Age Is a Gauge: Meeting Across Generations in the Counselling Room
With thanks to our member, Tina Stockwell, for this blog.
There is always a moment when a new client appears on my screen and we take one another in. They see me, I see them, and before either of us has said very much we will both have formed some kind of impression. Age is part of that, especially when there are several decades between us.
I am approaching sixty. I don't have a problem saying that, though I'm still not entirely sure how it happened. I had assumed that by this age I would feel settled and certain, and would at least know where I had put my phone. Instead, I sometimes look for it while I am using it.
When a client is much younger than me, I imagine they wonder whether I can really understand their world. I wonder that too, sometimes. It isn't that I doubt we can work together. It's that I don't want to rush past the differences, or pretend they aren't there.
I currently work with a client in their mid-teens. We are almost a lifetime apart. There are cultural references I don't recognise, and parts of their day-to-day life that sit completely outside my experience. And yet when we sit together, something quite ordinary happens. They talk, I listen, I reflect back what I think I've heard. If I've misunderstood, they tell me. Sometimes we laugh. Slowly, we find our own way of speaking to each other.
Much the same happens with clients in their twenties, thirties, forties. There may be one generation between us, or two. They may have grown up with ideas about relationships, identity, work and family that look nothing like the ones I inherited. Some hold back on slang at first and end up educating me later. I'd rather ask than nod knowingly while understanding absolutely nothing.
I don't need to understand every word immediately. I need to understand why what they're telling me matters to them.
Age can feel very present in the room. A younger client describing the end of a relationship, and part of me already knows this won't be the end of their story — they have so much life still ahead. But saying that too quickly misses the point entirely. It hurts now. Telling somebody they have plenty of time can be comforting from where I sit, and unbearably lonely from where they're sitting.
That's one of the things younger clients keep teaching me: we can't use the length of life we've already lived to shrink the importance of where somebody else is today.
They've also shown me how hard it can be to find your place in the world now. I left home at an age when many younger people simply can't afford to. That doesn't mean it was easy for my generation — but the possibility existed in a way it often doesn't now.
There's an emotional cost to that which gets lost when the conversation only covers rent, house prices, insecure work. Someone can feel ready to leave home and still be unable to go. They can study, find work, do everything expected of them, and still end up sleeping in the bedroom they had as a child. Shame creeps in easily, especially when everyone around them seems to be moving forward.
Living at home can also keep old family roles alive. A person might be making complicated adult decisions in every other part of their life and still become the child again the moment they walk through the front door. For some clients, home is warm and steady. For others, it comes wrapped in questions, expectations, and very little room to work out who they're becoming.
Clients in their thirties often carry a different kind of time pressure. Friends are buying houses, marrying, announcing pregnancies. They may want those things too, and fear they're running out of time to get them. Fertility is often somewhere in this — sometimes named outright, sometimes circling the edges of a session for weeks before it's spoken. I don't come in with reassurance about "other paths to a meaningful life," not straightaway. That line is true, and it is also, very often, the wrong thing to say to someone who is grieving a future they had quietly assumed would happen. What tends to help more is simply staying with the grief long enough that it doesn't have to be resolved before we can talk about it — giving language to the specific loss, whether that's a relationship, a diagnosis, a decision still unmade, or a door slowly closing. Some of that work is about mourning. Some of it is about untangling what the client actually wants from what they've absorbed they're supposed to want by a certain age.
By their forties, clients may be looking around and wondering how they ended up in a life that no longer feels like theirs. Some are starting again after a relationship ends. Some are caring for children while beginning to worry about ageing parents. Others are questioning family expectations they've carried for decades and feeling guilty for even asking the question.
These aren't simply practical stages of life. They touch identity, belonging, the fear that everyone else has somehow managed adulthood better.
Then there's social media, which has changed how people experience themselves and each other. Most of my generation made at least some of our mistakes in private. An embarrassing moment happened in front of whoever was there. It might have felt enormous, but it wasn't photographed, shared, and kept alive indefinitely.
Younger clients often feel permanently visible, permanently assessed. There's a constant invitation to compare their ordinary, complicated life against the carefully curated lives of everyone else. Relationships begin and end through a screen. Somebody can ignore your message while staying visibly online, and you get to watch them appear to move on without you.
I feel a real sadness when clients describe this — not pity, and not a belief that my generation had it right, because we didn't. It's more an awareness of how little space exists now to retreat from judgment. The outside world follows people home and sits down beside them at night.
It's easy to respond by telling younger people to spend less time on their phones. But their phone may hold their friendships, their work, their relationships, their access to whatever community makes them feel understood. Putting it down doesn't always feel like a healthy break. Sometimes it feels like disappearing.
I'm also cautious about the idea that younger generations are less resilient. Many are far more open about anxiety, trauma, identity than my generation was ever encouraged to be, and that openness gets mistaken for fragility. I have sat with younger clients carrying responsibilities that should never have been theirs to carry.
Some grew up reading the emotional weather in their homes — knowing when a parent needed calming, when it was safer not to bring in another problem, when their own distress would simply be too much for the room. They may have been loved and cared for in every practical sense, while quietly learning that everybody copes better when they look fine.
That pattern can outlast childhood by decades. I work with adults of every age who still feel responsible for their parents' emotions, who find it almost impossible to say "I'm not okay" without immediately calculating what that admission will cost somebody else.
Therapy can sometimes feel like reparenting, though I hold that word carefully. I'm not becoming the parent they needed. What I can offer instead is the experience of being with another person without having to take care of them. A client can tell me something painful without softening it for my benefit. They can be angry, uncertain, ashamed, silent. Nobody has to reassure me they're fine before the session ends.
Warmth in therapy lives in those moments, I think — in staying present when the conversation turns uncomfortable, in getting something wrong and hearing the correction without flinching, in admitting I don't know what a word means. Sometimes it's just holding enough quiet that they get to decide, in their own time, whether they want to say the next thing.
My age brings something into that relationship. I've lived long enough to know that people survive experiences they once thought would finish them. I'm less frightened by emotional intensity than I was earlier in my career, and I no longer feel that old pressure to produce an answer when what somebody actually needs is somewhere to bring the question.
But age doesn't make me the expert on anybody else's life. The moment I catch myself thinking "I've seen this before," I've probably started missing the person in front of me. I might recognise the shape of something. I haven't lived this version of it.
There was a birthday, a few years back, that shifted something in how I think about all this — the one where I stopped expecting a future version of myself to arrive and finally quietly settle the argument. I'd spent my thirties and forties assuming certainty was somewhere up ahead, waiting to be collected once I'd put in enough time. That birthday was the one where I realised it wasn't coming, and — more usefully — that I didn't need it to. What replaced it wasn't confidence exactly. It was something closer to permission: to sit with a client's unresolved question without needing to resolve it myself first, to be uncertain out loud instead of privately.
That, I think, is close to what ageing well means to me. Not arriving anywhere. Not becoming unshakeable. Just getting steadily better at staying in a room with whatever's actually there — someone else's pain, my own not-knowing — without needing to fix it, outrun it, or perform having it handled.
People come into therapy wanting many different things, but underneath there's often a hope: to be known without being judged, without being reduced to one part of themselves. Age is one part of that picture. It deserves to be noticed, because it shapes the distance between us, the assumptions each of us carries, the world each of us has known.
It's only a gauge, though. The relationship starts once we're both willing to meet across whatever distance it measures.
