Musings

What do I mean when I say I am a Focusing oriented counsellor?

Firstly, I should say something brief about what Focusing is.  Focusing is a way of learning about others and myself.  It combines meditation–the bringing of my attention to bear on a specific content–and creative expression–the use of language, pictures, movement, music, etc. to gain an understanding of that content. The bridge between these two activities is what Focusing calls the felt-sense or felt meaning.  It is a sense, often ...

What is mutuality in counselling?

I woke up in the middle of last night from a dream about work, something that rarely enters my dreams.  In the dream, I am listening to a client, and when he finishes speaking, I ask him what it is about our conversations that is of value to him.  His response is slow in coming.  I can see his mouth is trying to form a word, but something is keeping him from being able to do ...

Counselling for the darkness of depression.

I was recently in a conversation that brought home to me how much of what is called counselling is about a basic human need. I was speaking with a client, and he was telling me how important to him was the feeling of family, the feeling of belonging.  For him, not to have ...

Where does the notion of a therapy of resurrection come from?

It’s Good Friday, today, and so, it’s not surprising that I find myself this morning musing about what is undoubtedly the central story of western culture, and of many other cultures, that of resurrection.  And I find my mind effortlessly drifting to a question about ...

The phrase, counselling for earthly inhabitants, invites our attention in a specific way.

It started when I was reading some introductory paragraphs in a book about contemplation. The opening section of the book claimed the basic requirement for leading a thoughtful life is humility. My impression is that in our contemporary culture, humility is ranked low among qualities necessary for living ...

Thinking about empathic counselling

I was seated in the living room of a friend where a small group of us were just finishing up our monthly meeting of dream sharing and discussion.  As is often the case, we were all marvelling on how much easier it was to make sense of our seemingly chaotic dreams when we are talking about them with others.  I was aware that it wasn’t simply others that was crucial to my ability to interpret my dream, ...

How does counselling whole persons and their parts at the same time work?

I want to pick up on the question raised in the previous musing of how do we know when it’s most helpful to approach ourselves as a single, whole person or a person made up of many different and sometimes conflicting parts. My best simple answer is, for most of us, most of time, we can’t know. It takes a bit of trial and error, sometimes called floundering, ...

What is a counselling for the whole of who we are?

Now and again, it happens in my work as a counsellor and in my personal life that the word, “holistic”, comes up. I like the word, I’ve liked it for a long while now, but it’s only recently that I’ve started to ask myself what exactly does it mean, and, more importantly, what do I mean when using it.

My Macquarie Concise Dictionary provides me with the following for the ...

What makes for depression?

Mostly I’ve been educated to be a responsible person, and, at the same time, not a depressed one. When I claim that mostly I’ve been a responsible person, I mean that, by and large, I’ve done things I was expected to do in order to be thought a good person. Being responsible means I have responded to those expectations. Since my childhood, when I started seriously working at being responsible, I have had the expectation that one ...

Why is Couple Counselling an art in listening?

Staying together in a primary relationship can require endurance. Moving through the difficulties that inevitably arise in it can demand resilience to bounce back from the hurtful words that may be spoken or behaviours that we may wish had never happened . It is this latter quality that provides the title and theme of ...