to help people know the truth about themselves and the world around them.
How It All Started
From as far back as I can remember, when I was a little girl, I used to line up my dolls in my bedroom. I had a “counseling office,” and I would sit the dolls in front of me and help them. I always spent more time with the ones who had nappy hair or crazy, floppy arms, because I thought they had more issues. At that point, that was the only defining way I could evaluate people, based on how they looked. If a doll looked like a mess, that doll got more attention.
From early on, I was a person set in the world to help people. As I grew older, I don’t know that I thought being a therapist was a realistic option. I just knew I wanted to help people. So I became a social worker and worked at a homeless shelter for four years doing case management. Honestly, we threw a lot of money and resources at people that didn’t really help. Their issues were a lot bigger than we could resolve. The recidivism rate was high. It was really discouraging.
I decided I really wanted to go back to school and become a therapist. I felt like people had issues inside, and all the things we could do for the outside weren’t going to fix them. I was interested in the inside-out work. I finished grad school in 2000 and started a private practice in 2002. And, for the past 20 years, I have been helping people with their internal worlds in order to help their external worlds work better.
A Crisis of Meaning
A lot of people I work with are having an existential crisis, a crisis of meaning. People don’t know what the point is. Why am I here? What am I doing here? Why do I keep breathing and showing up in the world? It’s a crisis of existence.
Part of what shaped my interest in existentialism was reading Victor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, years ago. Victor Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist who was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust. He survived, but none of his family did. He lost his wife and kids. But he somehow came out of that horror writing a book about how to get perspective.
One of his most famous quotes says: “There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help us to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is meaning in our lives.”
He was able to survive the horrific things that happened in the camp, because he could find meaning in the suffering. He believed there was going to be a better life ahead. Being able to help people find meaning in the worst situations and give them a vision of a better life ahead is why I’m here.
Getting to Know Yourself
One of the most important things I do is help my clients become experts on themselves. I want them to develop curiosity and some interest in figuring themselves out. How do they tick? What goes on in their minds, in their world? What’s happening up in there?
A lot of people just have no awareness of how their mind works, or how to control it, or what their values and beliefs even are. As they sit with me in my office, I’m providing a venue for them to discuss that, to figure it out, to sort out all of that. I’m helping them discover a direction and momentum toward something else.
It’s pretty exciting work. I’m not going to lie. It’s the best. Some days I go into work thinking, “Let’s go!” I’ll even go into the waiting room sometimes and say, “Let’s go!” I want people to feel expectant and hopeful. I want them to have a sense that we’re doing something here. We’re doing big work in this hour. This is life-changing work that they can take with them and give to everybody else. It’s meaningful. It matters.
Building a Relationship of Trust
In the mental health world, there’s a term called therapeutic alliance. In its simplest form, it’s a positive bond between a therapist and her client. As a counselor, I have to be believable. My client has to feel that I’m trustworthy, that I’m only ever going to tell them the truth. Trust is the most critical component to someone wanting to do the work with you. It’s the only way we can move forward together and accomplish positive change with a client’s mental health.
Fear is not helpful. People being scared or uncomfortable is not helpful. They need to feel safe with me, feel at home in my office. Like I mentioned at the beginning of the post, my goal as a counselor is to help people know the truth about themselves and the world around them. So, when I’m thinking about getting people to their truth about themselves and the world around them—which is different for everybody—then I’ve got to set the foundation for that. That foundation is our relationship. And a sense of hopefulness that things can get better, that we can figure this out together.
I’m grateful for hundreds of clients over 20 years (and 30,000+ hours) who have believed in me and trusted me to take them forward into a better future.
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Stay tuned for Part 2 {add link} where I’ll talk about:
How I help clients go from revolving to evolving.
Why I encourage my clients to take risks.
How I help clients construct their internal world in a better way.
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