I Started Counselling Training — Here's What I Didn't Expect
On learning to sit with someone's pain without rushing to fix it — and what that's teaching me about living abroad.
I’m four months into my counselling training.
We’ve been doing role-play exercises. Helper, helpee, observer. Rotating through each position, practicing what it means to hold space for someone.
The most surprising thing?
Turns out… I’m still a novice when it comes to “just listening.”
Who knew, right?
Years of professional conversations. Cross-cultural navigation. Reading rooms. Tracking what’s being said underneath what’s being said.
It’s not about tracking well enough to respond strategically. It’s about being present without an agenda. Without planning your next move. Without trying to fix what the person is sitting with.
I’ve spent years in conversations — professional, personal, across cultures. I’ve built a career on reading rooms, tracking racial, linguistic and power dynamics, understanding what’s being said underneath what’s being said.
But active listening in a counselling context is different.
It’s not about tracking well enough to respond strategically. It’s about being present without an agenda. Without jumping ahead to what you’ll say next. Without trying to fix what the person is sitting with.
And that’s harder than I expected.
My tutor has a phrase for what happens when you perform the role instead of inhabiting it:
“Cosplaying counselling.”
You’re nodding. Making affirming sounds. Maybe even mirroring their posture.
But underneath? You’re not actually with them.
You’re managing your own discomfort with their pain by rushing to resolve it.
When someone shares something difficult, the instinct is immediate:
How do I help them feel better? What perspective can I offer? What reframe might ease this?
While it’s well-intentioned, it’s also a way of avoiding the hard part: sitting with them in the discomfort without trying to make it go away.
The people I’ve been speaking with — 5, 10, 15 years abroad — are high achievers. Intelligent. Capable. The kind of people who figured out how to build a life in another country and made it work. They’re not looking for someone to tell them what to do. They’ve already done the hard part.
What I keep hearing underneath the competence is: I just need someone to sit with me in this for a minute. Without trying to fix it. Without telling me I’m doing it wrong.
Here’s what matters about this, especially for people who’ve spent years adapting:
When you’re someone who’s navigated visa bureaucracy, language barriers, cultural codes, the constant low-grade work of making yourself understood — you get very good at managing your own difficulty. For some of us, that work includes what happens before we've said a word.
You stop expecting anyone to just sit with you in it. You expect advice, solutions, the next step.
What you don’t always expect — and what might actually be more useful — is someone staying present without an agenda.
One of the other things we’re learning: counselling isn’t about explaining things to people.
It’s about facilitating understanding — their understanding, not yours.
And that understanding doesn’t always come through visible demonstrations of empathy or perfectly timed reflections.
Sometimes it comes from silence. From not filling the space. From trusting that the person in front of you has their own process, and your job is to accompany them through it — not to narrate it for them.
I think a lot of high-achieving expats and globally mobile folks carry this pattern too.
Not just in how they relate to others, but in how they relate to themselves. The instinct to fix. To optimize. To turn discomfort into a problem with a solution.
Sometimes that works.
But other times, what’s needed isn’t a better strategy. It’s permission to stop strategizing for a minute. To let someone witness what you’re carrying without immediately having to do something about it.
The helper role is teaching me something I didn’t expect to learn:
Being present is active work.
It’s the ongoing practice of noticing when you’ve left the room mentally — when you’ve jumped ahead to what you’ll say next, or started planning how to make this better — and bringing yourself back.
Again and again.
It’s not passive. And it’s harder than it looks.
Sometimes, the most helpful thing you can do is the hardest thing: stay present without trying to make it better.
The instinct to fix isn’t wrong. It comes from care.
But there’s a difference between easing pain and witnessing it.
I’m learning that in these small-group role-plays. But the lesson applies to a lot of conversations outside the training room. Especially with people who’ve spent years being the capable one. The one who figures it out. The one who doesn’t need help.
Maybe what they need isn’t help.
Maybe what they need is someone who can sit with them in the difficulty without making it about solutions.
It’s that simple.
It’s that hard.
And if this essay named something uncomfortably accurate, you don’t have to make sense of it alone:
I hold a small number of Expat Orientation Conversations each month — 60‑minute, one‑to‑one, non‑clinical sessions for sense‑making and orientation, not therapy or coaching.
Together we look at how long‑term life abroad may be shaping your inner experience, find language for what has been hard to name, and gently sort what’s contextual from what’s personal before you decide what, if anything, you want to do next.
Let’s keep walking the edges together.
Onward,
Kay✨
Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?
I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.
If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.
If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.
If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.
Just FYI - I am not a counselor, I'm a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst, and my training has been very different from what you describe above. But we can share more about this as well.
Kay - I saw that you wrote me a message a few weeks ago and I was very busy - please feel free to email me at the address I gave you in the message. Let's talk more about it all!