Patience

 

This I heard from a talk.

Patience tends to connote a negative experience, something to endure, something to persevere while it lasts. It suggests waiting for the unpleasantness to end. Yet true patience is about accepting the experience, seeing it as it is, as part and parcel of life It is recognizing the mind's aversion and instead of thinking about having to "put up" with the situation, realize that things don't always turn out as we want them to be. That's reality.

So my encounters with a counselee calls for a lot of "patience". Initially she often gave last minute notice to cancel her appointments. Gradually she requested for more frequent sessions occasionally calling in between sessions when she was anxious over something. She wasn't making much progress plagued by low self esteem. Her living circumstances seem to be dire too and made it challenging for her to move on. For awhile 'we' seemed to be stagnating and I felt I couldn't help her much. It reached a point when I honestly wasn't looking forward to meet her.

Then I remembered a supervisor's advice that a counsellor is not expected to rescue the client but rather to guide them and much depends on their will to change. So I adopted an attitude of just doing my best and going with the flow. I decided to let her experience her own healing journey.

Counselling sessions can really be very unpredictable. Some days you prepare mentally to use certain strategies and it turns out that the client has other needs, throwing all your planning out of the window. So at the most recent session with the above client, I embraced myself to encounter her in an ultra distraught state as she had called a week earlier to share a stressful situation. Well to my utter surprise she was very eager to share what she called a "breakthrough" in that she was able to overcome her anxieties over the traumatic event in a more equanimous manner. She talked about how she has processed some of the strategies we had discussed in earlier sessions.

I guess this is what they called 'planting the seeds' and leaving them to grow in their own time.