I Am Not Here to Fix You

A person-centred counsellor does not try to fix you, because you are not treated as a broken machine. Distress is understood as a sign that your natural growth has been blocked, often by having to hide parts of yourself to get by. The counsellor's job is to offer a relationship where you can hear your own direction again, and to trust that you have one.

It is natural to want a solution. When we hurt, we want it to stop. You might come to therapy asking, "What do I do?" or "How do I stop feeling this?"

Why doesn't my counsellor just tell me what to do?

This is one of the most common frustrations with person-centred counselling, and it deserves a straight answer.

Advice can be helpful, and you probably already have a lot of it. Friends, family, colleagues and the internet all have opinions about your life. If you grew up in a family where elders made the big decisions, you may have had well-meant direction for as long as you can remember.

Yet often the problem is not a lack of advice. It is that you can no longer tell which voice is yours. One more person telling you what to do, however kindly, can add to the noise. So a person-centred counsellor holds back, on purpose, to leave space for the voice that is harder to hear.

Is distress a sign that I'm broken?

I view distress not as a sign that you are broken, but as a sign that your natural growth has been blocked. Perhaps the environment you are in doesn't support who you are. Perhaps you have had to hide parts of yourself to survive.

This view comes from Carl Rogers' idea of the actualising tendency: the belief that every living thing has a built-in pull towards growth and towards becoming more fully itself (Rogers, 1959). Rogers once described potatoes stored in a dark basement, putting out pale shoots towards a small window. The shoots were thin and strange, but they were still reaching for light (Rogers, 1980).

People can be like that. The anxious habits, the people-pleasing, the numbness: these may look like faults, but they often began as the best way to grow in poor conditions.

What blocks our natural growth?

Rogers thought growth gets blocked when love and approval come with conditions. He called these conditions of worth (Rogers, 1959). If you learned that you were good when you were helpful and a problem when you were upset, you may have built a self that leaves the upset out.

Imagine a woman who has always been the calm one in her family. She is the one who smooths things over and remembers what everyone needs. When she starts to feel exhausted, she does not see it as a message. She sees it as a failure to cope, and she tries harder.

From the outside she looks like someone who needs better time management. From the inside, something in her may be asking for room. You can read more about this pattern under people-pleasing.

If that sounds familiar, the longer topic page on people-pleasing looks at where the habit comes from and what can help, and the page on burnout describes what happens when the calm one runs out of reserves.

What does non-directive counselling actually mean?

Non-directive means the counsellor does not set the agenda. There is no homework and no gentle steering towards the "right" decision.

It does not mean the counsellor sits silently. They listen very closely. They reflect back what they hear, sometimes noticing a feeling you skipped past or a word you used twice. They may ask what something was like for you. They stay with you when it gets hard, instead of hurrying you on to a solution.

This can feel strange at first. You might find yourself waiting for the part where you get told what to do. Many people notice that waiting, and it can become something worth talking about too.

If you'd like a clearer picture of how this works in a real session, the guide to what to expect in your first counselling session walks through the practical side, from confidentiality to how the first conversation might start.

How do I learn to trust my own direction?

My role is not to give you a map. It is to walk with you so you don't have to be lost alone. I trust that you know, somewhere deep down, where you need to go. My job is to help you hear that voice again, underneath the noise of what everyone else thinks you should be.

Rogers called this a shift in the locus of evaluation, from judging yourself by other people's standards towards trusting your own sense of what matters (Rogers, 1961). It is rarely a sudden change. Usually it happens a little at a time, as you notice that your feelings make more sense than you had been told.

Why does acceptance help people change?

There is a line in Rogers' writing that many counsellors return to: "The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change" (Rogers, 1961).

It sounds backwards. Most of us try to change by being hard on ourselves. But criticism tends to make us defensive, and defensiveness makes it difficult to look honestly at anything. When the pressure to be different eases, there is often more room to see clearly.

That is why the counsellor's acceptance matters so much. It is a working condition, the ground on which honest looking can happen.

Rogers named it unconditional positive regard, one of the three core conditions he believed make change possible. I write more about why this matters in why healing is relational.

What if I really do want advice?

That is a perfectly reasonable thing to want. Some people do better with a more structured approach, with tools and tasks between sessions, and there is nothing wrong with that. A good counsellor should tell you honestly if another approach might suit you better.

CBT is the best-known structured option. It works more directly on thoughts and behaviour, often with worksheets or exercises between sessions. The understanding therapy resources include trusted outside reading on the different approaches, which may help you choose.

Person-centred counselling may suit you if you are tired of being told who to be, or if you suspect the answers you need are already somewhere in you, just buried. If you would like to understand the approach more fully, my longer guide on what person-centred therapy is is a good place to start.

You don't have to arrive with the right question. When you are ready, you can book a first session and simply begin from where you are.

You can also read more about how I work on the person-centred counselling page. I'm a trainee person-centred counsellor and BACP student member, working under supervision.