One thing I’ve noticed about being a beginning therapist is that it’s tempting to think about treatment plans in terms of recipes. You add a dash of this, season it with that and top it off with a cognitive-behavioral exercise (and a healthy pinch of mindfulness) then mix it all up and wait expectantly for the client to respond just like the research-based treatment says s/he should. Only that’s not how the world works. Treatment plans are not recipes and clients are not their diagnoses.

But to be a newbie counselor is to want clear answers and one of the big learning curves for most of us in practicum and internship is to discover that you can’t drop your client into a computer program and get a nice, neat treatment plan out the other end. (Actually I hear there are a couple of computer programs that do this but you know what I think of that? I think that’s gonna be some lousy therapy.)

As I wrote in a previous entry (that I’m too lazy to go link to so just trust me that I wrote it), when I feel anxious to DO SOMETHING with a client, it usually means I need to stop and do nothing. It usually means that I need to figure out what’s making me anxious and usually what’s making me anxious is the client’s anxiety. S/he wants answers, s/he wants to feel better and s/he is looking at me to make that happen. Only I can’t make my clients do or feel anything; only they can. When I’m operating from a place of anxiety I forget that.

Where is my island?

I remember when I first went to therapy myself. I was 18 and miserable and I expected to walk out of that very first session much improved. I expected therapy to be magic, I guess. Of course it doesn’t work that way and therapy takes a lot of work and sometimes you leave a session feeling worse than you did when you went in because it’s a process, not a quick fix. Still, I always thought my wonderful, kind and insightful therapist was a little big magical because no matter how hard I was working she remained loving and calm, like a safe island in my own personal tumultuous sea.

So I knew this from my own experience but I certainly had my therapist up on a pedestal. I realized somewhere during my first or second semester of school that I was still harboring this secret hope that at some point — maybe around the time of my class on diagnosis — I was going to get some of those magic and mysterious powers that she seemed to have that would allow me to fix people who were broken as easily as she seemed to fix me. Really, I knew better. But I so benefited from my own counseling that a wee hidden part of myself still kind of thought it was magic.

Well, I am sorry to tell you that there is not even a touch of Hogwarts in the community counseling program and that what we’re learning, while fascinating, is not a bit magical. Nope, instead we’re learning some basic counseling skills (critical thinking, empathy, how to listen, how to convey that you’re listening, etc.) and some basic counseling knowledge (theories, what the research says, what it doesn’t say, where to get more info) and we are practicing, practicing, practicing to trust that when we master the skills and use the knowledge that we will be able to help our clients help themselves.

That means not letting the client’s anxiety futz up the calm you’ve got going on in your head because if you’re catching their anxiety then not only are you not going to be able to be a calm island, but you’re probably going to leap to an intervention in a desperate attempt to do something, anything, whether or not that intervention is what the client needs. (When I say intervention, I mean grabbing, say, a worksheet to fill out or an exercise to do or homework to give.) It’s not the intervention that’s necessarily the issue; the problem is that we newbie counselors are sometimes using them as crutches because it’s kind of scary to sit there and do nothing even when nothing is exactly what we’re supposed to do. (And when I say nothing, I don’t mean NOTHING exactly because to sit with a client who is crying and to be an accepting, loving presence who is willing to give him/her space to cry without trying to stop his/her tears with empty comfort or advice is doing something and the fact that it’s so hard to do is proof of that.)

Sometimes counseling does feel magical. Sometimes when I’m meeting with a client and I’m really hearing him/her and I am fully present in the session, it feels like when I’m on a writing tear that works. It feels exactly the same way. (And I’ll tell you, I am loving counseling the way that I love writing.) And I know that writing is about skill and practice and OK, some talent but not as much as the skill and practice part so I trust that counseling is that way, too, which has demystified it for me and let me start having fun with it even when it’s hard.