Counselor, Heal Thyself

If you are working in the helping professions, as a psychologist, social worker, advisor, support mentor, minister or spiritual counselor, you cannot afford to let your negative emotions overcome you and dictate your actions and reactions. As someone who is there to help others deal with their emotions and situations, you must be able to practice what you preach and walk your talk; you must be able to effectively deal with your own emotions and challenging situations. You are the example that you want your clients to emulate. If you, yourself, have trouble with emotions and situations, then how can you effectively help others with same?

I cannot tell you right now what your upset is about and how to heal it within yourself. I cannot tell you right now how to effectively help your client. I can only suggest that you work on yourself.

It isn’t about trying to change the other person. It isn’t about talking to friends about what happened to try to get validation for your fears, angers and false viewpoints, or for your accurate viewpoints.

It is about taking the focus off of them and focusing on your own reactions. Counselors have a strong tendency to think that they are really together and are never wrong about anyone or anything. If the counselor reacts emotionally to someone, or to a client, they tend to blame the client or that other person, thinking to themselves that this person is psychologically unbalanced and that they, the expert on human behavior, need to straighten this person out. Counselors often need to look at themselves and their own emotions and perceptions to make sure that they, themselves, are not out of balance or giving wrong advice. And really, they also need to avoid giving a lot of advice and just gently guide clients into having their own insights and realizations and making their own mature decisions.

And, in my opinion, ministers and spiritual counselors should be advising their clients to pray, and pray with them, and suggest that they make contact with God and Jesus directly to receive answers, insights and guidance. This is the best way, although you could still give them some advice or feedback. However, your main focus should be supportiveness, compassion, kindness and love, guiding them into God's help and guidance. You have to be the good example for them, too; and so if you are not spiritually strong and praying, and if you have trouble contacting God and Jesus for guidance and insights, then you need to work on yourself so that you can better help your clients.

Social workers should guide their clients into optimistic thoughts and expectations, determination, positive focus, goal-setting, and building their self-confidence; and also give referrals and suggested courses of action, as needed, while being a loving and kind support system for them. If allowed in the particular workplace, they should also be giving clients some sort of spiritual guidance, if it seems needed and appropriate. Unfortunately, most social workers spend most of their time just helping their clients financially and with needed items and resources. They may try to help them to find employment, adequate child care, transportation and other needed services, but usually counseling of any kind tends to take the back seat.

As a social worker, have you ever had any direct experience and healing, yourself, in the areas of poverty and struggle, and gotten back on your feet again? Or is it all just about what you have studied in school about social work? If it is just book learning, it may be difficult for you to fully understand everything that your clients are dealing with and their emotional reactions to it all.

You may have taken many classes in psychology, or ministry, or social work, and you know all about the causes of various emotions and problems between people. You know about how to properly relate to emotions, conflicts and life challenges because you have studied this for years. However, are you able to put into practice in yourself and in your life all that you have learned about in school? Are you able to do what you are teaching others to do? Are you able to effectively counsel yourself, as well as others, and solve your own problems? You are the guide for your clients, but your goal is to get them to a point where they are able to counsel themselves and follow their own guidance regarding how to solve life’s challenges. You must have done this yourself so that you can know how to get them to that point of self-sufficiency. Some psychologists make the mistake of thinking that because they have a degree and have studied so much about psychology that they are then qualified to help others; but book learning is only half of it. You must become emotionally mature yourself, and this takes going through life experiences while working on your own emotional reactions. Book learning just isn't enough.

Most people, including the counselors and teachers, experience times in life when they are feeling emotional, confused and upset, and when challenges arrive in relationships, friendships, workplace interactions, finances, health, etc. None of us are perfect and feeling balanced all of the time. But as a counselor, you need to be able to balance yourself out within those challenges and emotional reactions, and you need to be able to do this rather quickly. It will not work out too well if your client says or does something that throws you into an emotional tizzy and you are not able to deal with your emotions quickly and be able to focus on ways to help your client.

Or, let's say you run into an emotional reaction with a coworker at the clinic where you work. In a work situation, you will need to develop the ability to balance yourself out quickly so that you can continue working through the rest of the day effectively and unemotionally, and so that you are able to continue to interact with that coworker without carrying a lot of old emotional baggage into those interactions. It is better to feel those feelings and process through them instead of just stuffing your emotions into your cells. Stuffing emotions creates aches and pains; and if you do it enough times, this can create actual illnesses, or at the very least, frequent states of fatigue and other physical symptoms.

In any difficult emotional situations, you will gradually become able to balance yourself out more and more quickly. It may take many years of therapy and self-therapy to be able to clear yourself really fast, but it is worth working towards this goal.

You, the counselor, already know what is required, but please don't make the mistake of thinking you have always got it all together and that you don't need to work on what your patients need to work on. Everyone, even psychologists, social workers and ministers, have emotions, have inner and outer conflicts, and need either some therapy or self-therapy. No one is totally immune to hurt, sadness, grief, shock, anger or guilt. We all experience these feelings at one time or another. It is how we learn to deal with these feelings that's important. It's like when a minister tells you that God didn't promise us we wouldn't ever experience trouble or pain, but God did promise us He'd be there with us helping us deal with it. It is how we deal with and react to challenges and pain that is the key. Pain and challenges build our inner strength, our character, our wisdom and our spiritual faith and grow us psychologically and spiritually. And negative emotions warn us, protect us, grow us and transform us. Without emotions, we wouldn't know that anything was wrong and needed to be addressed.

It will usually help if you can go off somewhere by yourself and work it out alone. If you have really worked it all out, then you will be experiencing feelings of relief, freedom and peace, and you will be feeling well and unemotional. The fear will be gone because you saw it was just old irrational fears. The anger will be gone because you healed the fears behind it and saw it all very clearly and what to do about it. The confusion will be gone because you got clarity on what it was all about, why it happened, why you reacted, and what you can now do about it.

When you are feeling overly emotional, in hurt, fear, and/or anger, you are most likely focusing on the other person who did something to you that hurt you. If you want to resolve this issue, you will need to first balance yourself out emotionally. Continuing to focus on the other person's abusiveness, misinterpretations or shortcomings will not balance you out and nothing will get resolved. You must take your focus off ot the person who hurt you and put your focus on yourself. Your first priority is to heal your emotional reactions. To do that, you will need to see what it is about within you. Once you see what it is about within you, then you can release your own emotional reactions. Once that happens, insights and guidance begin to flow. You suddenly feel like a mature adult and not like a hurting, self-pitying child. You suddenly begin to feel much better. Then you can decide whether you should confront the person and talk it out, whether or not you should share your emotional reactions with that person, and what to say and what to do.

You can never solve anything by focusing on the other person and their issues, problems and reactions. Criticizing them won't help you. It will probably just make you feel worse and will probably exacerbate the whole problem.

Why do we have emotions of hurt, sadness, fear, and anger? At a certain point, I realized that God gave us emotions as warning signals that something was wrong and that abuse was present. But later, I realized it's not quite as simple as all that. Often, there really isn't abuse present, and we just think that the person is being abusive, but they really are not; and when we confront them about what we are thinking and feeling and a discussion ensues, we will find out that we just misperceived that person and what they said and did.

Other times, we may be way overreacting to someone because what they said or did reminded us of something or someone in our past. If we go off alone somewhere and process through our emotions, we may find out that we projected that past situation and person onto this current situation and person and that we reacted to something that wasn't what it seemed to be.

Other times, our emotions may be out of sympathy and compassion for another person's suffering, or we are empathically actually feeling their feelings.

Sometimes, the other person is not intentionally being unfair or abusive and is just misperceiving us and the whole situation. Maybe they don't have all of the information needed and are jumping to conclusions about us and our actions, and we feel unfairly accused. This could possibly be easily resolved simply by unemotionally and maturely giving them the missing information, without defensiveness or judgment of them.

Maybe the other person is overreacting due to their own past issues and experiences and projecting that old stuff onto you through misperceptions and judgments of you. Then you react to that, feeling falsely accused and attacked.

Then, other times, the other person really is being abusive, doing it on purpose, and is always like this. In that case, release the emotional baggage from your past and past abusive people, including family members, and then resolve to get yourself out of this person's space and life and to never recreate such a person in your life.

Then, there are those emotions which spring up out of our desire to judge, criticize, be self-righteous and feel superior. Whether we are right or wrong about that person isn't the issue. The issue is, why do we feel we must attack them in our minds, with our words or with gossip? Why not just take your focus off of other people's trips and let them be whatever they want to be? You can't change them. Only they, or God, can change themselves, and they certainly aren't going to change just because you criticized them or tried to psychoanalyze them. When you are in judgment and criticalness, this creates negative emotions within yourself. You start to feel angry. Anger and criticalness hurts you. It takes you off of your inner balance. It pulls you away from feelings of love, peace and joy. This type of judgmental anger does nothing good for you or for the other person. It solves nothing. It may make you feel superior to others so that you don't feel so insecure yourself, thus giving you a temporary sense of security, but that's no way to feel secure, and you know it. Just live and let live. Forgive a hundredfold. Pray for that person to be healed and then let God work on them.

When someone does something to you that elicits an emotional reaction in you, please do not attack them back. This resolves nothing and often worsens the situation, plus it makes you feel even worse, ultimately, even though it may have given you a temporary lift. You are angry because you feel they unjustly did something to you that hurt you, or because you feel falsely perceived or accused by them. But you can reach a point in life where those types of things don't cause you to feel hurt or angry and you feel no need to lash out at them because of it. It just washes off of you and you can see that it's just their problem, they are mistaken about you, and then you forgive them, you pray for them to be healed, and you just walk away from them, and you don't keep them in your life.

I'm going to give you an example of how you can "process through" emotional reactions and balance yourself out. One time I overly reacted emotionally to something my boss had said to me. Rather than telling my boss I was angry and why, or telling my boss I was feeling emotionally upset, or trying to work it all out initially, I felt guided to put off any conversations about the issue and go off by myself to try to balance myself out first. It took me at least half an hour to get myself together, but I did get myself together. First, I prayed to God for help with it. Then, because I had prayed, some insights and feelings came up that I needed to examine. I found deeper issues that had nothing to do with that initial conversation and its related emotions. I found fears I didn't know I still had. I saw what I was really reacting to beneath the surface situation. I then saw things from my past that I had mixed into the current fears and situation. I feared it would all happen again with this person. I realized then what was really happening with me. I allowed myself to feel my emotions and see those pictures from my past that were attached to it, I cried a little, released it, saw the truth that set me free from it, saw that I was reading a lot into it that might not even be there, and then I balanced out. I went back into the office, ready to talk about the situation if necessary. My boss called me into her office, and it seemed we were both more balanced now and we had a very nice conversation that straightened it all out beautifully. We didn't need to talk about any emotional reactions. We just discussed it unemotionally like mature adults, without any past baggage or childlike hurts, and it worked out just fine. After that, I felt this sense of power, peace and freedom, and I knew something deep within me had finally been healed and released from me and my life. I suddenly saw how different I was now and how much I had grown. In the past, i could never have done that. In the past, I was too hung up on fears of rejection and loss, too attached to people, still holding onto past emotions. This time was diferent. After years of going through challenges and trying to come to terms with my past, I had finally reached this point of emotional maturity. At the time I was going through this particularly painful experience, I was wishing fervently that I didn't have to go through it and feel such pain. But later, I was so glad for that painful experience and how it grew me past something, and I knew that someday I might share this experience with others who might benefit from it, too.

Also, remember that your clients need your love, understanding, compassion, kindness and forgiveness -- even when they are doing something rude or inappropriate, even when they are lashing out at you. You have to be able to handle your own emotional reactions and judgments regarding what they do with you and with others, and then not judge them. Do not criticize and put down your clients. Forgive them, for they know not what they do. Be patient with them, and give them time to grow and change. Pray for them, and pray for yourself to be able to effectively help them. Support them and continue to help them, for as long as they are choosing to receive growth and help from you, for as long as they are showing potential for and desire for change.

If you feel you cannot walk your talk and be a good example to your clients; if you feel like your book knowledge is not enough to help you or your clients; then be gentle on yourself, love yourself anyway, and begin to work on yourself.

You may need to find a role model/counselor for yourself; and, if you are Christian, I would suggest praying to God for help with this, and praying frequently. Spend quiet times alone with God; stop your repetitive thoughts and worries; connect to love, faith, positive thoughts and forgiveness; and then wait to receive insights and solutions.

Be willing to cry if you feel like crying, as crying was given to us by God as a release mechanism. Once you have cried, it becomes much easier to receive insights and guidance and be less emotional. If you just keep crying and don’t balance out, then you’ll need a counselor who works with emotional release to help you through whatever the problem is.

Don't worry, you will reach a higher level of emotional maturity and become the great example that you want to be to your clients. You are already ahead of the game, with all of the knowledge and wisdom you have gained so far. You may just need to go a little deeper and focus a little bit more on your own issues.