Getting Started
“What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.” Hecato
Welcome to Wayfarers Counseling. Counseling is a journey of self discovery and growth, motivated by the drive in all beings to heal from injury, to thrive, and to live in a self-directed way. A clinician helps facilitate the healing journey, by providing safety, confidentiality, and support. The resources required for healing, however, already exist within each person.
For most people, emotional pain is not constant—and life’s daily demands can make it easy to put off taking care of issues that never resolve or go away. If you have ever had a small sliver of glass stuck in your foot, you will recall that if you are not putting pressure on your foot there is no pain. However, the second you put your foot down, there is an immediate and sharp pain, your foot saying “ouch!”.
This is how I think of emotional pain—something people may learn to manage by not putting pressure on the “tender spots”, where the emotional glass is embedded. Many who end up in counseling have spent years minimizing and/or denying their pain, even when they know that they are languishing, failing to thrive, or self-destructing. Addictions to substances, food, work, sex, gambling, exercise, and so on often play a role in supporting the avoidance.
Years can pass like this, and those tender spots of pain and hurt grow bigger and demand increasing amounts of energy to manage. This is when the cut foot becomes infected, and hurts all the time, even when there is not pressure on it. In real life, for people who have emotional traumas or issues from the past, what this means is that the intensity of the pain demands action. This can be terrifying for people, as their fortresses start to crumble, but at last, it is also when self-discovery and healing can finally begin.
In therapy, as clients become more clear on who they are, they also learn to tune into their own wisdom and to trust their judgment. Discovering who one is translates into the capacity for healthy self-leadership. To me, this is one of the most important things that can happen through the course of a therapy process.
As the wonderful Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh said in his book “Peace Is Every Step”, “a psychotherapist has to give birth to the psychotherapist within his patient.”
In this way, through the pain of deep therapy work, light and hope is restored. I have seen this happen many times over, and so am always deeply optimistic and hopeful, no matter what someone has been through in their lives.