Getting Counselling

I have always quite liked the idea of having counselling. Basing my knowledge entirely on American TV shows it seems quite a common thing to do over there. They all talk about discussing things with their therapist, even Emily Gilmore has a therapist. So when stuff started getting serious I contacted Bupa (my work pay for Bupa which is really fortunate). Although I have plenty of people to talk things over with they are of course heavily biased towards me and it is hard to know how objective they are being, and indeed whether their advice is actually going to help me move on or in fact stay in an angry place.

So I booked in with Rita. I like Rita, i’ll guess she is in her 60s and she told me that when she had her second baby her husband used her maternity pay that she was going to buy a pram with on stuff for himself and from then on she knew the relationship wasn’t going to work (seriously though, what a knob. The more people I talk to the more I realise the shocking abundance of knobs there are in the world). We have an hour a week, I do sometimes get carried away and just sit down and rant the whole hour about everything that has pissed me off lately. She politely said that while that is totally ok and my choice, it probably won’t help me move forward – fair point Rita.

So anyway she did help me see that my husband and I are fundamentally different people which has helped me make sense of the break up. She also keeps telling me that I am grieving, I think it is really helpful to talk about divorce in terms of grief and loss rather than heartache. For me a big part of the hurt is the loss of the life I thought we would have together. You can’t just ignore grief you have to work through it and process it even if it is really shit. But it is also really important not to be perpetually grieving. It’s ok to get upset but you can’t let it become a habit, every now and then you need to shake yourself down and say that’s it for today. Knowing that you have that counselling session booked in feels like a weight off your mind in a way. Sometimes I think i’ll forget about that today, i’ll wait until tomorrow and talk to Rita rather than dwelling on it now.

It is interesting how many people have told me they have had counselling, on the whole most people are really positive about it. I think everyone could benefit from counselling during hard times it is just a case of finding the right person for you to open up to. I’m definitely glad I did anyway.