Find meaning to your experience

To find a meaning to experience can help us grow in confidence, self-insight and in our capacity to relate. This is a potential contribution from the counselling process by being able to reflect on experience with another person. The experience may be a specific traumatic event, recent or historical. It may be a purely internal experience or a very real external experience. It may just be the daily grind of life which you seem to experience differently to those around you. Counselling deals not only with conscious experience but also the experience of the unconscious. All those things which go on at the back of our minds may need to find a place and meaning of their own because they affect our experience of people, events, thoughts and actions. So, in counselling you may be working at more than one level; with the things you know about and those things which you half-know or aren't even aware of. It may be possible that new meanings are made by weaving these various levels together through the process of regular sessions, listening, reflecting back and occasionally looking at the material from another point of view.