Everyone’s different and your feelings ahead of your first counselling session may fluctuate from nerves to excitement to impatience to dread – and all of that is normal.
Some people feel nervous before their first session. Entering into a therapeutic relationship is a significant moment and it’s really common to feel apprehensive or excited. You might want to consider why you’re nervous – what are your feelings telling you? If you figure something out you might want to share this with your counsellor.
It’s worth remembering that your relationship with your counsellor is non-judgemental. That’s what it means when we talk about a ‘safe space’ – this is where you can share all the stuff you can’t or don’t want to talk to anyone else about, in complete confidence and with zero judgement.
If you’re having counselling, you may be addressing issues that are hard for you to talk about so you might even be dreading it a bit, even though you know that you need, and want, to do this work. It might reassure you to know that once you’re over the hurdle of the first one, it becomes easier and you’ll probably start to look forward to your sessions. Clients often say they’re ‘not very good at talking about things’ but suddenly 50 minutes has gone by and they’ve found they have rather a lot to say!
Often your first counselling session is a massive download of all the things on your mind. It might feel chaotic, like you’re jumping from subject to story to memory and back again, but that’s all completely fine. It’s like you’re holding a huge bag full of stuff, you bring it to counselling and start by tipping its contents all over the floor – and everything goes everywhere. This is completely normal. Once the bag is empty, we can start examining the contents (but it might take more than one session to empty the bag so we can start sorting through it).
Usually people feel better for getting it all ‘out there’; there’s a sense of relief, a lessening of emotional pressure, a lightening. It can also feel heavy when you realise what you’ve been carrying and the effort it has been taking to hold yourself up. You may feel very tired.
Whatever happens in your first session, just make sure you give yourself some time and space immediately afterwards to centre yourself and ‘return to the world’. You may find that lots of thoughts and feelings crop up after the first session as you start to unpack all the things you had stored away, so make sure you take very good care and be really kind to yourself while you’re going through this process.