The pause of summer
For a lot of us, summer gives us a time to pause, sit still and look around.
You might have had time off work, been on an actual holiday or just enjoyed a change from your normal routine. Even if you’ve been working, you might have been taking advantage of the lighter mornings and evenings. At this time of year, it can be lovely to sit outside or by a window with a cup of tea, and just look around.
There’s something about late summer, when we can see that nature is beginning to pause, which means that maybe we can pause as well. Everything has been growing all spring and summer long, and now there’s a kind of relaxing. Things don’t have to be happening all the time.
What have you noticed in the pause?
When we slow down a little, when we aren’t quite as busy as normal – even if it’s just for an hour – things can come up.
Sometimes these are the things we don’t really want to feel or think about. A pain from the past. A low level of sadness that never quite goes away. An awareness that you’re anxious much more of the time than you would like to be. Perhaps there’s something you keep thinking about when you’re lying awake at night, but manage not to think about during the day.
It’s often much easier not to notice these things when there’s enough going on. There is always another email to answer, another job to do, another person who needs something from you.
Stopping for a while might also mean that when you do look around, you realise that maybe this isn’t what you wanted or expected.
You aren’t actually enjoying your life, as it is just now. There’s nothing dramatically wrong, necessarily. Perhaps, from the outside, your life looks pretty good. But on the inside, something doesn’t feel right. It’s not really clear how you got here, or where you would like to be instead, but there’s a feeling of discomfort.
When you think about the time you have spent pausing this summer, what has come up for you?
How can therapy help?
You may have noticed a sort of underlying feeling that something isn’t right, or there’s something you don’t understand about yourself, or that there’s something you might like to change. You might have a part of your life that you’ve never really talked about, or never really understood.
Arranging to work with a counsellor gives you a place to explore what’s going on. Whatever it is that you have noticed when you paused, why not give yourself permission to explore it?
Therapy can be a bit like clearing out a full kitchen cupboard: initially there could be a worry about just what on earth is in there? And then there might be a carefully balanced pile of plastic tubs, that when you move other things, falls out of the cupboard onto you. You might be surprised at some of the stuff in there, discard some things, want to tell the story of other things, and finally you hope to be able to leave the cupboard in a much more organised state.
The beauty of doing this with a trained counsellor is that they’ll be there alongside you. If something comes out that hurts you, your counsellor will right there with you. When it comes to understanding what’s in your cupboard, your counsellor can understand it with you – that is your counsellor’s only agenda, to support you as you do your best to understand yourself.
Next steps
If you would like to start working through whatever it is, or just talking through what came up for you when you paused, why not contact a few counsellors with a view to starting therapy. You can find an article about starting counselling here.
If you’d like to work with me, send me an email to jessica@jessicatettcounselling.co.uk, or contact me below. If you think you’d be better suited to someone else, looking on the BACP Therapy Directory could be a good place to start.
Good luck with your pausing, and exploring whatever turns out to be in your kitchen cupboard!