Helpers as Counselors

Helping seems to be in our DNA -- a part of what it is to be human. Counselors help in a specialized way, attempting to help a person learn about his or her hidden life -- an "inreach" -- offering to be included in what otherwise might remain private, intensely personal, and perhaps intensely painful.

The counseling room is designed to be a safe place in which one may discover and study and understand the complicated or confusing pieces of one's own life. It is an ever changing landscape in which counselor and client are constantly exploring new territory, organizing the findings and creating new perspectives of their inner world. Counseling is a process of guiding and supporting a companion's process of self exploration, self discovery and self reorientation.

Safety and trust are the essential elements of the terrain of a counselor;s room. They are the shelters under which one encounters the parts of their soul which have been hidden by coping methods and self protection for months, years or decades.

Courageous clients walk through the story of their lives, counselor at their side, sharing not only their experience by how their experience has shaped how they perceive themselves and others. The guide, having traveled similar roads with others, is sure footed and provides a sense of "knowing" where the client has been and how they have come to be where they are. He marks the important turns and confusing twists in the trail, sharing the unique discoveries made by his companion with alternating joy and horror as each new thought and feeling is revealed and understood.

While they walk together the client feels more understood and also better understands themselves. Counseling assists people to see life from a new vantage point from which they live out their dreams and goals. They reinterpret their experiences and develop new, more positive feelings about themselves. Change occurs as their inner world becomes comfortable territory, perhaps for the first time.