Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost (Some Are Just Overthinking).

When I first announced, somewhat naively, that I wanted to be a counsellor there were mixed reactions. There was excitement. There was concern. Someone corrected me and asked, did I in fact mean a psychologist? (Let’s not get started on that.)

I was told that I’d be good at it. I even had someone laugh and suggest I couldn’t stay quiet long enough for a client to talk to me.
Needless to say, it wasn’t the overwhelming sense of excitement and encouragement I may have hoped for.

That was about five years ago now and the path from a hopeful, nervous wee student Clare waiting outside the college to begin her first class, to the hopeful, nervous Clare spending far too bloody long clicking on stuff and shouting at technology, moving things around on and editing websites at four in the funking morning, fuelled purely by caffeine and spite, has been one of the most nerve-wracking, exciting, frustrating, emotional, and uncomfortable journeys of self discovery I never imagined.

I embarked on my counselling journey to learn how to help other people, to help them understand themselves, only to discover that focus is seriously turned inwards.

Discovering patterns. “Shoulds.” Realising where expectations come from, where that inner voice comes from, and why the bloody thing doesn’t shut up when I’m trying to sleep.
Which on more than one occasion has led to me sitting up in bed and exclaiming a few words I won’t repeat here along with:

“So THAT’S why I’m like that!”

There were a lot of lectures that led to me over-analysing things, although if I’m honest I have always done that to myself. One thought led to another, and before you knew it I’d fallen down a rabbit hole of memories, thoughts and feelings I thought long forgotten, and I was painstakingly unravelling them all trying to make sense of things.

I believe at one point “I’m rabbit-holing again” became a phrase myself and another student began to use.

(Sounds quite rude now written out!)

And somewhere along the way, I started to notice just how much noise many of us are carrying.
Once you start to notice the “shoulds”, the expectations and the voices around us saying what we ought to be doing, and how to do it, it becomes very difficult to un-notice them.

Sometimes those voices and what they say echo inside our heads for so long and so loudly that it really does feel almost impossible to separate them from our own.
They develop into a constant white noise that can at times seem overwhelming, and it refuses to offer up anything helpful, with just the odd sinister whisper:

Not like that.
You’re doing it wrong.
You should have done this by now.
Well, if they can manage, why can’t you?

And then there are the ones telling you:

Perhaps you can.
Maybe it doesn't have to be perfect.
You don’t know if you don’t try.
Perhaps it's worth finding out what happens if you take the next step.

The hardest part of all the studying, lectures, homework and assignments wasn't necessarily the work itself. I found it was continuing despite the self-doubt and learning to recognise that not every thought deserves to be treated as a fact, and learning to question some of the things I had accepted about myself as truths.

And, occasionally, learning that the answer to feeling overwhelmed isn't necessarily to open another seventeen browser tabs…. Although I remain unconvinced on that one to be honest.

Someone in my class once compared holding down a full time job with our studying, college days, assignments, placements etc with “spinning plates.”
I couldn’t agree more with that, even if it did feel like some of my plates were on fire.

There were late nights, too much caffeine (though I would debate whether that is really possible) about thirty tabs open, music coming from somewhere blending with whatever earworm was driving me mad at the time, and the peculiar experience of having one part of my brain working on something while another part has apparently wandered off to investigate something completely unrelated.

I certainly didn't do this alone. There were tutors, my fellow students, placement supervisors, friends, family, and people who encouraged me when I needed it. There were also people who challenged me, frustrated me, made me question things, and occasionally made me want to launch my laptop out of a window or lie in a dark room for a while.

All of them, in one way or another, became part of the journey.

Perhaps that's one of the things I have come to appreciate most through training - we don't necessarily need someone to tell us where to go. Sometimes we just need somewhere safe to stop for a while, take a breather and have a look at it all, and work out what comes next.

That might well be what actually brings someone to counselling - 

Sometimes there is no big crisis or event where we can say, “I need help with this!”
It's simply the feeling something isn't quite right.

Sometimes it's being overwhelmed by all the thoughts, expectations and “shoulds” and not knowing which ones actually belong to you.

Sometimes it's wanting to make a change but not knowing where to begin, or sometimes, you might just be completely bloody exhausted from trying to hold all the plates up at once and don’t think you even had a fire extinguisher to start with and what IS that music in your head from…

You don't need to have everything worked out before you take that first step, and maybe that's the thing about beginnings.

They don't always feel like beginnings when you're standing in them.

Sometimes they just feel like one small step.

And sometimes, you only realise how far you've travelled when you finally stop and look back.


“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step into the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

J.R.R Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings
(Specifically recalled by Frodo, in The Fellowship of the Ring.)

Image shows a Level 4 Diploma in Therapeutic Counselling Certificate