Reflections of a Counseling Intern

I just completed my second semester as a counseling intern. Two down and one to go! I am so looking forward to graduating in August and becoming fully licensed.

During this semester I had a full caseload of 9-15 clients a week. These were children, adults, families, and couples. There were so many wonderful moments of healing, and also moments where all I could do is sit in the pain of others and communicate back that it is as real as it feels to them. And at the end of the day, so many wonderful experiences that have made me feel I am where I am meant to be. I wanted to take a moment to share the big themes I noticed, most of them cultural and social, that impact mental health on a larger scale.

Listening to our experience

One of the biggest themes I see across the board with poor mental health is that we often are extremely invalidating to our own experience. When something happens to us it’s rare for us to say “Oh it makes sense that I could be feeling this way because of _____ (fill in the blank).” We don’t look from a larger perspective and with understanding toward ourselves, which means that often what feelings come up seem disjointed- not connected to what we think is going on, and therefore we ignore it. We very easily gloss over what we have experienced in our lives and take ourselves for granted. We often try to see ourselves from the lens of others, typically others who (real or imagined) are very critical and afraid of us making mistakes. When we apply these voices toward our experience we are saying:

“Oh I shouldn’t be feeling this way. I don’t know why I’m feeling this way because nothing really happened to me and it doesn’t matter how I feel. None of what I’ve gone through is that big of a deal. Other people have it worse than me.” etc, etc.

Why invalidating our own experience has such a big impact is that you are cutting yourself off from very important information as well as subconsciously communicating to yourself over and over that you don’t matter. I imagine us on some level deciding it is just too inconvenient to be a human and deal with all this stuff- and the more we turn away from it, the bigger and scarier it seems.

Sensations in our body, thoughts, and feelings are like little signals- no, they are not the ultimate truth, but paying attention and getting curious about them gives us information about our world and how to navigate it. And it’s only when we see ourselves as worthy of having our own subjective truth and how our own experience can matter, that we can truly engage with the world.

Trusting ourselves is scary

So yes, the opinions and criticisms of others we tend to internalize which becomes our way of interpreting the world and our place in it. These stories get imbedded and have a hay day attacking the most vulnerable parts of us, leaving us feeling worthless, depleted, insecure. It is my personal and professional opinion that many mental health symptoms arise from poor understanding of ourselves, a poor relationship with the “self.” We base our reactions off habits built on fear and not reality. A therapist and/or a lot of internal reflection can help you identify where you are letting these beliefs get in. Once you identify them you can start to build yourself up. But it takes practice.

One of the obstacles of this is that we fear if we peel back the layers, we’re scared at the core we’re not good people, and we don’t know how to make good decisions. We don’t trust ourselves. I have even been asked, isn’t it risky for me as a counselor to tell people to listen first to their own opinion before they let in the opinions of others? Couldn’t someone use it incorrectly if I teach them how to listen to their own internal experience? What if they are bad? And this is the cyclical trap.

In every psychology book and research article I have read over the last 10+ years, in my 7 years of education, in my last year of direct client contact as a counseling intern, and in my personal experience, I strongly believe that people are inherently good with bad habits. Humans desire connection, love, and understanding and the thing that gets in the way and leads us to develop unhealthy patterns of behavior, unhealthy beliefs, and end up hurting others- is pain. The more that people get away from the the good stuff, the more the cycle continues. This is why a lot of mental health symptoms is are called “mal-adaptive.” Individuals adapt in a negative way- typically in response to their environment which was incredibly painful, and they go on to find relationships that repeat this pattern.

“The quality of human life on our planet is nothing more than the sum total of our daily interactions with one another.”
–Desmond Tutu, The Book of Forgiving

Making sense of our world, creating our own story

The thing about pain is that we really just don’t know what to do with it, how to make sense of it, how to just let it be there. When we experience something we don’t understand our brains create a story to control the fear- which is where magical thinking comes from in children, superstitions in adults, etc. You could also call it ignorance, the blissful state where we all begin. We can hold onto these stories that don’t look at the whole picture for a long time, especially the stories that mean to protect ourselves from a much scarier truth. Examples of scarier truths are that bad things happen to good people, or that our caregivers were unreliable. Our brain is always looking for the “why” and if it’s too painful, it will often come up with another version of what happened that makes it our fault.

Suffering keeps us living small, grasping at temporary solutions, using the wrong medicine (drugs, codependency, escapism) to treat our emotional wounds, staying scared of others, being indifferent and perceiving the world as indifferent. Social connections are the source of our pain and they’re also the source of our healing. There is no life free from pain but we can reduce our suffering by being more understanding of ourselves and paying attention to ourselves when we get one of those thought or feeling signals. I think the more we avoid them the more it shows up in our lives by being reactive, and we end up hurting others.

“We can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is … not to try to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already”
– Pema Chödrön

How we treat ourselves really, really matters.

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Written by Kate Buckner, LPC Intern