8 Ways to Maximize Your Counselling Experience

Seeing a counsellor or psychologist is a foreign, and unique experience for most of us. For many of us, we may be the first person in our family to ever experience a formal counselling session.

Here at Masters Counselling Calgary, we’ve compiled some thoughts on how you can get the most out of your counselling experience:

Tip 1: Find the right counsellor

Finding the right counsellor or psychologist for you, is critical to the success of your counselling experience. Here are a few things to look for when selecting a psychologist:

First and foremost, just like any other professional, they need to be qualified and experienced. Ensure that they have received training (most likely a minimum of a masters degree in Psychology) and are certified with a governing body like the College of Alberta Psychologists (CAP) for Calgary Psychologists or Canadian Professional Counsellors Association (CPCA) for Calgary Counsellors.

The next thing to consider is, do they offer support in the area that you are looking for? For example, if you are looking for marriage help, does the counsellor you are looking at support marriages as part of their practice?

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, consider whether or not you feel comfortable with them. You are likely going to delve into deep topics, so you want to ensure that you feel comfortable with that individual. It will take a few sessions to get to that place of comfort, but often you can also tell pretty quickly if you don’t think you’ll ever feel comfortable with a particular counsellor. And that is ok! Just make sure to try and find someone different, that you do feel comfortable with.

Tip 2: Come with humility

This is probably the most important tip of them all! The greatest hurdle that most people hit that prevents breakthroughs in counselling, and in life generally, is pride! Pride tells us we’re fine, we don’t need help, we can figure it out on our own.

Approaching counselling with humility is critical to receiving wisdom and being willing to be guided by the counsellor. There may be times in session where you’ll feel like you know what the issue is and what needs to happen, but humility allows the door to be opened for new revelation and new awareness that can lead to breakthroughs.

Humility allows us to come into counselling willing to learn and see our circumstances from a new light.

Tip 3: Recognize counselling takes time and patience

For many of us, when we get sick, our doctors prescribe a medication that we take, and in most cases, we start to feel better almost immediately. Many of us take this same approach to mental health: “I feel depressed, my counsellor will help me, and after the first session (or soon afterwards), I won’t be depressed”.

Unfortunately, counselling is not like that: it’s not a quick-fix, it’s not an Advil for psychological issues. It takes time, effort and patience to see the breakthrough!

Counselling is more like piano lessons or gym training: There are re-occurring meetings (or sessions) often with homework and practice in-between.

In counselling, each session will typically have a few take-aways: something to practice, or something to ponder and consider for the next session. We’ll dig into this on Tip 5,6, and 7.

Tip 4: Have a general idea of what you’d like to talk about

Coming into your first session with a general idea of what you are wanting to talk about will help guide the counsellor in terms of where you’d like to go. Ultimately, the session is for your benefit and you can decide where you want to go and what you’d like to work on.

Here are a series of questions that you can ask yourself to help frame the first conversation:

• What led me to want to seek counselling?
  
• What feelings or emotions am I currently struggling with?
  
• What action(s) do I continue to do that I wish I didn’t do?

Tip 5: Find time to review and process your past session

There is often a lot of information, wisdom, feelings and thoughts to digest from every session. To get the most out of your future sessions, find time(s) to review what happened in the last session.

If it helps, take notes in the session to help you do this more effectively.

When you are taking time to reflect, try and remove all distractions and ask yourself some of the following questions:

• What topics did we discuss in the last session?
• How did I feel as that topic was being discussed? (Happiness, sadness, aggravation, fear)
• Why was I feeling that emotion?
• What about the session left me confused?
• How did I feel leaving the session? Note this down and share it with your counsellor at the next session.

Tip 6: Find relevant material to read in between Counselling sessions

As we discussed in tip 3, Counselling can take time and effort.

Oftentimes, the more work and time you put in, in-between sessions, the more wisdom and awareness you’ll have in subsequent meetings.

Find material that helps you be introspective on how you feel or how you think. Ask your counsellor what would be beneficial reading material for you and the topics you are discussing.

Tip 7: Keep an emotions/feeling journal

As we briefly touched on in the previous tip, many of us will go throughout our day ‘responding’ to emotional triggers we aren’t even aware of. Many of us have become so accustomed to these feelings and responses that we no longer even recognize them. To help yourself, and your counsellor identify the triggers, try to log your emotional responses and what happened leading up to that response.

Some emotions journal examples:

• My child didn’t listen to me yesterday and I got really angry with him. (emotion: Anger, Trigger: Child not listening)
• My spouse ignored me and I got upset (emotion: Not feeling valued, Trigger: My spouse ignoring me)

Tip 8: Be Courageous

Ultimately, you determine the speed and journey of your counselling process. If you want to see a breakthrough in a relatively short timeframe, it takes courage and vulnerability! It can be scary to admit to some of the things we don’t want to tell anyone.

The sooner and quicker that you get to that place of vulnerability, likely the sooner you will start to see breakthrough.