From Where I Sit

Did you ever think to yourself,… ‘one day I’ll do that’.

Well that day came for me and this blog is the result.

As a professional counsellor, I spend my day in conversation with people searching for ways to bring more happiness and contentment to their lives. At its most basic level, the counselling I do is about meeting with people to find out what is making them unhappy and then removing those barriers to happiness. My view is that happiness is not something that has to be built into life, instead what we need to do is stop doing those things that take us away from happiness.

Having sat with many hundreds of clients and thousands of conversations I have witnessed a great deal about what stands between people and a greater sense of happiness. While each person’s story is unique there are common themes that run throughout the lives of many people.

For a long time I have wanted to document and share what I, and the people I have met with, have learned. By documenting what they have learnt I wanted to honour and pay tribute to their hard work, and to celebrate their hard won gains. I wanted to share what they discovered. My guess is that they might want this too, and indeed some have captured their own stories here, in the Voices of Hope Project.

So what I hope you will get from reading this blog are ideas about how to increase happiness , how to put an end to the small and big things we do everyday that can take us away from happiness. This blog doesn’t promise happiness, (despite the practices of self-help books, it’s very unwise to make promises in this field of endeavour. I only hope that it might provide some new ideas, some new ways of thinking about life that perhaps you haven’t considered before. I would be satisfied if you come away with some new ideas or new approaches that open up possibilities.

But who am I to be writing this blog?

I work as a counsellor in private practice, and have done since 1996. My counselling website can be found here, which includes some detail on who I am here.

Aren’t your conversations with people private?

Absolutely, I never share what has been said to me in the counselling room without the consent of the person consulting me. What I am documenting here is not the individual stories of individual people but the collective wisdom and experience of many people.

This is a very important point. In writing this blog, I would not betray the confidence of people who consult me. Every professional counsellor knows that counselling does not work if there is no privacy and confidentiality.

Each entry in this blog represents a typical story of the sorts of issues that people face, while not representing any one person’s individual story. Even where a name is used in an entry, this is a fictional name, for a fictional person, and is used only to represent the ideas. No real names are used and no story belongs to one individual person (even if the story is written to suggests it does).

For instance, if an entry begins, ‘Susan came to me saying she was depressed…’, this doesn’t mean I am talking about an actual person called Susan. The ‘Susan’ from the story represents many people who struggled with the same issue. I cannot stress this strongly enough, no real names are used and no story represents one actual person, but many actual people.

So read on, and see if anything catches your attention. Not everything will be relevant to you, but you may find something that could make a difference. If not, then I still hope you find it an interesting read.

Right now, I’m just happy the idea …’one day I’ll do that’, has become a reality.

Note to current and past ‘clients’, If you are currently seeing me or have seen me in the past and read a story that seems to be your story, I urge you to keep in mind that you may have been one of many who came to me struggling with the same issue. If you still have concerns, contact me and I will be happy to chat with you about it and address your concerns.

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