5 questions clients want to ask in their first counselling session | Celina Cares4you

The first session is not therapy. There, I said it. This is a time to get to know your counsellor and to assess whether or not you two are a good fit together.
There is a difference between intervention and assessment, both of which are ongoing processes.

Intervention: Adding new concepts, new stimulus to introduce a new perspective or thought framework.

Assessment: Evaluating current frameworks, impact of life experience and other factors on client’s wellness.

To make it easier to digest, please review the Q&A below:

• Q1: Why we don’t want to do therapy immediately? I feel bad right now, which is why I want to talk to someone.

  Good question and I think it’s still the counsellor’s job to help you feel a little better during this session. However, a counsellor cannot magically guess your entire lifestory just by listening to you for 20 minutes. A counselling relationship is established with time, continued honesty and a relationship is defined by having more than one party. Intervening too quickly is inappropriate without this foundation of trust because it may introduce ideas that can be at best irrelevant, at worst harmful to the client - because we don’t know you yet.

  What we can do it giving you a roadmap of what to expect in future sessions, set a specific counselling goal, and talk about what tasks you might feel comfortable doing.

  Have a look here for what to expect in your first session with Celina.

• Q2: What do you mean a “counselling goal”? I just want to feel better!

  That makes a lot of sense! If we work without a goal, we won’t really know what “better” is supposed to look like.
  Here are some dimensions I usually offer to my clients when we are setting goals together:

  1. Do you want to talk about coping with the situation?

  2. Finding how to untangle yourself from this siutation?

  3. Understand why the situation makes me feel this way?

  4. Understand why I react to this situation?

  5. Change how I react to similar situations?

  All of these goals will help you feel better, it’s about your personal priorities right now, and getting to know what you expect. There’s no correct answer, but only what might feel most comfortable for us to build a foundation of trust. This process also gives us a blueprint of what milestones should look like, and we will always come back to this to review what progress is, especially when the process gets tough.

  Sometimes progress doesn’t look like smiles and sunshine, soemtimes it is simply being able to fully cry in front of someone about something.

• Q3: Right… in what situation will other people know about my story?

  https://www.celinacares4you.com/service-agreement

  https://www.hkpca.org.hk/about/code-of-ethics/#s3

  Before counselling with anyone, it is highly advisable for you to enquire about:

  1. How your data is kept safe

  2. How are counselling notes and reports retrieved (if needed)

  3. When your emergency contacts may be notified

  4. How your counsellor may contact authorities if they assess you are a danger to yourself and others.

  The HKPCA Code of Ethics, Section 3.2 Principle 6 describes:

  …Counsellors should let their clients know the limitations to confidentiality rising from within the counselling process…

  If and whenever your information should need to be disclosed, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to you.
  You should be informed of the decision, the reason and what to expect moving forward.

• Q4: Why can’t you tell me what to do exactly?

  Ultimately, each persons life is their own responsibility. A consellor’s role is to provide a clear, safe space for you to navigate this. We can bounce around different ideas, review other perspectives, but what to do is completely your choice.

  Furthermore, a counsellor may seem to have some other worldly knowledge or give the impression of some fantasy guru (believe me, I’ve heard it before!) That’s just not the case. We are just trained to reflect and tidy up other people’s thoughts. We are human ourselves too with our specific biases, influences and opinions. I can model healthier thought models to you, but how you make it your own is a journey you need to walk with your own two feet.

• Q5: You never experienced my life, and you’re so different from me. How will we ever understand each other?

  I’ve got some good news and bad news for you.

  Good news first: humans develop on the same trajectory, developmental psychology demosntrates that though our differences in culture, privilege and experiences are different, our biology largely are the same.

  This factor alone is a dicdates why human behaviour, with all its uniqueness and variations, can still share universal feelings. This is beyond our politics, other abstract identifiers we might attach ourselves to.

  In reality, any two peoples’ genomes are, on average, ~99.6% identical and ~0.4% different.

  Bad news is that truly understanding each other is at best a guess.

  That 0.4% difference means that there is always a chance of misalignment, even if two people grew up exactly the same.

  Twins study in 2025 between twins Fernand and Victor demonstrate that despite being identical, the motivation divergence that emerged over their adolescence is hard to explain. Ultimately the two twin brothers stopped understanding each other, and thus the sepearation-individualisation between them solidified. They were the same, but clearly very different.

  I believe that trying to achieve 100% similarity and whole hearted validation over each other is not the goal for a relationship. Rather, we should be striving to be aware of our differences, intending to understand, keeping ourselves curious and open to ideas. In a paid service such as counselling, the counsellor’s job is not to validate everything, but to provide space for non-judgemental reflection. It might not be the most comfortable process, but it will be a supportive learning process.

Hope this answers your questions about counselling. If you’d like to explore these questions with Celina, start a Whatsapp conversation (+852 63135011).