“There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting and enslaving than the life at sea”.
Joseph Conrad
Clients very often find themselves in a place and wonder just how they got there. In a reversal of the nature of things it is as if they have suddenly woken up and found themselves in a bad dream. What did I miss, they ask themselves? It is as though we take leave of our senses, begin to
wade out into the shallows and without noticing the danger (or ignoring it) we begin a leisurely swim out into deeper waters. The sky then darkens
and the sea begins to storm up around us. But still we swim on. It is usually only after many such storms that we wake up – lost at sea and very far
from land.
It is just this “lost at sea” feeling, however, that often signals the coming of change and presents us with an opportunity to take stock and to begin to wonder how we can get back to dry land. A central feature of counselling is the challenge to somehow turn a negative into a positive, to “turn it around”.
Ok, you are lost at sea – what resources do you have at your disposal? Maybe there is a lull in the storm – you spot something – the idea that maybe you can clamber on to your own “lift raft” might be a useful one. You look around and begin to wonder which way the land lies. You may even try
to relive the process of how you got here in an attempt to trace your way back. Very often, though, the “way back” is not the route you will take to
return to land. In fact there is no way back as such – actually it is the way forward.
A different route, then, is required, one where you begin to examine yourself and the things you have embraced as guiding lights. Some of these things will be useful as you make the “turn around” whilst some will have to be respectfully left behind and experienced as loss.
Through counselling, we can learn to trust that our own resources and judgements are reliable and that we can lead ourselves back to land. We then start to get a clearer sense of which direction our values lie in and begin to go with that flow.
As we draw closer to terra firma things may look unfamiliar. This certainly isn’t the place you leisurely waded out from at the beginning. Yet, maybe there is a freshness and honesty about this unfamiliarity, a newness that signals life can be lived in a different, less damaging and
more meaningful way with regard to yourself and others.
The relationship you have with yourself may have many such sea journeys and turn arounds, hopefully not all of them raging, tempestuous ones. It may well be, that the fundamental turn-around of negative into positive will eventually lead us to a clearer idea of which is land and which is
the sea in the first place. This may well give us the good judgement to pause and step back.