What the Kitchen Table Taught Me About Counseling
Twenty years of homeschooling turns out to be an unusually good apprenticeship for sitting with people — mostly because of what it teaches you about pace.
Nobody would design homeschooling as counselor training. It is too long, too domestic, and the credential is worthless. But I have come to think it taught me more about how people change than any single course I have taken since.
Change is slower than the syllabus
A curriculum tells you a child will grasp long division in three weeks. A child tells you otherwise, at length. What you learn, if you are paying attention, is that the schedule was always a fiction and the actual unit of progress is much smaller and much less linear than the plan assumed.
The same is true in a counseling room, and it is the thing most likely to make a new counselor despair. The person in front of you will circle the same insight four times before it takes. That is not resistance. That is the rate.
You cannot want it more than they do
There is a particular temptation, when you love someone and can see exactly what would help, to push. I have done it at a kitchen table and I have watched it fail there. The pushing produces compliance, which looks like progress and is not, and which evaporates the moment you are out of the room.
What works is slower and less satisfying: ask the question again, differently, and wait.
Staying is the intervention
The last thing, and the one I did not expect. Over twenty years, the moments that changed my children were almost never the ones I had prepared for. They were incidental — a remark in a car, a question at ten at night, the third conversation about a thing we had already discussed twice.
None of those would have happened if I had not been there for the boring hours in between. There is no way to schedule the important conversation. You can only be present for enough unimportant ones that the important one has somewhere to land.
I think that is most of what counseling is, too.