As a counselor it’s so much easier to look at other people’s lives and make suggestions, guide them, and counsel them. It’s so much more difficult to look at myself and my own life and know how to navigate the things that I never learned how to recognize, cope with and work through when growing up.

While counseling is an emotional journey, I do not have any control of what my clients choose and how they choose to do it. My time with clients is impermanent. I will be with them for a short time in their life journey. I only hope that I have shared with them enough tools and they have been able to process and recover enough so they can thrive until they get to the next stop where they survive until they learn to thrive once again. We’re all mostly thriving and then surviving then thriving and the cycle continues throughout the life span.

I remember my counselor, Pat, when I was 14. I thought she was absolutely perfect and had it all together. Her daughter went to high school with my sister and was pretty and popular. Pat’s husband owned a local family business and they were what I perceived as “rich”. Pat was pretty and gentle, soft spoken, and listened a little too well, mostly not saying much at all. Pat was my first female counselor and what I didn’t realize at the time was that it wasn’t that Pat was perfect, it was that I needed a female counselor because I wasn’t comfortable talking to a male counselor from ages 11 to 14. I also didn’t realize, until I became a counselor myself, how many people think that counselors have everything together. The truth is -> WE DON’T -> we’re still trying to figure out how to thrive and survive outside of the womb, too.

I have been in and out of counseling from the age of 11 and I’m still going. I will always go to counseling because every day I learn something new about myself, and it’s not usually something that’s delightful, however instead it’s something I needed to know to continue evolving as a human.

I usually learn from something I’ve done to traumatize my now 24 year old daughter. She’ll tell me a struggle she’s having and in the past I have not responded well. I’ve only recently realized how defensive I get because my daughter is the ONLY person in the whole world that I would care if she rejected me. That’s a great fear of mine because I have rejection/abandonment trauma. I also start to reject myself when she’s struggling because of – yep, you guessed it -> trauma! My own unhealed trauma has traumatized my daughter. Some people call it generational trauma, generational curses, whatever label you want to slap on it. It’s there and it will exist until we choose to try to stop the cycle from continuing.

The other day I recognized how much I was suppressing. Here all of these years I thought I was doing so well. Nope. I’ve been suppressing. Trauma recovering (unfortunately we don’t escape life without trauma) is a cycle of starting at the top and peeling back layers at different times in our lives until we die. It’s a lifelong experience and while I am better at it today than I was 30 years ago, 40 years ago, or 50 years ago, I’m still learning and I’m still evolving because counselors are human, too.