A month of settling

Reflections on November 2022, seven weeks into my weekly sessions with a counsellor helping me to loosen my grip on everything that's happened.

This was written in November 2022

November was a month of settling into the dark afternoons and dark mornings. Settling into coats, hats and scarves. Settling into the rhythm of talking to a counsellor once a week

It’s been a month of letting thoughts and ideas gently drift and settle somewhere in and around me. Every Monday for the past seven weeks I’ve sat down with a counsellor and over the course of an hour we’ve talked. I’ve talked, she’s listened. She’s talked and I’ve listened. I can’t say that I look forward to the sessions exactly, but they’re part and parcel of my Monday now. I do feel better, clearer as I put my coat back on and walk home through town, and I know I’m feeling the benefit.

I can’t be too specific about what that benefit is yet because the conversations are leading me to rethink and reframe how I view myself and my life experiences. It feels a little like throwing the Christmas tree lights into the air and naively hoping they’ll land perfectly unravelled, but the reality instead is that you have to still unpick, unwind and unkink them, and even then, they probably won’t lie just the way you want.

But let’s just say that there are some recurring themes. Take my leaky boundaries (actually, don’t take them, come and help me fill them in) and what prompts me to self-sabotage them. The way I squish and squash myself into ever smaller corners, making my needs subservient to other peoples, leaving me feeling cross and resentful mostly with myself, because I feel invisible and unseen - again.

How ‘and this too shall pass’ has taken on greater meaning as I explore my relationship with my emotions, learning that they are temporary. That they don’t define me. That the sad, angry and cross emotions, can be just as fleeting as the happy, joyous and carefree. Understanding that I don’t need to absorb other people’s emotions and add them to mine.

Despite, in spite of all this confusion of thoughts and feelings, I can feel the glimmers of hope and light. I can feel something small but significant, buried deep within me shift.

I feel better able to navigate day to day challenges. And crucially, I’m beginning to recognise some of my more unhelpful responses and reactions, and even working out how to reverse out of some of them, some of the time.

I'm mindful of my counsellor's early observation that I seem to be 'holding' a lot of things. I guess I feel like I'm holding fewer things.

It would be far too easy to write November off, viewing it through the fog lights we’ve got used to turning on, at least in this small corner of Yorkshire. Trying desperately to illuminate our way through, but never quite being able to see clearly or with any real confidence or conviction.

It has been tough in places but the Vitamin D prescription has helped, and so did the GP gently reminding me that just because I have a history with cancer and chronic fatigue, it doesn’t automatically follow that they are to blame when I feel rough or out of sorts.

Sometimes there’s a more straightforward answer – like a Vitamin D prescription, but sometimes it is a sign that I need to address long-term underlying issues I’ve been conveniently ignoring for too long.