James Drysdale Stewart

So, on the 14th of February, I received the news that my father had passed away. Now, before I start, please be aware that although he was my father, we were not close. He left our family when my brother and I were very young, and while we did go and stay with him and his new wife for a…

L3CiCS Counselling Theory and Self-Awareness Assignment

The purpose of this assignment is to show how learning about counselling theory and applying it to your own life can promote and increase self-awareness, by deepening the understanding of your own personality, history and relationships. This will be a very personal journey through my counselling studies so far, and hopefully a good reflection of what I have learned about…

L3CiCS Reflective Diary – 22nd May 2020

Ethics in counselling are very important. I will be using the BACP’s Ethical Framework as contextual guidance to explore these hypothetical Ethical dilemmas. A client has been in counselling for a year and has made great progress. She brings in an expensive gift for you. She knows that this is something that you would like, and she knows that you…

L3CiCS Reflective Diary – 8th May 2020

This week in lockdown, I am working on self-awareness and how it contributes to the ability to empathise with others. Empathy is a kind of emotional imagination; it is the ability to map the knowledge of your own feelings to those of someone else in order to gain a deeper understanding of how those emotions influenced their mental state, their…

L3CiCS Reflective Diary 31st January 2020

This week we looked at why theory is important in counselling work. Through a group discussion we identified several key aspects of why it is important, and I was quite surprised by the amount we came up with. First though, I think it’s important that I reflect on what is meant by the word “theory”. A theory is generally a…

L3CiCS Reflective Diary – 10th January 2020

Over the past few weeks we’ve been learning about three very different counselling theories – Person-centred counselling, Psychodynamic counselling and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) – with very different methods, glossaries and philosophies that ultimately all work towards the same goal, which is helping people. They each offer a different language, and a different way of understanding our personality or self,…

L3CiCS Learning Log 10th January 2020

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is the current culmination of several other therapies, in particular: • Cognitive therapy – focusing on a client’s thoughts and how they feel on the inside • Behavioural therapy – focusing on how a client acts and reacts to certain situations The philosophy behind CBT is that the client’s problem is not the problem itself; the…

L3CiCS Reflective Diary – 15th November 2019

This week we went straight into roleplays with relation to discrimination – as a client we had to play someone that had experienced some kind of discrimination or was somehow different to the counsellor. First off, I was counsellor to Leonardo’s client. His difference was that he felt he was being mistreated by his employer because of his Attention Deficit…