Week 23 – 2025

In an effort to chronicle my progress in the various avenues of my life, I have started using Obsidian in an effort to organise my thoughts and design processes. One of the features is a daily note system, in which I just jot down a few notes of what I've been doing that day and at the end of week…

Keith Flint 17/9/1969 – 4/3/2019 R.I.P.

Cross-post from ObeliskTherapy.net Three years ago, on Monday, the 4th of March 2019 Keith Flint was found unresponsive in his home after hanging himself. You'd think, watching one of The Prodigy's music videos that he was an aggressive and angry man. But he wasn't. Adorned with black ink, chunks of metal and an aggressive fashion sense, he did look intimidating.…

Life Coaching Diploma Module 1

I have recently taken up an online course about Life Coaching. Specifically, this one on New Skills Academy: https://newskillsacademy.co.uk/course/life-coaching-course If you fancy doing a course from New Skills Academy, consider using this affiliate link which will give you a massive 75% off a course: https://newskillsacademy.co.uk/refer/IAINDOUGLAS75-1226. It will also give me 75% off my next course, so it's a win-win scenario…

L3CiCS Comparing Counselling Theories Assignment

The aim of this essay is to compare and contrast two counselling theories of my choice. I have chosen to compare Psychodynamic Counselling and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. The philosophy behind the Psychodynamic Counselling approach is that we all have an unconscious mind as well as a conscious one. It states that the unconscious mind can hold on to painful memories…

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 – 8th November 2019

We were still working on diversity, discrimination and prejudice this week. Our tutor asked us to discover all the ways (both positive and negative) in which diversity can impact on the counselling relationship, which allowed us to consider how to take diversity issues into account when developing a counselling relationship. The most obvious negative one is a counsellor being unable…

L3CiCS Learning Log – 18th October 2019

This week we looked at the three stages of the counselling relationship. There are three stages in the therapeutic relationship between counsellor and client, and they apply to individual sessions as well as the counselling process as a whole. The start of a session is known as The Beginning and is about the counsellor exploring the client’s world and developing…
A letter to myself as a ten year old…

A letter to myself as a ten year old…

Inspired by a post Nikki wrote on her blog, https://lifeasjustnikki.wordpress.com/2018/10/04/dear-me/, I started this with the intent of writing a letter to my 10 year old self. I was in awe of her raw honesty, and her post really got me thinking about what advice I would give to myself at that age. I started writing but about halfway through I…
L2CiCS: Homework – Counselling in the Media – 10th February 2018

L2CiCS: Homework – Counselling in the Media – 10th February 2018

This week we were given a series of questions about how counselling is portrayed in the media, in particular magazine and newspaper problem pages and TV shows such as Oprah and Jeremy Kyle. Here are the two problems from “Agony Aunts” I have chosen to look at; One from a “lowbrow” newspaper and one from a “highbrow” newspaper. The first…

Learning Log – 8th November 2017

This week, we worked on a variety of different topics. One of those was defining the difference between prejudice and stereotypes. A prejudice is a decision that a person makes about something or someone without any evidence, based on a preconceived notion of some kind. A stereotype is an oversimplified idea of what a typical member of a class or…