Bit of a rambling one, this. Four years ago I had a mental breakdown and I walked off into the night with the intention of killing myself. I didn’t do it, obviously, I changed my mind. I turned away from the void. Vowed to change. To become someone I’d always …
This week we are looking at Assessment in counselling, and how it informs the counselling work. In counselling, assessment is the process used to determine if counselling is appropriate and needed, which type of counselling would be the most suitable for a client’s needs, and to take an initial measurement …
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 …
Or yesterday, I forget. Whichever day it was, three years ago I was going to kill myself. I’ve come a long way, baby. Far enough? Not yet. We still have a ways to go. But still, considering the progress that I have made, it’s unreal. Compare the person I was …
This week we went over some Case Studies, and applied a SMART model to them with the aim of helping the client. I really enjoyed learning about the SMART model, and having a quick look at some of the other models and systems out there. We’ve learned how to ask …
The fear of turning out like my dad. — Iain Douglas Stewart 😙👌 (@Iain_D_Stewart) August 12, 2018 Inspired by this tweet, and powered by a love of self-discovery, I’m going to answer this question honestly and fully, to the best of my ability. It took me a while to get …
It is #WorldSuicidePreventionDay today, and it brought my feelings from this post into scrutiny: https://iaindstewart.net/blog/2005/08/25/gcse-results/ I say in the post that I wish I had paid attention during years ten and eleven, done some revision and actually applied myself. But at the time of the exams themselves, I was in …
This week we were looking at Ethics in counselling. Our tutor gave us some “Counsellor’s Ethical Dilemmas” to unpick and suggested we use the BACP’s Ethical framework to aid us. That is what it is there for, after all. The first ethical dilemma was that we had been working with …
This week was a bit more abstract and self-exploratory than usual, in that we carried on exploring our understanding of the relationship between our personalities and our helping work by asking ourselves various introspective questions (Unit 5.1), and we also considered the ways in which our life history has impacted …
We were given homework this week, which was to imagine our own ideal counselling room. Here is what I came up with. The building itself is old, with period features and a lot of character. It is in a centralised location, somewhere near Portsmouth and Southsea train station, maybe five …
