Wildwood Counselling & Supervision

A line from Najwa Zebian captures something important:

“It’s easier for them to believe that something is wrong with you
than it is for them to believe that something wrong happened to you.”

This is something I see often in the counselling room, and it’s something many people carry without realising it.

Over time, it can become easier to believe that there’s something wrong with you than to look at what you’ve been through. If you’ve grown up feeling misunderstood, criticised, ignored, or expected to cope without support, it can start to shape the way you see yourself. You might tell yourself you’re too sensitive, too much, not enough, weak, difficult, or just not the kind of person who gets things right.

When those messages are repeated often enough, they stop feeling like opinions and start to feel like facts.

The strange thing is that this way of seeing yourself can feel safer than looking at what actually happened. If the problem is you, then at least the world makes sense. But if something unfair, painful, or difficult happened to you, especially when you were younger or had no control, that can be harder to face. It can bring up anger, sadness, or the feeling that you weren’t protected in the way you should have been.

So instead, many people learn to turn things inwards.
They blame themselves.
They try harder.
They keep going.
They tell themselves not to make a fuss.

From the outside, it can look like coping.
Inside, it can feel like carrying something heavy for a long time.

In counselling, part of the work is gently looking at how those beliefs about yourself were formed. Not to blame anyone, and not to rewrite the past, but to understand how your experiences have shaped the way you think and feel now. When you start to see that your reactions make sense in the context of what you’ve lived through, the idea that there is something wrong with you can begin to loosen its grip.

That doesn’t mean everything suddenly feels better.
But it can mean you stop being alone with it.

I see counselling as a space where we can make sense of things that have never really been spoken about properly. A place where you don’t have to prove anything, explain everything perfectly, or pretend you’re fine when you’re not. Just somewhere to look honestly at what’s happened in your life, and how it has affected the way you see yourself.

Sometimes the hardest shift isn’t changing who you are.
It’s realising that who you are makes sense,
once your story is allowed to be heard.