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Learning to Sit Beside
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ISBN13: 9781911812067
Publisher: Inner Recovery Press
Published: Oct 27 2026
Pages: 278
Weight: 0.83
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
What does it really mean to become a therapist?
Learning to Sit Beside is a reflective exploration of counselling, recovery, and the personal journey of becoming a therapist.
This is not primarily a textbook about techniques. It is about what happens inside the therapist: the hopes, doubts, mistakes, emotional reactions, boundaries, responsibilities and moments of connection that shape the work over time.
Drawing on lived experience, recovery, counsellor training and therapeutic practice, John Graham explores the difference between helping and rescuing, between being useful and needing to be needed, and between bringing one's humanity into the therapy room and making the therapy about oneself.
The book considers themes such as:
- why people become therapists
- the wounded healer
- recovery and therapeutic work
- person-centred values and relational depth
- empathy, silence and presence
- helping versus rescuing
- supervision and self-awareness
- countertransference and therapist triggers
- rupture and repair
- making mistakes
- boundaries and responsibility
- burnout and self-care
- therapeutic humility
- continuing professional development
- becoming rather than arriving
Throughout the book, the emphasis is on presence rather than performance.
Therapy is not about standing above another person with answers. It is about learning how to sit beside them with honesty, compassion and enough humility to allow something new to become possible.
Written for trainee counsellors, newly qualified therapists, experienced practitioners, people considering counselling training, supervisors, addiction counsellors and readers interested in the emotional reality of therapeutic work, Learning to Sit Beside offers a thoughtful and human account of what it means to grow into the role.
Perhaps becoming a therapist is less about learning how to fix people and more about learning how to remain present beside them while something new becomes possible.
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