Why I Finally Said Yes to Counselling, and Why You Should Too

In the Black community, we don't do counselling. We think it's for other people. We think something must be wrong with you if you need to sit down and talk to a stranger about your feelings.

But I'm here to tell you, it needs to be our conversation too.

WE ALREADY DO IT, WE JUST DON'T CALL IT THAT

Most of us have already been to counselling and didn't even flinch. When you're getting married, you go to marriage counselling. Nobody bats an eye. We accept it then. So why do we reject it when life gets hard?

I've been to counselling more than once. Every single time, it helped me.

THE FIRST TIME: A BROKEN MARRIAGE

When my first marriage ended, because my husband cheated, I went to a counsellor. I told her straight: "I don't need counselling. It's him who needs it."

She looked at me and said: "The counselling is for you. To help you deal with how to move on. To pick up the pieces and live."

She told me something that stopped me in my tracks: because I had been so deeply hurt, I had closed my heart, and in closing it to everyone who could hurt me, I had closed God out too.

I wept on my way back to work. I am glad I went.

THE SECOND TIME: WATCHING MY MOTHER DIE

In 2020, I was watching my mother die from lung cancer. I wasn't sleeping. I was just watching, and waiting. A friend connected me with a counsellor via Zoom, and what I found out surprised me: I wasn't depressed. I was experiencing anticipatory grief, grieving my mother's death before she had even died. Grief and depression can look identical, but they are not the same thing. A trained counsellor can tell the difference. A well-meaning friend usually cannot.

I did about ten sessions. It helped me get through one of the hardest seasons of my life.

THE THIRD TIME: CANCER CAME BACK

After my second breast cancer diagnosis, I stopped sleeping again. My doctor noted severe depression and anxiety disorder and offered medication. I said no, that was my personal choice, and I am not here to judge anyone who makes a different decision.

But I knew I needed to talk to someone. My employer had been offering a counselling service for a while. I kept brushing it off, until one day I said: Opal, go. So I went. And it helped. Again.

WHAT COUNSELLING ACTUALLY DOES

Sometimes our family members love us but they simply do not want to hear the same thing over and over again. Jamaican people are blunt, "How much time you going to tell me the same something?" They don't mean harm. But they get tired.

When you go to counselling, you can say the same thing ten times if you need to. That is the space. And something about getting it out, saying it out loud to a neutral party, lifts a weight off your chest.

Counsellors also see patterns you cannot see in yourself. This time around, mine helped me identify that I have an adjustment disorder, I find it hard to adjust to sudden, significant life changes. Now I know it about myself. Now I can work with it.

A WORD TO MY COMMUNITY

The Bible says seek wise counsel. Solomon had counsellors. If the wisest man who ever lived sought counsel, what makes us think we can go through life's hardest moments alone?

It is not weakness to ask for help. It is wisdom.

Go and get some counselling. Don't bash it, don't dismiss it. It is not for the counsellor. It is for you.

Walk good, until next time.

Opal McKnight-Kleinsasser