Ideally, the goal of counselling is to improve the way that you’re feeling. Counselling offers an opportunity to vent your frustrations, explore your emotions and hopefully, leave the session feeling lighter than when it began. However, you might find yourself feeling more emotional after your counselling appointments, particularly at the beginning of the counselling process. Why is that?

There can be a number of reasons why you might feel more emotional after your first couple of counselling sessions. The most common reason is that you’re discussing experiences and memories that are painful or difficult to talk about. Oftentimes, people come to counselling after a significant period of feeling challenged or down, and it is hard to talk about the things that brought you here. This might bring up a lot of emotions in the days after your appointment, a phenomenon that I like to call “The Emotional Hangover”. You might feel teary, blue or angry after discussing things that have caused you a lot of distress.

If you’ve been suppressing emotions for a while, beginning to delve into them in counselling can open the floodgates. You might find yourself experiencing an onslaught of emotions that have built up over time, and this can feel very overwhelming. This is especially true if you’ve been burned out or feeling “numb”, as the emotions can begin resurfacing once you start healing and “thawing out”.

The third reason is a simple one: therapy can be hard. Working on ourselves is difficult, especially if you’re confronting behaviours or thought patterns that have been deeply ingrained or are shrouded in shame. Therapy takes mental and emotional energy, and you might find yourself feeling drained after your appointment from the sheer effort of the work that you’ve been doing.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “Well, that sounds awful and I don’t want to begin counselling now!”, rest assured that there are ways to manage this. Exploring your emotions, changing your behaviours and healing from difficult experiences are hard at first, but it gets easier with time. It’s kind of like if you begin exercising after years of inactivity. At first, your muscles are going to feel sore and you’ll tire easily. But after a while you get stronger and things become easier. Sometimes you have to walk a challenging path before things begin to ease off and you feel lighter.

So how can you cope if you’re experiencing these emotional hangovers after your counselling sessions?

First of all, I’d encourage you to tell me if you’re feeling drained, tired or emotional after your appointment. If I know that you’re having these experiences, we can work together to put supports in place to help you overcome them. I can set aside more time at the end of your session to do a calming or grounding exercise to allow you to settle before you head off. I can help you to decide what you can do between sessions to look after yourself. We can also make more frequent appointments if you feel like you need more support for a period of time while things are hard.

Self awareness and self-care are some of the most powerful tools that you can use to navigate your emotional hangovers. Finding things that you can do to soothe yourself and calm your nervous system can be very helpful. It also helps to express these emotions in a constructive way, perhaps through journalling, art or music. You might choose to make voice recordings of what’s going on in your mind, or write them down so that you can bring them to your next appointment. I can help you to explore different ways to self-soothe and express your emotions.

Simply knowing that it’s normal to feel this way can be really reassuring. It can be confronting to feel worse if you expected to feel better right away, and knowing that this can be part of the process might alleviate some of your anxiety. You might find it easier to cope with intense emotions if you understand that they can be part of the process.

Counselling can be hard work, and it can bring up emotions that can feel intense and challenging. You’ll be supported during the counselling process, and we can also work together to make a plan to help you look after yourself in between sessions so that you can begin to feel lighter, brighter and better.