What I've Come to Understand About People
When I began my counselling training, I had ideas about what it meant to support someone through a difficult time. But the more I have learnt — through studying, reading, researching and, most importantly, listening to people's experiences — the more I have realised just how individual every person's journey is.
There are things I have come to understand that no textbook could fully teach me.
We are rarely just one thing
People can be confident and insecure.
Independent and still need support.
Happy and grieving.
Strong and exhausted.
They can know exactly what they want in one part of their life and feel completely lost in another.
I think we can sometimes put ourselves, and other people, into neat categories. But human beings aren't particularly neat.
We are shaped by our experiences, our relationships, our circumstances and the meanings we have made from them. Two people can experience something similar and be affected in completely different ways.
There isn't a single right way to feel.
There is often more behind the behaviour
One of the things I have become increasingly aware of is how easy it can be to judge a behaviour without knowing the story behind it.
Someone may appear withdrawn, angry, distant or difficult.
But what if there is something underneath that we cannot see?
Perhaps the withdrawal is protecting them from feeling overwhelmed.
Perhaps the anger is covering hurt.
Perhaps keeping busy is a way of avoiding something that feels too difficult to face.
This doesn't mean that every behaviour is acceptable or that we shouldn't take responsibility for how we treat others. But understanding where something comes from can sometimes change the way we look at it.
It has certainly changed the way I look at people.
We can become very good at adapting
We all develop ways of coping with life.
Sometimes those ways of coping are incredibly helpful. They get us through difficult periods and allow us to keep going when we need to.
But sometimes a way of coping that once served us well can become something we no longer need in quite the same way.
We might learn to keep everyone happy.
To avoid conflict.
To be the strong one.
To never ask for help.
To keep busy.
To put our own needs at the bottom of the list.
These things may have made sense at one point in our lives.
The question isn't necessarily “Why do I do this?”
Perhaps sometimes it is:
“When did I learn that I needed to?”
We can be much harder on ourselves than we are on others
This is something I think many of us can recognise.
We can be compassionate when a friend makes a mistake, but incredibly unforgiving when we make one ourselves.
We can understand why someone else is struggling, while telling ourselves that we should simply be coping better.
We can encourage someone we love to take care of themselves, while continuing to put our own needs aside.
I have come to believe that the way we speak to ourselves matters.
Self-understanding isn't about making excuses for ourselves. It is about becoming curious rather than immediately critical.
Instead of:
“What's wrong with me?”
perhaps we can sometimes ask:
“What is happening for me?”
That small change in question can open up a very different conversation.
Change isn't always obvious
When we think about change, we might imagine something dramatic — a major decision, a complete transformation or suddenly feeling like a different person.
But change can be much quieter than that.
It might be recognising something about yourself that you hadn't noticed before.
Realising that you are allowed to say no.
Noticing an old pattern beginning to emerge.
Responding differently to something that would once have overwhelmed you.
Or simply being able to sit with a difficult feeling rather than immediately pushing it away.
These things can be easy to overlook.
But sometimes the smallest shifts can tell us that something inside us is changing.
What counselling has taught me
Perhaps one of the most important things I have come to understand is that people don't need to be put into boxes.
We are all more complicated than a diagnosis, a label, a difficult period or a particular behaviour.
And although I have learnt a great deal from counselling theory, research and the experiences of others, I am reminded again and again that no two people arrive with the same story.
This is one of the reasons I value the person-centred approach.
I don't believe I need to arrive with an answer about who someone is or what they need.
Instead, I can be curious about their experience and allow them the space to explore it for themselves.
Because ultimately, you are the person who knows your life.
My role isn't to tell you who you are.
It is to walk alongside you for a while, listen carefully, and perhaps help you see parts of your own story that have become difficult to see on your own.
And perhaps that is what I have come to understand most of all:
There is usually more to a person than the part of their story we can see.
Sometimes, we simply need the opportunity to look a little deeper.