Why Seaglass Psychology?

October 28, 2019 | General, Seaglass News

It took me a while to find the right name for my practice. It seemed like so much of what I wanted to communicate with a name was already in use!

After some time, I finally found a name that resonated with me: Seaglass Psychology. It evoked something beautiful, smoothing out the sharp edges of history, and it reminded me of the sea. I love the sea.

When I told my friends I had chosen the name for my practice, one of them sent me this link which, upon some research, appeared to be a shortened version of this:

I want to age like sea glass. Smoothed by tides, not broken. I want the currents of life to toss me around, shake me up and leave me feeling washed clean. I want my hard edges to soften as the years pass — made not weak, but supple. I want to ride the waves, go with the flow, feel the impact of the surging tides rolling in and out.

When I am thrown against the shore and caught between the rocks and a hard place, I want to rest there until I can find the strength to do what is next. Not stuck — just waiting, pondering, feeling what it feels like to pause. And when I am ready, I will catch a wave and let it carry me along to the next place that I am supposed to be.

I want to be picked up on occasion by an unsuspected soul and carried along — just for the connection, just for the sake of appreciation and wonder. And with each encounter, new possibilities of collaboration are presented, and new ideas are born.

I want to age like sea glass so that when people see the old woman I’ll become, they’ll embrace all that I am. They’ll marvel at my exquisite nature, hold me gently in their hands and be awed by my well-earned patina. Neither flashy nor dull, just the right luster. And they’ll wonder, if just for a second, what it is exactly I am made of and how I got to be in this very here and now. And we’ll both feel lucky to realize, once again, that we have landed in that perfectly right place at that profoundly right time.

I want to age like sea glass. I want to enjoy the journey and let my preciousness be, not in spite of the impacts of life, but because of them.

~ Bernadette Noll

This fits so well with my view of life and of therapy. Our history teaches us both the pain and the joys of being human and, in the process, it can create wounds: we can be shaped to have sharp edges. Life — like the sea — can toss us around and, with time, it can help us smooth out the roughness, creating something special. Something unique.

I see counselling as a way of consciously looking at those sharp edges, using the therapeutic relationship to understand where the roughness comes from and what it needs to start changing shape. My work, in this sense, is to help people look inwards, figuring out what their experience means, and how they can sort it out. I see this process as creating that beautiful patina of seaglass, that which hints to a bright light within. I’d love to help my clients feel like this poem. It’s an honor to be the one to help people with that.