A Conversation
Sometime in my twenties I found a counsellor. I don’t remember exactly how—a recommendation, probably, or a listing in a directory that existed in print form in those days—and I don’t remember with any precision what I needed to talk about, only that I needed to talk about something, and that the something felt large and shapeless in the way that things tend to feel large and shapeless when you are young and still learning to take the measure of yourself.
An existential crisis, I would have called it then. I had several at that age. They came and went like weather.
My partner at the time had no patience for that kind of thing. He was a practical man, genuinely and admirably practical, the sort of person who looked at a problem and asked what you intended to do about it—which was a reasonable question, and not the one I needed. What I needed was not a solution. What I needed was a room in which I could speak, and someone in it who would stay still and listen. My partner could not provide that room. The counsellor could, and did, and I went every week for a while and found, to my own mild surprise, that it helped.
What he did was simple. He listened. I know he listened because he asked questions, but the questions had a particular quality that I recognised even then without being able to name it: they were questions that helped me understand what I meant, rather than questions that suggested I had meant something other than what I said. There is a difference, and it is not a small one. One kind of question opens the thought further. The other kind redirects it, gently or otherwise, toward a destination the questioner already has in mind. His questions opened. They did not redirect. He asked because he was following me, not because he was leading me somewhere.
He offered no advice. I had made it clear from the beginning that I didn’t want any, and he respected that without apparent difficulty. He made no referrals. He didn’t suggest that what I was really dealing with was something a different professional might address more appropriately. He didn’t seem to work from a particular framework—or if he did, he kept it entirely out of the room, which amounts to the same thing from where I was sitting. He simply attended to what I said and let me say more. That was the whole of it. That was enough.
I am in my sixties now. The existential crises belong to another era, and I don’t miss them. But I found, some time ago, that a handful of things I had never quite resolved had taken to appearing in my waking thoughts with a regularity that I couldn’t entirely ignore. Not intrusive—that is too strong a word. More like a tap you can hear from another room. You can close the door. You can forget about it. But at some level you remain aware that the tap is still running, and every now and then you notice it again, and some part of you registers that you still haven’t dealt with it.
I know how to stop thoughts. Most people who reach their sixties have worked that much out. But stopping a thought and resolving it are not the same action, and I had enough experience of my own mind by then to suspect that stopping it was the wrong move. The thought would return. It always did. What I hadn’t done was sit with it long enough to understand what it actually wanted from me. And sitting alone, I had found, only went so far. You reach the edge of what you can understand about yourself without the friction of another consciousness to think against. I knew this. It is, in some respects, what the man in my twenties had taught me.
So I thought about finding another counsellor.
The idea made sense on the face of it. I wasn’t in distress. I wasn’t seeking crisis intervention or medication or a diagnosis. I didn’t need anyone to fix me. I simply wanted what I had found before: a room, a person, the permission to speak without agenda. I looked into it, as one does now, which means I looked online, and I found very quickly that the landscape had changed in ways I hadn’t anticipated.
What surprised me wasn’t that they had modalities. It was that I found myself reading the lists with a faint sense of disappointment. Person-centred. CBT. Psychodynamic. Integrative. EMDR. The terms were not all unfamiliar to me, and I understood, at least broadly, what they meant. I am not suggesting that any of it is without value. I have no doubt that these frameworks help a great many people, possibly the majority of people who walk through a counsellor’s door. The frameworks exist because they work, and they work because most people who seek professional help want more than a listening ear—they want structure, direction, a route out of the difficulty they’re in. I understand that. I don’t fault it.
But I noticed, sitting with it, that something in me resisted. What I wanted was what I had had before: a person who attended to what I said without pre-interpreting it. And I began to wonder—not with hostility, just with genuine curiosity—whether a counsellor trained in a particular modality could fully set it aside in the room. Whether, as I spoke, some part of their mind might be sorting what I said into the categories their training had given them. Deciding which approach applied. Listening, certainly, but listening through a framework rather than simply listening.
I wondered about notes. Most practitioners take them—during the session, or after, or both. I understand why. Memory is imperfect. Continuity matters. If I return the following week and refer to something I mentioned three sessions ago, the counsellor should know what I mean. But notes also create a version of me on paper, and that version, however accurate, is not me. It is a reduction. And once it exists, it has weight. The counsellor arrives at our next session having read it, which means they arrive already holding an interpretation of who I am and what I contain. I wanted to be heard in the moment, not through a document someone assembled about me between appointments.
Then there is the question of recording. Perhaps not here, perhaps not now, perhaps not with every counsellor—but the possibility exists, and it exists increasingly often, and I am not a person who finds comfort in the possibility alone. I have nothing to hide, which is not the point. The point is that I wanted to think out loud in a space that contained only what I brought into it and what the other person brought into it—two minds, a subject, nothing else. The moment a recording enters the room, a third presence enters with it. You speak differently when you know your words will be stored somewhere, indexed, potentially reviewed. You edit yourself, slightly and probably unconsciously, which is precisely the opposite of what I was looking for.
What I had wanted, I realised, was something the profession no longer seemed to offer in the straightforward form I remembered. Or perhaps it still offered it somewhere and I simply hadn’t found it. But the impression I came away with—and impressions, however partial, carry information—was that counselling had professionalised in ways that moved it away from the thing I valued most about it. Which was its blankness. Its willingness to receive without immediately sorting. Its capacity to hold a silence or follow a tangent without needing to bring it back toward a predetermined destination.
I didn’t proceed. Perhaps I should have looked harder. Perhaps the right person exists and I simply didn’t find them. But I found myself turning instead to what I already knew: that thinking with another person, almost any thoughtful and attentive person, does something that thinking alone cannot. It doesn’t require a professional. It requires presence and the willingness to ask the kind of questions that open rather than close. It requires someone who resists the urge to interpret before they’ve fully heard. Those people exist. They are not always easy to find, but they are not behind a professional listing either.
The man in my twenties gave me something I have carried for forty years without fully acknowledging it. He gave me a model of what listening looks like when it is done without agenda. No framework. No notes. No destination. Just a person, tracking what I said closely enough to know when I had left something out, and asking about the absence until I found the words to fill it. In finding those words, I found things I hadn’t known I thought. That is what I wanted again. It is a modest request. It turns out to be surprisingly rare.
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