I have been super open about my experience with counseling on Life with EMM because I think it’s beneficial for everyone to be comfortable speaking about hard things and work past the stigma surrounding mental health. In this post, I want to go over some of the main lessons I learned in my first year of therapy. Although everyone has an extremely different journey with counseling, I think a lot of these lessons will speak to you!
Most of our internal struggles are based in self-love and self-worth
My favorite counselor really focuses on this statement throughout her sessions. In her experience, almost all things that shake us do so because we are not on stable enough ground with ourselves. For example, you might become super insecure, anxious and default to an extremely negative self-talk pattern if your boss gives you less than perfect feedback on a project. This belief states that you feel this way because you do not have enough self-worth to know you are worthy even when you face criticism.
The same can be said for self-love. You may think you need to lose 15 pounds to truly love yourself and be happy with who you are. If this is true for you, consider spending some time working on self-love and self-worth practices. Ultimately, you may always want to change something about your body and this thinking will not go away even when you lose the 15 pounds. An exercise my counselor always suggests, is writing one positive thing about yourself, whether it’s about your body, personality, or something kind you did, every single day. This will help you to focus on what you are versus what you think you lack. It may feel impossible to come up with something at first, but stick to it and you will absolutely see improvements in your feelings of self-love and self-worth.
Your emotions are valid
No matter what they are, no matter how different they are from people around you, no matter if you have ever felt that way before. What you feel is always valid. A lot of times the narrative we grow up with is that it is strong and brave to hide your emotions or ignore them to achieve a greater goal. So often, that sounds like, “others have it worse” or “focus on the positives, you should be grateful you still have…” That can be so problematic as it inherently teaches us to de-value our emotions. Eventually, this is not sustainable and not only do we then have emotions, but we also have guilt and shame attached to feeling those emotions.
The only way to un-learn this habit is to be mindful of it and practice honoring your emotions. In another article, I talk about the importance of giving yourself space and time to feel however you feel without judging yourself. Carve out time in your day to allow yourself to feel without trying to suppress the feelings. You can journal, talk to someone about it, just reflect about it, whatever fits best in the moment. Eventually, it will become easier for you to respect your own emotions, process them for yourself and then act on them in a productive way, rather than beating yourself up and deteriorating the self-worth you are working on building up!
You NEED to create boundaries
Struggling to create boundaries was one of the first reasons I really dove into counseling. At the time, I didn’t know my issue was creating boundaries, I just knew a lot of the relationships in my life were making me exhausted and upset and I felt empty for everything else in my life. While I was trying to fix and help and counsel everyone in my life, I was forgetting to take care of myself. I think this is so common, especially in girls because we love to be the best friend everyone goes to for advice. I still love being that person, but I had to stop being that person for a while- like a long while.
First, I had to understand that no one person was my project to “fix.” No one needs to be fixed. We are all figuring life out for ourselves and while we should absolutely lean on others for advice, it is still our own life to figure out. Learning this took so much pressure off my shoulders. I no longer felt responsible for saving everyone’s life. Though this may seem like a dramatic way of thinking now, it is absolutely how I felt! My counselor taught me about enmeshment. Enmeshment is a lack of boundaries between people who are close.
In order to be the friend everyone goes to for advice, you have to learn to separate your own feelings from the feelings of others. This is a part of creating boundaries. Remember that people treat you how you let them treat you, you are in complete control of setting up healthy relationships. Creating boundaries can start small like saying, “I’m sorry, I’m too busy today. Can we find a time to talk about this that works for both of us?” or “I’d love to help you with this but I have a bunch of important deadlines coming up, how about I reach out when I can really focus on helping?” That way, you are respecting your time as well as the person you care about helping. If someone gets mad at this, they may not be the kind of person you want in your life as they clearly do not respect your time like they do their own. I think there is a lot to unpack with boundaries, but I will definitely write more about it in the near future and link it here!
Generally speaking, counseling helps you to nurture and value yourself so that you can achieve all you want to and live your happiest life. I say literally everyday but I think everyone and anyone can benefit from counseling and your fears about it, while valid, should not hold you back from taking that leap!