My gratitude as a counsellor

My career has been an extraordinary gift. It has given me purpose and a deep sense of fulfillment. I know I have helped clients grow because they have told me so, and this never fails to bolster my spirits. With that in mind, I thought I would share some ways my clients inspire my gratitude for this work and my desire to continue it.

First, I am grateful for the opportunity to practice empathy, which is how I learn the most from my clients. When I can enter another person’s frame of reference and dissolve or contain all my projections, it is like the emotional equivalent of proper musical tuning. When disparate, antagonistic sounds align, they soften and become transparent, revealing space and structure greater than them that coalesce into Being. So it is with emotions. Empathy feels like spacious interpersonal harmony. It is music to the ears of the heart.

In fact, empathy feels like more than that. It feels magical, perhaps because it is so rare yet transformative to experience empathy’s harmony of personalities of differing pitch and timbre. When I see clients as they are and not how I am, they know they matter to me, whatever pitch or timbre they may be. And once people matter, miracles are possible! Because of empathy, my clients open me to broader humanity and the truth it contains. In this way, my clients help to grow my understanding, compassion and curiosity for this troubled yet hopeful world.

I am grateful for my clients’ receptivity to my skills. When they are discouraged, I can motivate them by calling upon their strengths. When they feel lost or overwhelmed, I can help deepen their understanding of their situation by exploring their emotional process or pointing out the influence of systems that may have profoundly shaped their lives. I can also use my tone and body language to help foster connection and safety.

Finally, and perhaps most of all, I am grateful for my clients’ trust. With every session, the realization continues to thrive inside me of what a privilege it is to witness the oft-hidden struggles of others. It is a privilege, always, to meet my clients’ struggles with tenderness, affirm their values and dreams, and ultimately witness the mastery of their struggles- or even their attempt, which is itself noble and worthwhile. And above all, when each such encounter is complete, I’m grateful to have been moved, inspired, and therefore changed, by the experience my clients have given me.