Wildwood Counselling & Supervision

“Trauma is insidious in that it crawls inside our head and turns us against ourselves… often without us even realising it.
Real world recovery is about relearning to trust ourselves, care for ourselves, protect ourselves, listen to ourselves — and maybe even like ourselves.”
— Glenn Patrick Doyle

Something I often notice in counselling is how easily people learn to turn on themselves without realising it.

Someone might come in feeling anxious, low, angry, or exhausted, and talk about themselves as if they’re the problem. They might say they’re weak, too sensitive, not good enough, or that they should be able to cope better than they are. Sometimes they’ve been telling themselves that for years, so long that it just feels like the truth.

What often gets missed is how those ways of thinking didn’t appear out of nowhere. They usually grow slowly, through experiences where it didn’t feel safe to speak, safe to feel, or safe to be yourself. When you have to hold things in for a long time, you can start to believe the reason it hurts is because there’s something wrong with you, rather than because something in your life was too much to deal with on your own.

Over time, that can lead to feeling like you can’t trust yourself.
You doubt your reactions.
You question your feelings.
You tell yourself to get on with it.
You push things down because that feels easier than facing them.

From the outside, it can look like strength.
Inside, it can feel like you’re constantly at war with yourself.

Part of the work in counselling is slowly beginning to notice that. Not forcing change, and not trying to make everything better straight away, but learning to listen to yourself again without immediately judging what you find. That might mean recognising feelings you’ve ignored for a long time, or allowing yourself to admit that something affected you more than you thought it should.

That can feel unfamiliar at first, because many people have spent years being hard on themselves just to get through life. But when you begin to relate to yourself with a bit more understanding, something often starts to soften. You don’t suddenly become a different person, but you may find you’re not fighting yourself quite as much.

I see counselling as a place where that shift can begin.
Not about fixing you, and not about becoming someone else, but about learning to feel a bit safer inside your own experience. When that happens, people often find they can trust themselves more, take care of themselves differently, and feel less alone with what they carry.

Sometimes the hardest part of healing
isn’t changing your life.
It’s learning not to be against yourself anymore.