Current Affairs in the Counselling Room

This morning, Britain's Prime Minister has resigned. By the time you read this, the speculation about who and what comes next will already be running hot — the analysis, the predictions, the arguments at kitchen tables and across social media feeds. For some people it will feel like a relief. For others, a fresh wave of dread about where the country is heading.

And here's something the counselling world doesn't talk about nearly enough: a fair number of those people will bring that feeling into a therapy room this week.

In my experience, both as a counsellor and during my own training, politics is treated as something of a no-go area. It comes up in lectures and personal development sessions only to be quietly stepped around. The instinct is understandable — person-centred counselling is non-directive by design, and politics feels like the fastest route to a counsellor accidentally steering, judging, or imposing. So the subject gets sidestepped.

But clients don't sidestep it. I've sat with people who have spent entire sessions on their fear about the direction the world is taking, their anger at the rise of a party whose values they don't share, their genuine grief about a future they no longer recognise. This isn't abstract for them. It shows up as fear, as anger, as a kind of exhausted helplessness — and those are exactly the feelings counselling exists to make room for. But it cuts the other way too: so much news is framed as bad news, yet good news comes into the room as well. The lift of watching your team win at the World Cup, or a piece of long-hoped-for news finally arriving, is just as real — and just as welcome in the room as the worry.

I came to this work from a previous career in journalism, so current affairs has never stopped being part of how I see the world. That might sound like a liability for a counsellor. It isn't. If anything, it's taught me how strong the pull is to have a view — and therefore how deliberately you have to set yours down when a client sits across from you.

So here's the question people sometimes ask, sometimes nervously: what happens when a client's politics are the opposite of the counsellor's? When the person in the chair is frightened of exactly the politics their counsellor happens to vote for?

The honest answer — and I think it's a reassuring one — is nothing happens. Nothing, other than the client being completely listened to. Those fifty minutes are theirs. My job is not to agree, not to correct, not to gently nudge them toward a more "balanced" view. My job is to sit fully with them in what they're feeling, whatever it is and wherever it points.

That's not me being coy about my own beliefs. It's the discipline at the very heart of the work. Non-directive doesn't mean I have no opinions; it means my opinions are irrelevant to your experience. The moment I let mine into the room, it stops being your space. The whole point of person-centred counselling is that you are met without conditions — and "I'll accept you, as long as you vote the way I do" is about as conditional as it gets.

I'd go further: political feeling is often a doorway, not a destination. Underneath the worry about an election result is frequently something far more personal — a fear of not being safe, of not belonging, of a world that doesn't have room for who you are. For some of the people I most want to support, that fear is not paranoid; it's lived experience. To wave the politics away as "just the news" would be to miss the person entirely.

So no, I don't think this is a subject to shy away from. I think the counselling training world especially has been a little too comfortable treating it as off-limits, especially when it comes to 'PPD Sessions' (other counsellors will know only too well what I mean!). If the state of the world is keeping you up at night, that is a perfectly legitimate thing to bring to counselling. You won't be told you're overreacting. You won't be argued with. You'll be heard.

The world will keep doing what it does this week — resignations, contests, party in-fighting, power struggles, international affair fall outs. In here, none of that gets a vote. Only you do.