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• There is an article of faith that accompanies us as counselling students. It is in the room with us every week when we attend college and came to the fore on our recent ‘residential’ – a kind of counselling boot camp where the agenda was to ‘explore the self’. The article says that this knowledge of self is a universal good. It is the personalised version of what the German philosopher Heidegger spent a lifetime trying to work out on all our behalves – what is the essence of our being? What makes our being, as a species, different from others’ being? What makes us us? For both Heidegger and the counselling creed, the merit is in the searching.

  What we need to know, says the counselling article, is what makes ‘me’? It makes an assumption that to wander round the rooms of my psychological and emotional house, to familiarise myself with every nook and cranny, will facilitate a better knowledge of my self and will be good and will do me good.

  To this end, we all committed to be closeted in a meeting house for a weekend, exploring what it was to be us… to be ‘me’. We came in pursuit of insight. And insight, according to humanistic and psychodynamic lore certainly, comes quite literally from looking in. The ‘residential’ was spent, in a whole group or small groups, mining ourselves for feelings that might, ordinarily, be hidden. We faithfully aired these feelings, these private thoughts, as a mark of our mutual trust and as a way of letting others know us better, letting private things become public, letting things we may hide from ourselves become apparent. We were all, I believe, acting in ‘good’ faith, believing that this type of honesty is the path to true karma/self-acceptance and psychological enlightenment.

  This did not result in any rending of garments or mass hysteria, but we did develop a currency of tears; several of us did meet with emotions that were unexpected and, to use a counselling euphemism, ‘challenging’, and several of us were shocked by revelations of feelings we harboured about partners, parents and peers. These feelings were authentic; they were trawled, in some cases, from what seemed great depths and aired for exploration, but with all the good faith in the world, it was impossible to resolve these issues or to quell the emotional storms that followed them in a weekend. Consequently, I drove away with a sense of unease, worried about what some of us might be taking home, about the way these revelations might ripple through the relationships we sustain outside the sanctuary of the counselling group – in real life.

  There emerges a conundrum: on the one hand, I ascribe to the First World War ethos: how can I expect others to go over the top if I am not prepared to do so myself? As a counselling general leading by example, how can I ask for a client’s trust and bravery in taking the therapeutic journey, if I am not prepared to delve into my own psyche? On the other hand, what if there is no palpable crisis? What if I manage OK? Reflecting on some of the experiences retold by colleagues over the residential weekend, there was part of me, witnessing the disassembly of existent ‘coping/management strategies’, that thought those strategies might be better left in place.

  So what of our faith? Is counselling a universal force for good? Does it offer something for everyone? Or should it be seen as a refuge for the needy? If not a last resort then some way down the line? Are we dealing with an island idyll or a port in the storm?

  Heidegger’s forebear and antithesis Aristotle (Heidegger thought him, on this topic, somewhat shallow), stated that the purpose of human existence is eudaimonia, which has been variously translated as happiness or as wellbeing, flourishing. I left our residential, privileged to be trusted by my fellow students and with a sense of responsibility and care for people who had placed this trust in me – a sign, if nothing else, of real friendship, but asking myself if insight and wellbeing are always compatible – as counselling lore might suggest. Is self-knowledge always good and is it a necessary bedfellow of true happiness; will it always facilitate a flourishing? For some of us and in some circumstances is it sometimes better not to know, to leave some rooms in our house closed, some stones unturned?

• Some details have been changed to protect identities