Why Counseling Helped (But Wasn't Enough)

The limits of awareness without deeper connection

The year 2017 was a major turning point in my life. Much of the unresolved trauma from my earlier years and how I had been coping with it came crashing down all around me. Unfortunately, as it often does, others close to me were heavily affected. It was a dark year for me as I barely kept afloat in the sea of awareness all around me.

Thankfully, I immediately started meeting with a counselor. This was helpful because I was finally able to speak out loud to someone who seemed to understand what I was going through and was not judgmental. I recognized that I was paying him for his time, but regardless, I felt relief in being able to be seen by someone and not be shamed for what they saw.

I enjoyed counseling so much that I went twice a week at times for two-hour sessions. The counselor was a 1.5-hour drive in each direction, so it was quite a time commitment. I was committed to identifying how I got to where I was and how to never get there again.

After almost two years of meeting with the counselor, we had identified where things started and how I got to where I was. He was a Christian counselor, so we often spent time in the Bible looking at what it had to say about how I was feeling. It was valuable time spent, and I was growing.

I realized that I was getting to a place where I had all the awareness I needed of why things happened but still no understanding of what to do about it. This is where a counselor relationship might need to turn to something more like a life coach. I wasn't aware that is what I needed at the time. I just knew I was tired of digging and that it was time to start building.

Honestly, I didn't feel any real healing during that time. Counseling was valuable to me because I was able to speak out loud about things I had never let out before, and if I tried to make an excuse, my counselor was quick to call me out on it rather than letting me pass the blame on something else or trying to make him feel sorry for me as if I was the victim.

I didn't have anyone in my life who was paying close enough attention to me to call me out on anything. I can't completely recall all of the expectations I put on counseling at the time, but I do know that I was expecting it to fix me, and it didn't.

At first it made me more aware of my brokenness and how much of my past I allowed to define me. It gave me somewhere else to point the finger other than at me, which is what I had always done. I didn't want to point the finger at others. My counselor didn't encourage me to do that, reminding me at times that people only know what they know in the moment and that we can't be upset at people for making decisions based on what they knew at the time; I had been doing the same myself.

There are a lot of great insights I got out of counseling. I was extremely lucky to get a great counselor on my first attempt. I am not sure I would have tried a second time had he not been exactly what I needed at that time.

Where I failed in some ways was putting what I knew I needed to do into practice. He encouraged me to create some deep friendships, and I was unable to make that happen. I now have deeper friendships than I ever have had in the past, but not the type of connection he was recommending.

Honestly, I am not sure you can create those relationships these days. We are all far too busy and perhaps even too self-conscious and scared to be that known by anyone. It gets harder to create deep friendships as we get older. I have some of the most kind and interesting friends and am truly blessed to have them in my life. I know a lot about them and they know a lot about me, but I am aware that there is a depth that we are nowhere close to in truly knowing each other, and I am okay with that.

Though I don't want to believe it, perhaps these days it takes a paid relationship to get the depth one needs to make real change in his or her life, though that depth would likely only be one way. I recognize that being known is not enough. We are created to know and to be known by others. I don't have a solve for this yet.

For now, I do my best to show up for my friends and be the kind of friend that I want. I am not that great at it. I kept all relationships completely siloed from what was going on in my heart for the first 38 years of my life. I've been learning what being a friend actually looks like.

Last year I read the book "Made for People," which put words to what I knew was possible in a friendship. The term "covenant friendship," characterized by the relationship between David and Jonathan in the Bible, is the example for what I desire to build the friendships I have into.

Counseling and therapy could only take me so far because it was never meant to replace the power of covenant friendship grounded in truth. That is the ultimate goal and where healing becomes realized.

What are you expecting counseling or therapy to fix that might actually require deeper relationships?