Have you ever had a client come to one or two sessions and then disappear?
Most counsellors have. And if you're anything like I was, you've probably found yourself replaying the sessions afterwards, wondering what happened. Did you miss something? Could you have said something differently? Was there anything you could have done to help them stay?
This week's blog explores something that completely changed the way I think about those clients who never come back. It started with an experience I had in my twenties, and years later, I realised I'd been looking at it all wrong.
I wonder if you have too...
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One of the first questions I ask when I'm working with a counsellor is, 'What is your why?'
I'm trying to understand what sits underneath the ‘I want to help people’. I want to know what compelled you invest years of your life, a huge amount of money and more emotional energy than most people will ever realise into becoming a counsellor? What is it that makes this work so important to you?
I’ve been updating my About page and I realised it was time to ask myself that question.
Now, if you've heard me talk about About pages before, you'll know they're not really about you, listing your qualifications or telling your life story. Their job is to help the person reading to decide whether you're someone they could imagine talking to. They're about giving people a sense of who you are, how you work and whether you might be the right counsellor for them.
So as I was rewriting mine, I found myself thinking about what is MY why?
- What was the thing I wanted somebody reading that page to understand about me?
- Why have I spent all these years talking about blogs, websites, homepages and marketing?
- What is it that's kept me so interested in this work for so long?
And the more I reflected on it, the more I kept thinking about an experience that happened when I was in my early twenties.
My experience of stopping counselling
I was going through a really difficult time (again!) and decided to have some counselling. I couldn't afford to pay privately, so I was allocated a counsellor.
He was an older counsellor, professional and a little bit tweedy, and therein lies the problem. He reminded me so much of my dad... or maybe even my grandad... that I just couldn't relax.
I found myself holding things back because I was worried he'd judge me. I was a troubled twenty-something young woman getting into scrapes, and the things I most needed to talk about were the very things I couldn't bring myself to say to him. So I went through the motions for a couple of sessions and then stopped going.
At the time, I didn't think, 'Maybe he wasn't the right counsellor for me.' I just thought counselling wasn't for me. I thought I couldn't be helped, that I was simply too broken, that no one would ever understand.
Looking back now, with the benefit of hindsight (and fourteen years working as a counsellor myself), I see it completely differently.
I don't look back and think counselling failed me, and I certainly don't think I'd been given a bad counsellor. In fact, he may have been exactly the right counsellor for somebody else. He simply wasn't the right counsellor for me at that stage in my life.
Because when you're looking for a counsellor for the first time, you have no idea that different counsellors can feel completely different. You don't know that one person might make it easy to open up while another, through no fault of their own, never quite feels like the person you can trust with the most vulnerable parts of yourself. You don't know that the relationship itself is such an important part of the process.
All you know is how it feels to sit in that room.
Why some people stop going to counselling
Recently I was reading a discussion on social media that really brought this home. One counsellor mentioned that a new client had told them ‘their previous experience of counselling had put them off trying again’. The comments quickly filled with other counsellors saying they'd heard similar things, or that clients had told them they'd almost given up on counselling altogether because of a previous experience.
How sad is that?
Reading those comments made me wonder how many people never make it to that next counsellor. How many walk away believing counselling doesn't work, or that they're simply beyond help, when the real problem was that the fit wasn't right?
It wasn't until I became a counsellor myself that I saw the other side of that experience.
Because yes, we all want to help people, but it's more than that, isn't it?
There is something incredibly rewarding about seeing someone have one of those 'a-ha' moments. You can almost see the pieces falling into place. They leave the room standing a little taller than when they came in, and you spend the rest of the day with a smile on your face. It gives you a real boost. It quietens that inner critic we all have and reminds you why you chose this profession in the first place. It sends you home feeling that you've spent your day doing something that really mattered.
But there were also times when it didn't happen.
I saw that sometimes, despite both of us trying our best, it just didn't click. It wasn't because they were a bad client, and it wasn't because I was a bad counsellor. We simply weren't right for each other.
At the time, though, I didn't always see it like that.
Why Clients and Counsellors Both Lose Confidence
When a client stopped coming, I wondered what I'd done wrong.
Had I said the wrong thing? Had I missed something important? Could I have helped them more? (Does that sound familiar?)
Looking back now, I can see that the client and the counsellor often leave exactly the same experience carrying very different worries.
The client may go home thinking, 'Counselling isn't for me.' Or worse, 'I'm beyond help.'
The counsellor may go home thinking, ' I'm not good enough.'
Neither of them is questioning the relationship. They're questioning themselves.
To me, that's heartbreaking.
Because sometimes the counselling wasn't the problem at all. The counsellor wasn't the problem either. It was simply that the fit between them wasn't right.
Why the Right Counsellor Matters
When the fit is right, everything changes.
As I explored my own 'why', I realised why I care so much about the words counsellors use.
For years, I thought I simply loved the creativity of marketing (which I do). I loved untangling websites, helping counsellors explain what they do and finding the words that had been sitting just out of reach.
Now I realise it goes much deeper than that.
Whenever I sit down with a counsellor to work on their homepage, yes, I'm thinking about them. I want them to feel proud of their website. I want them to feel more confident talking about what they do. I want them to have a thriving private practice filled with the kind of clients they genuinely love working with.
But they're not the only person I'm thinking about.
Somewhere in the back of my mind is a younger version of me. A frightened young woman in her twenties, sitting at home in pain and confusion and wondering where to go for help. Full of fear and anxiety, having been criticised for so much of my life and wondering if anyone would take me seriously. Wondering if I'd be judged for the choices I'd made. Wondering who I could trust. Worried I wouldn't know what to say, or wondering whether I was simply beyond help and whether counselling would even work for me.
I know that feeling because I was that person.
And I know that, right now, there are people sitting at home asking themselves exactly the same questions.
That's who I'm thinking about when we work together. I want to make it so that person who's full of pain and confusion feels safe enough to reach out.
Because if the right person finds the right counsellor, everything that happens afterwards has a much better chance of changing their life:
The client gets the support they need from someone who feels right for them:
The counsellor gets to do the work they're passionate about with the people they're genuinely well placed to support. They build a private practice they're proud of, one that feels rewarding both professionally and financially, rather than constantly worrying where the next enquiry is coming from or whether they'll earn enough to cover the bills.
And I get to know that, in some small way, I've helped make that happen. I've helped one person find the support they needed and another build the kind of practice they dreamed of when they first decided to become a counsellor.
That's what makes this work so meaningful to me.
And that is my 'why'.
Maybe that's why I've become so passionate about helping counsellors find the right words, because I know what it's like to be the person desperately hoping to find someone who understands. And I know what it's like to be the counsellor hoping the right people will find them. If I can help those two people meet, then I feel as though I'm doing exactly what I was meant to do.
That's why I created Write Your Homepage
That's why I created Write Your Homepage.
Of course, we'll write your homepage together, but what we're really doing is so much more than that.
We'll explore who you're best placed to work with, what they're hoping to find when they arrive on your website and how to explain what you do in a way that sounds like you. Together, we'll create a homepage that reflects who you really are and helps the right people recognise that they've found someone they can imagine talking to.
Because that's what I believe a good homepage does. It isn't there to persuade people or convince them to choose you. It's there to help them make one of the most important decisions they'll ever make with a little more confidence.
And if that means one less person walks away believing they're beyond help, one more counsellor gets to experience the joy of seeing a client have that 'a-ha' moment, and one more life changes because the right two people found each other, then every conversation I've ever had about websites, blogs and marketing has been worth it.
And that makes me a happy bunny!
