Can Counselling Make You Feel Worse Before Better?

Yes — and it's more common than most people realise when they first start.

That's not a great sales pitch, I know. But it's an honest answer, and I'd rather you knew this going in than sat there a few weeks in wondering what's gone wrong when actually nothing has.

Counselling often involves looking at things that have been pushed down, set aside, or quietly managed for a long time. When you start opening them up in a session, they can feel more present and more alive than they did before you walked in. That's not comfortable. And the discomfort doesn't always stop when the session ends.

Why the early part can feel harder

The first few sessions of counselling are typically the most emotionally demanding. You're talking about difficult things — possibly for the first time in this way — in a new room with a person you're still getting to know. You don't yet have the relationship, the trust, or the experience of having been through it before and come out the other side.

A lot of people find that things feel stirred up more than usual in the early weeks. Feelings that have been kept in check can suddenly feel closer to the surface. Something you discussed in a session might keep coming back to you afterwards, in the car, at three in the morning, at random moments during the day.

That's not a problem. That's your mind doing what it does when it finally gets to look at something properly.

The discomfort tends to shift as you go

Most people find that things start to settle as counselling continues. Not because the work gets less real — sometimes it goes deeper — but because you build a kind of capacity to hold it. The sessions become more familiar. You start to develop a sense of what to expect, what comes up for you, how you tend to process things. That familiarity makes it easier to sit with difficult material without being quite as destabilised by it.

It's also worth saying that the sessions that leave you feeling most wrung out are often the ones where something important gets moved. Not always, but often. The difficult ones tend not to be the ones where nothing happened.

There's a difference between difficult and harmful

This distinction matters and it's worth being clear about it.

Temporary discomfort — feeling drained or unsettled after a session, emotions being closer to the surface than usual for a day or two — is a normal part of the process for a lot of people. It's the difference between difficult and harmful.

If you're feeling consistently worse over a longer stretch, or the sessions are leaving you significantly more distressed in a way that doesn't settle, that's worth talking about with your counsellor directly. A good counsellor won't be defensive about that conversation. They'll want to understand it. The pace of the work, what gets looked at and when, should be shaped by how you're actually doing — and if it isn't working for you, that's important and worth saying.

What helps in the harder stretches

If you know you tend to find sessions emotionally demanding, it can help to leave a bit of space afterwards when you can — even just twenty minutes before jumping back into something that needs you to be fully switched on. Not always possible, but worth doing if you can.

A short walk, a bit of time to let things settle, being a bit gentler with yourself than usual for the rest of that day — these are small things but they matter. Counselling takes energy, even when it's going well.

It's also fine to mention it to me at the start of the next session. "Last week felt harder than expected" is genuinely useful information, and it helps shape what we do with the time.

The overall direction is what matters

Progress in counselling doesn't move in a straight upward line. There are sessions that feel like breakthroughs, sessions that feel like hard work, and sessions where it's not entirely clear what happened. Some weeks you leave lighter; others you feel like you've had a difficult conversation with yourself and need a bit of time to recover from it.

What tends to matter most is the overall direction across time. And that's harder to see when you're in the middle of it — which is worth remembering on the weeks that feel heavy.

If you want to read more about why this happens and what it actually feels like, there's more detail in why do I feel worse after counselling. Or if you're thinking about starting and want to understand more about the process before committing, the first session page is a good place to start.