The Rocky Road to Recovery
It can be heart-breaking for clients to have experienced some progress only to suffer a setback. Hope is shattered and it feels so hard to keep going. This blog explores the concept of ‘recovery’ and helps prepare clients for a possible rocky road along the way.
Expectations of improvement
‘Recovery’, ‘progress’, ‘getting better’ or wanting to be ‘fixed’ are common conversations in the counselling room - as they should be. It is natural and understandable that clients want to see and feel improvement; often the states they are living in are distressing, exhausting, empty, or sad.
Improvement is also something I want to see in my clients and it’s what I’m always working towards, but it isn’t necessarily straightforward, and certainly not easy. It is a process of exploring emotions, thoughts, situations, experiences and it is a process of understanding and self-awareness.
As a client, it is important to think about your expectation of ‘recovery’ when you embark on your counselling journey - and your counsellor will help you to do this. When I’m in a session with a new client and their aim is “to feel better”, I will ask, “how will your life be different when you are feeling better?”, or, “what does feeling better look like to you?” Answers to these questions are wide-ranging. If a client says, “I never want to feel lonely/sad/angry/depressed/anxious again”, this expectation needs managing. We need to be realistic and acknowldge that there will undoubtedly be times in the future that you may feel sad or anxious, but the key difference should be that you will feel capable to be resilient at those times.
Versions of feeling better
‘Recovery’, or whatever name we want to give it, will be different for each client. For one, it may be feeling ready to confront someone at work. For another, it may be having better self-care. For others, it may be feeling more able to relax or having more self-confidence etc. etc. It is necessary to work out, up front, what your expectations are of the therapy and of yourself. The saying, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’ sounds flippant here, but it is applicable to the therapy process.
If you feel sad and tearful most days, it is not reasonable to expect that you will feel happy every day after a few sessions of therapy. Your expectation has to be relative and realistic. While we may be optimistic that improvement will be felt, if we are not realistic about the process towards that, clients may feel that they’re failing or making no change. Change can be so subtle and incremental, and one of the important parts of therapy is your therapist reflecting back to you the changes he/she/they see in you.
During the process of counselling sessions, something may occur that causes you to feel that you’ve had a setback or aren’t progressing. These are important feelings to bring to your counsellor. When this happens, I talk about the context. Just because something difficult has happened, doesn’t mean any progress felt to this point just disappears! Learning is still there, and guess what - the client has noticed something feels difficult where before they may not have. Or, the client feels open enough to bring this to therapy, where before they may not have. There will be something positive to find. It is all recovery, even the ‘downs’.
Facing setbacks
When clients suffer setbacks, it can feel so devastating. What they thought they were achieving feels lost. This is where I really want to reassure you. All is not lost. I know from my own therapy that it can feel so difficult to keep going and to keep attending sessions and to keep doing the hard work. When you feel “back to square one”, or like “nothing’s changing”, a therapist will help you to see how, for each new bump along the way, you will be dealing with it or processing it in a slightly different way than you have before.
It is often a certain trigger, situation or exchange with another person that brings back difficult feelings and reactions. Clients might stop looking after themselves as well as they had been, even if this was just one new behaviour, such as getting into a sleep routine. This is what we need to notice together. What was it that made you feel worse? When we know more, we can explore what went on more fully and look out for it in future. All of these conversations help you to understand yourself better and your self-awareness improves the next time a difficult situation arises.
Would I love a magic wand?
On one hand, yes, of course I would! On the other hand, no way. I sometimes find myself saying to clients at the start of therapy that I don’t have a magic wand. I do this because it is important that clients are accountable to themselves and take responsibility for themselves and work towards their ‘recovery’. If I had a magic wand, clients wouldn’t get to understand themselves better and find ways of looking after themselves better. They would lose their sense of autonomy.
Counselling is not often a very quick fix and progress is rarely smooth, I’m sorry to say. Sometimes it can be and that is fantastic, but this is based on a lot of variables; the issue the client comes with, how ready the client is to take responsibility, the support clients’ have around them, and other factors.
Making change
More understanding and self-awareness is positive and it is progress, even if not much behavioural change has taken place yet.
At times, because the additional understanding and self-awareness that you have is new, you may not always be able to make use of it. It might feel fragile. New behaviours take time and practice to become more concrete. This is ok. Well, maybe not ideal, but we can understand why it is difficult each time to put your new learning in place. Again, self-compassion is required here towards your effort to keep trying.
In summary…
Life has its ups and downs; we need to expect this. Even when we have done such hard work on ourselves and have new understanding, self-awareness and feel that we’ve progressed, life can still be bumpy. This is natural but how we learn to cope with the downs will become better each time. This is resilience – how we bounce back from difficult experiences.
So, while the road may not be smooth at times, it is valuable to hold some hope and faith that the work you are doing in counselling is setting you up to deal with the bumps along the way better each time.