How Can Counselling Help With Major Life Transitions?
Everyone encounters major transitions during their lives. Events like bereavement, getting married, having children, changing jobs, and moving house can be challenging to deal with, as it can feel like your world is being uprooted. Dealing with these transitions is not easy, especially if you are alone. The stress that builds from these events can, if left unchecked, mushroom into deeper mental issues, which is why counselling in Blackfriars and online can be extremely helpful.
In this blog post, then, we will explore the different ways in which counselling helps with major life transitions.
- Normalise Your Emotions
Whether you experience a positive major life transition (marriage, having children, etc.) or a negative major life transition (bereavement, divorce, etc.), you are expected to feel a certain way by friends, family, and society in general. However, emotions are far more complicated than that. You may, for example, feel extremely depressed and anxious ahead of getting married, or perhaps extremely angry, or numb, after losing a family member. We all react differently to certain situations, and often in unexpected ways; sometimes this can be hard for loved ones to understand.
By seeing a counsellor in Blackfriars or online, you have a friendly, confidential space in which to explore these emotions and have them understood, validated and contextualised by a neutral professional. I will help you realise that your emotions are completely normal, whatever they may be, and give you the space to process them in a healthy way. - Avoid Unhealthy Coping Mechanism
After a major life transition, it is common for people to develop damaging coping mechanisms - particularly when they have to deal with the event on their own. Feelings of overwhelming stress or panic can culminate in abandoning important daily habits, not eating well, or perhaps resorting to drink and drugs, which in turn can cause deeper problems. Counselling in Blackfriars or online allows you to become aware of these unhealthy responses to feelings of stress and, through working closely with your counsellor, develop positive coping mechanisms that don’t reinforce your suffering. - Make a Plan
Change is scary because of the uncertainty it brings. Nobody likes to feel like they don’t have control over a situation. It is, after all, difficult to know how something like having a child or moving house will impact your life and relationships. Such unknown variables will lead to your brain naturally defaulting to a negative bias as a way of protecting itself.
To help you move past this state of fear and negativity, your counsellor in Blackfriars or online will work alongside you to develop a tangible plan for dealing with your given major life transition. By formulating a clear roadmap for dealing with the issue at hand, the major life transition goes from being a large and unknown prospect to a manageable set of actions that you can visualise, thereby reducing stress levels.
Are you experiencing a major life transition and want to talk it through with a counsellor in Blackfriars or online? If so, get in touch to arrange an initial meeting.
How Can Transpersonal Psychotherapy Help Me?
We all experience seismic personal events during our lives. This could be a bereavement, for example, or losing a job following many years of secure employment. Moments like these shake up our entire world, and cause us to grapple with questions of meaning. We are naturally drawn to wonder about our purpose, about identifying the precise meaning that lies behind our struggle.
In such instances, seeking counselling or psychotherapy online or in Blackfriars feels like a natural reaction. But why?
We see therapists and other professionals as a source of concrete answers and solutions - a particularly comforting notion in moments of crisis. We value certainty in uncertain times. Counselling or psychotherapy is essentially seen as an external means through which to address an internal problem. The answers, we think, come from the outside.
Transpersonal and spiritual psychotherapy, on the other hand, teaches the exact opposite: to move past difficult life events and complex emotions by developing an enhanced understanding of oneself. In other words, transpersonal therapy states that personal growth comes from looking inwardly, not outwardly.
By working with a professional in a private, welcoming environment, you can reconnect with a deeper and more enduring essential self that exists beyond your conditioned ego. Coming back into contact with ‘the real you’ allows for problems in your life - from relationships to social anxiety to addiction - to be viewed in a more understanding, compassionate light, thereby reducing the power they have over your daily behaviours and modes of thinking.
The conditioned, egoic mind is developed as a natural defence mechanism in early age, but in later life, and particularly during difficult times, this perspective leads to unnecessary levels of suffering and a loss of meaning in life, due to that disconnection with our authentic self.
Transpersonal psychotherapy - through a series of techniques such as meditation, hypnosis, breathwork, and dreamwork - reduces the impact the egoic mind plays in how we feel about the world. Doing this kind of work diminishes our attachment to irrational, negative thoughts that weigh us down and reinforce suffering, and allows us to feel freer in our decision- making, more connected to other people, and more grounded in our sense of being.
No matter how much pain you are in, the answers - or, more accurately, that sense of inner peace you have lost in response to difficult events - remain inside of you, and can be accessed at any moment. Moving past the baggage of the egoic mind and towards something closer to preternatural consciousness is extremely difficult, but seeing a transpersonal psychotherapist is the first and most important step of that journey.
If you are experiencing problems with sexual diversity, depression, anxiety or bereavement, and require transpersonal psychotherapy to make sense of your issues, don’t hesitate to get in touch with Stephen Weaver for online counselling, psychotherapy and supervision.
