Humanist approaches to Education Post 2

Ideas and  Reflections: Introduction to Counselling 2

The main points that have had impact on me from my second counselling session :

The counselling exercises this weekend I found very helpful because we revisited our nonverbal, opening and invitational skills. I was surprised that they had not vanished from my skill set, even though I had not been pouring over the content in the text. I therefore surmise I have internalized some of what I have practiced. The reasons this is revelatory to me is that I believe that, to date, my learning experiences have been mostly audio visual in nature, employing a mostly psychological splitting mode where I do not interact with others well and mainly see them as uninformed or not willing to learn. I know now that everyone is on a path that is different from me. I have also learned that I can learn and experience differently in a collaborative practical and hand-on manner while still using my intellect to guide me. I have been always seeking knowledge that is more intellectual in the absence of knowledge about my relationships and myself. Now that I have experience mindfulness, I realize what I have been missing and know I need to take a dramatically different approach to my relationships building and learning in the future. This I wish to share with both my daughters: Olivia who has Crohn’s disease which has brought on depression which has been around for well over a year; and Julia who is dealing with anxiety which is causing her spiral into depression an exhaustion. Julia is not listening to what her body is telling her so I will recommend further to her counsellors’ behest, the mindfulness techniques I have learned. Olivia and I will take the mindfulness-based stress reduction course; me supporting her so that she can get help since she tends not to follow anything her mother or I suggest.

The sessions also helped to dispel the notions I had about myself being less than empathetic in most of my dealings with people. I do however question what my performance using these skills would be like in a less clinical setting.

I have been practicing calming, mindfulness techniques and telling my wife and kids about how transformative, the information and practices have been. This home practice us keeping me grounded enough so that situational triggers which used to anger me have a lot less effect. This is especially true while driving on the streets of Brandon where I usually am infuriated daily.

Non-judgemental listening and acceptance of others differences figure largely in my new direction since practicing these counselling skills this weekend! Congruence has been sorely lacking in my outlook of ‘the other’ even though I purport to be accepting do to my experience with the down-trodden and marginalized, as I had spent all my career previous to Brandon School Division on Aboriginal reserves. I was not walking-the-talk as it were.

I have also curtailed my reading Common Dreams (http://www.commondreams.org/  ), TruthDig  ( http://www.truthdig.com/  ), and Democracy Now ( http://www.democracynow.org/  ) and books that I have by Chris Hedges, Henry Giroux, Naomi Klein and others who speak truth to power against the neoliberal elite world we live in. The reason is I feel I need a better worldview; one that does not give me a mood that will cause me to brood over the state of the world, which then triggers a sense of being emasculated and without agency to the oppressive forces at play in the world, and which affects my every relationship. These counselling sessions have reinforced and solidified within me the ‘circle of control /circle of concern’ guiding principle, which I always believed but never practiced.

Recordings was a great idea. It helped me have something more permanent to refer back to instead of using my dubious memory. It is more factual and has the anxiety of the performance removed so it can be examined more clinically. I think that maybe a professional actor, who could challenge in our counselling role to make sure we are guided towards getting thing wrong and then correcting the errors. Learning from failures is quite powerful and I believe may mirror real-life situations more aptly.

I found I was waiting for the moment to pounce on the client in the challenging scenario. I was expecting it. The unexpected is and being put on the spot so we err in our practice I think would be beneficial too. This I got from a client who role-played having a still-borne baby from a relationship from a married man. I had to suppress my shock and remain calm without becoming zombie-like in the face of this extremely challenging narrative. Most men would have great difficulty empathizing in this situation I believe. I am thankful that she did drop this bombshell on me because I had to think and feel my way through it, not just react. This helped me immeasurably.

Pithy phrases I like since they can elicit a create a discourse around the meaning and volume of knowledge hidden behind them. I refer to ‘thoughts are not facts’ and ‘wisdom without thinking’ aphorisms in The Mindful Way Through Depression text. I think that they are a sort of mantra you can keep for yourself that can trigger awareness too, once the skills of mindfulness have been practiced and internalized. During our ‘Thoughts in a Stream’, exercise, as I let all thoughts set on a leaf and drift downstream, these phrases kept coming back to me. I put them on a leaf and let them float away as well. They did help me refocus however.