I believe that trust is earned in counselling and it’s my job as a therapist to help you feel safe. It’s a precious honour to be trusted enough to witness what is often incredibly hard to tell. Secrets that sometimes have been kept for a lifetime, sometimes feelings or thoughts or things that have happened to us that we have never dared to tell. Stories about ourselves and our lives that on telling can sometimes open doors onto often unbearable feelings.  I know this as I’ve invested heavily in trying to tell and make sense of my own story. Life experience tells me it’s a rare thing to find someone to trust enough with your story even in a professional setting. There’s wisdom in being careful who we open up to as once we share something we lose control of it, it’s out there in someone else’s keeping. We need to be sure what’s going to happen to the story. We need to be sure that the person who is receiving the story can hold the space and treat the story teller and the story with love, honour and respect.

I personally feel strongly that the story has a life of its own and it belongs to the teller. It stays in the counselling space where the teller has felt safe enough to share. The teller deserves ownership of if, when or where that story is retold.

I was recently on a training course where I heard a psychologist share a very personal client story to an audience of hundreds. The story had been anonymised  but it jarred at the time and  I left the course wondering what was then going to happen to the information I’d shared about myself as I’d dared to take part in the personal development exercises.

I must have heard stories into the thousands in the time I have worked as a therapist or been part of a group. They must in some way shape me like the sea must over time smooth a rock. They are part of me and I carry them with love and respect often remembering the story before the teller. I keep them safe.