Skills Recording and Assignment Done (tick!)

Tags

assignment, coursework, person-centred, skills

 

It’s a fortnight since my last post and that seems to belong to another person.

We’re in the Easter holidays and the alarms have been switched off. I seem for some very weird reason to have more energy. I woke up early this morning and rather than just reading a few books and faffing around I got up and went for a walk.

I have done the skills recording, which was a dreadfully stressful Saturday, although alleviated by a collective trip to the pub afterwards. That was last weekend. Yesterday I completed my essay. You had to pick out at least 5/10 skills and point out your use of them. I had more problem in assigning remarks I’d make to the right skills that writing them up. There is considerable overlap between effective questioning, checking your understanding and demonstrating deeper empathy with tentative remarks. Although I may go through it again before the end of the holidays I would be happy to hand it in and that is an enormous relief that suggests I might enjoy the holidays more without it hanging over my head. This is the quickest I have completed an assignment. I have put in not a single quotation or reference. I am comforted by the fact that in my tutorial last week my tutor said that my first assignment was too academic and the second one more appropriate to counselling. I’m not sure whether I was actually pleased by that.

We now only have one assignment left and I might be really brilliant and start on it and I might do something else. This is on personal development over the year and as such it will be interesting to write as progress has not stopped.

My mood has certainly lifted. This is also due to 2son having visited another school, even if he’s still finding it hard to get up for his current school or go and visit another one. I had to make his Universal Credit appointment on my own which was to hand over his sick note. Sorry, that should be a fit note. My son did hand it to me saying “look, I’ve got a piece of paper that says I’m retarded”. Anyway, at least we’re moving on.

After a slight wobble I am definitely going for the person-centred diploma rather than the integrative one. Those continuing from this year will split in two but I’ve got one or two coming with me and that’s all I need. We’ll have to get in of course. Applications open next Monday.

There are lots of other little bits happening, some good, some not so good, but none of them matter.

 

 

Advertisements

A Successful Week

Tags

anxiety, diploma, school visit, time, workload

The last fortnight has been intensely focused on 2son as he comes closer to accepting the need to move on to a another specialist school, one that can support him up to 25. I had visited this school in November and said I thought it would suit and it has taken 2son up to now to accept that he had to go see it.

I took him up for a day trip the previous week so he could have a look at the school and the accommodation and then took him up this week so he could stay for two nights and experience it. It went successfully in that he didn’t need to call me for support and he managed to join in. He needs to be pushed into a corner before he accepts that he has to get on with something and just do it. He was understandably incredibly anxious, as was I, but he was also very matter of fact about it. He didn’t say much about it afterwards, other than he thought it would do, which is really high praise.

I have been preparing for this event and worrying about it and trying to sort out domestic and work responsibilities. I cleaned out a U-bend for the first time last week but we still have a blocked sink, which is a trivial problem in itself but it adds to the list and serves of a reminder that something else will always happen to add to the list of boring stuff to sort out. Being away so much I oculdn’t call anyone out to deal with it.

1son is in Italy and hasn’t really been in communication much although his brothers report that he’s playing a lot of video games in the evening so that suggests he hasn’t got a job yet and is saving his money. I got an email from 3son’s teacher while I was away explaining that he is about to bugger up his remaining A level. I think he’s done with it all really and that despite wanting to do A levels he’s just no longer in the frame of mind to do them. Getting an apprenticeship would be one thing, but a job would also make sense. 4son is quietly getting on with his GCSEs and actually doing more than five minutes revision for them. He’s noticing the difference in results.

As usual, I’ve gone through all four children before turning to me. I still feel overwhelmed by the next stages for 2son: getting him to visit a second school and getting the local authority to fund what will be another expensive option. This is all supposed to be agreed by the end of this month and so far this year I’m on my second temporary case worker for SEN and no sense of how long this one will be in place.

I’m struggling with therapy and my therapist says she’s realised that she needs to dredge my childhood out of me as no set of questions, whether the TA that we’ve just done, or anything else is going to do it. I have a narrative about my childhood that I can deliver but I find it quite difficult to go beyond that and to really remember how I felt. I have blocked it up so much that not only is it difficult to unblock, but it is also difficult to recognise what I have blocked out. I need to do some serious digging. However I also am coming up to an intensive part of our course. Next weekend we do our skills recording and then we spend the Easter holidays analysing it and writing a full essay on it. I still haven’t fully listened to the last three skills sessions that we recorded and found it difficult enough to get our short essays done for this weeks which were only 500 words each. So I am feeling that there is currently not enough time in the day for me to do all the things I need to. I will get there but not without a fair dose of anxiety along the way. It does also make we wonder how I will cope with the workload requirements for the diploma, where the essays are double the length. Applications open in a few weeks. Several of my peers are looking at the integrative pathway rather than the purely person-centred and although I have little doubt that the latter is my choice I’m also not liking the idea of losing these people and having to start afresh.  It would be the wrong reason to go integrative but it has sewn doubt in my mind.

There you are then. It’s a messy write up but I am in a messy place. I’ve been away for four nights and that seems an awful lot. 4son has gone to school. 3son has gone at least once and I’m struggling to get back into the swing of being at home. And we’ve run out of toilet roll.

 

 

Differences Between Us

Tags

differences, identity, labels, skills recording

Once again I left this until far too late but I least I wrote up my journal for the residential weekend, which came first, and my two short assignments, due in tomorrow. So finally I have time for this session which did leave me uncomfortable.

One of the questions we have to answer for our skills recording is what difference is there between listener and speaker and how do we overcome it. Two by two each pair identified their differences easily: old with young, career-driven and child-driven etc. When it  came to me however the only difference I had perceived was that given a situation outlined by my speaker, I would have acted differently. I said we had no differences that had been at all relevant within the previous sessions.  The tutor exclaimed”really” in a way that suggested she didn’t believe it and  asked us to name the obvious difference. Well I’m white and my partner is mixed race but we still hadn’t discussed anything that made that relevant. My partner did echo this completely. The tutor suggested that being colour-blind was not appropriate as it is necessary to be aware of our differences rather than pretending they don’t exist.

I found this really difficult to handle. I try to meet people and get to know them based on the person they are, not assume that visual differences necessarily mean anything. A person brought up in Ghana will have a very different outlook and identity compared to the same person born and bred in England. But they’re black either way (unless of course they’re white). I also dislike this attitude because when I first met my partner for our skills recording S, I was very quickly aware of several things we had in common as well as differences. When I meet someone I look to the common threads rather than the differences. The things you share are what bring two people together and once you’ve got some sort of relationship then you talk about your differences. Some people did bring up differences that made more sense: if you use very different language you need to check you are being understood; sometimes people use the same words with different meanings; differences of faith, socio-economic background, class as well as character traits like confidence, extrovert.

I think what the course is trying to say only it’s saying it badly is that we each have our own identity and that identity is forged by our upbringing, our circumstances, how we react to it all, and what we do with it all as an adult. All these experiences shape us differently and mean we have different identities. We must always beware labels. Just because we are both divorced doesn’t mean we had the same divorcing experience; everybody’s childbirth is a different story. Someone brought up on the street round the corner from me could have had a completely different childhood. The only thing to do is to look at the person in front of you and get to know who they are and set aside all and any labels, whether they represent differences or similarities.

After all that discussion and after I waffled as speaker, S and I decided to talk about our childhoods to let the differences out. The more time we spend together the more we realise how unnatural this skills recording will be as we will talk about a topic earlier agreed on, possibly that we’ve gone through already and we will try and leave pauses and make it easier for each of us to demonstrate our skills. I think most people are doing the same. This recording is a demonstration of our skills rather than an examination. If it wasn’t they would be better off putting us in front of people we hadn’t worked with all year and seeing how we got on. So there is something very artificial about it.

A Plan, Sort Of

Tags

2son, beautiful you, catch up, plan, reflection, school

Having said I need a plan for where to go next, after having completed our TA questions, I think I have come up with one.

I was searching for self-awareness writing prompts, which came up with a lot of lists that were a little bit relevant but not very and then I remembered that I had tried this with Rosie Molinary‘s Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self-Acceptance some six years ago.

Giving you a prompt for every day for a year it offers a reflection to consider or an action to take. I only managed a dozen or so before I gave up but I am going to have another attempt. This time I’m going to use the second edition which I bought (she gifted me the first). When I have journaled previously I shall compare and contrast, hoping that I’ve grown in the last six years (which I know I have). Since I’ve now got two copies I’ve leant one to my therapist so we can discuss.

It’s a good plan but time for reflection has suddenly shrunk. We had our course residential weekend which went well but was exhausting and I haven’t finished post weekend reflections and write ups. We have two small essays due soon and two more big ones that both need preparation for. I do not feel at the moment that I have time enough to process the work we are doing and I feel that I am playing eternal catch up.

I had a day visiting 2son’s school where the snow didn’t permit me to visit him, closely followed by the residential weekend. I then spent three days with 2son taking him for a day trip to a potential new school. This is hugely exciting as I visited it in November and it’s taken us this long for him to be willing to visit. They have offered him an assessment next week when he stays for two nights and I have to be around in case of need so that’s next week devoted to him. I really had my doubts until he got into the car as to whether he would come or not. I didn’t know what we would do if he didn’t as he’s a bit big for me to throw over my shoulder and the staff aren’t permitted to be physical with him. So inside I was panicking all the way. I went to collect him and he was still in bed but he opened his eyes to me which was a relief and then he threw me out so he could get dressed. After five minutes I was clock-watching wondering how long it takes him to get dressed. Anyway it was all splendid. He visited the school and two houses, one on a par with his current house and one for the more independent student. Everyone was nice and he did ask lots of questions but seemed as relaxed with it all as he could be. So maybe I won’t worry quite as much about next week.

I did take my course work with me but failed to do any of it other than a bit of reading as I really wasn’t in the mood. Unfortunately I do not have the luxury of not being in the mood at the moment. Work is just being let go for these busy weeks.

So having decided that I’m going to use Beautiful You as a writing prompt I have yet to write #1. Here’s to the future.

Learning About Myself

Tags

assertive, avoidance mechanisms, changes, faith, mind going blank, mountain, pride, snow, Stepford Wives

Well it was certainly an interesting weekend. We have coalesced into a group of ten, half of whom smoke so a natural subdivision has formed. There is a feeling that we are down to the core group, that no one else will now leave before the end and that we have bonded.

The weekend in itself was a bit of a mess and we have moaned about it far too much in feedback and in PD after. It was supposed to happen in the Autumn term and be about breaking barriers and bonding, or some such. Since we’d already got that it was more about going over skills and doing our first recordings of skills practice. The sessions were badly arranged (I hadn’t realised until then that it was our tutor’s first teaching experience) and a very full on Saturday left us exhausted such that when we reassembled on Sunday after lunch our desire was to go home early, which we did. There was also an awful lot of tension before the weekend as to whether it would go ahead due to the snow (which in fairness was the biggest snow since the last biggest snow). Some of us did go for a lovely walk through the snow on Saturday, with some lovely untouched snow that crunched loudly with every footstep. We stayed up on Saturday night talking nonsense and drinking. We bonded some more.

We played several little ice breakers and warm ups that were interesting to participate in and to note the thought with which some of us had prepared them. I got assertive and I note that this is not the first time on the course that this has happened and it is as if a new voice is emerging that is confident to speak out. Our tutor was not going to participate in these little sessions and I insisted that she did, especially as she had joined with the first one that I led. She wanted to sit back and observe us and I said no, she was part of the group and had therefore to join in. My peers supported this viewpoint. As I write this I realise the similarities with my father writing about his mountain climbing experience but refusing to bond with the team members. The difference of course is that our tutor decided to join in and turned out to be incredibly competitive.

Our tutor’s opener was to invite us all to pick up a felt tip and then fill in the sentence our colour belonged to. My purple sentence was “The thing I am most proud of is…”. My immediate reaction was to fill it with “my children” which came as no surprise to many. What was surprising was how uncomfortable that made me feel. Stepford Wives sprang to mind with this image of the perfect housewife who cooks and cleans, is house proud, bakes for the cake sale and has no personality of her own. Being proud of being a good parent is not the same as being a proud housewife but for me the two are linked, no doubt a reflection on my mother’s attempt to be both. Being proud of my parenting and my sons is still new to me and I did find saying it out loud difficult but I hadn’t expected the housewife side effect. On discussing this with my therapist she suggested that what I should be most proud of is me. She is of course right and it is about time I acknowledged that the journey I have gone through, am still going through and the immense changes that have occurred. If last year was about accepting that I have done well by my children, this year should be about acknowledging that I have done well by me. In addition, I have to write an assignment on my personal development over the last year so will need to reflect on it for that anyway. I had also suggested to school that they reflect with 2son on the changes he’s made since he got there so it is a recurring theme.

I played a simple little game that my children had learned when they did their drama sessions some years ago. It was about feeling the mood of the room an sensing the quality of the silences. It’s a game to be played with some consideration and I was really quite annoyed that no one tried it seriously and there was laughter throughout. All subsequent games played were much lighter.

One of the games that stumped me was a person would offer four choices about herself, “my favourite colour is…” “I have never…” and you rush to the corner of the choice you think is correct. That was fine but my mind went absolutely blank when I had to come up with my own four choices about something. I needed everyone else to shout out ideas to me before going for type of books. I find it so difficult to put myself out there in any shape or form. I could have selected favourite colour or something equally innocuous that gave nothing away or something deeper that was revealing. But my mind went blank and I realise that this too is a hangover from childhood. It is not a defence mechanism as such but an avoidance mechanism whereby my brain simply shuts down when it fears ridicule from an inappropriate answer. I can remember the exact same feeling when Mme Van de Steen would ask me a question in French class and I knew that she would pick my answer to pieces so I would sit there and refuse to answer. That same blank feeling came across to me and I fully recognised it. It also matches many a conversation with my father when I would struggle to explain something he couldn’t understand or when I would just sit there passively waiting for it to be over. I only recently realised that this was a pattern. Playing Trivial Pursuit at Christmas I couldn’t come up with a word I knew that I knew. I cannot do pub quizzes because even when I know the answer it won’t surface. I’m not good at thinking of words which often reside on the tip of my tongue. One of the ways I am trying to work with this is to do the Guardian quick crossword (now available on the app in a very neat form). I’m trying to not bother about completing it or feeling stupid for not knowing answers but to simply exercise the power of recall and bring the answers to the surface in the hope that this will help break the pattern.

Lastly, and I realised I haven’t even mentioned the work and practice skills recording we did, we spent the weekend in a convent. I did not realise that would be so triggering. I suspect I should write a whole piece on faith but I have a mix of negative and positive experiences like many I suppose. What I found really irritating was the amount of propaganda or publicity about god. A great number of poor artwork decorated the halls depicting one saint or another, Jesus surrounded by his followers etc. None of them were attractive or had any artistic merit. There was lots of reading material left everywhere although surprisingly no bibles in the bedrooms. I almost got saddled with a small bedroom which had a cross hanging over the bed which would not have worked. The nuns were perfectly nice and helpful but I felt beholden to them in a way I wouldn’t staying at a B&B even though the services offered are very similar. It’s that feeling of being on your very best behaviour as you would with a grandparent when you’re very young. On a very practical basis I resent some of my money going towards to the church in payment, however little.

Skills Practice

Tags

assumptions, father, snow

Today was a bizarre day. The day before I had spent on a school visit to discuss 2son’s future and had driven there and back in pouring snow. I was using windscreen cleaner to clear the windscreen every few minutes as the wipers wouldn’t cut the snow and I ran out just as a service station was coming up so I went on the hunt for some more cleaner and was not the only one. I was struck by a young woman asking me whether the stuff I’d just bought was what she needed to stop her windscreen getting covered and I was wondering if she was safe to drive. I don’t know much about cars but it felt like I knew more than she did.

Anyway it was a long day and I was really struggling to get in the zone for my course. I hadn’t gone to an exhibition first as I needed to get a blood test done and that was the only time I could manage. Also I was looking forward to seeing 1son afterwards for dinner before he flies off to Rome next week. We discussed the need for our future assignment to reflect on changes in personal development over the last year. 3son thought I had changed in the last year but wasn’t sure what was about, that maybe I appeared more confident. I mentioned this to my therapist and she said she no longer felt battered and bruised after a session with me and that I had just become a little softer. I think I have lowered my defences, just a tad, and am slightly more willing to take a risk. Alongside that goes just caring a little less what others think about.

We had an observer for triads who had joined us the previous week when she had given me good feedback and when I say good I mean useful rather than all positive. I hadn’t felt able to write so much about her for my observation because I was busy trying to work out what it was about her during the session that grated. Again I discussed it with my therapist who asked whether I could have said that as my observation, that I wasn’t happy with something but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It would have been the right thing to do but I was trying to work out exactly what it was. This week I was able to observe her without having to write anything down as the tutor was doing the observation which enabled me to spot it. She seems too assertive, making statements rather than questions and it can come across as too pushy and too expert (and too much like my father).

The person I was listening to surprised me when she said this weekend would be the first time she had taken a train journey on her own as all holidays were with family and mostly driven. I exclaimed “really” rather too loudly in a way that sounded as if I was making assumptions about her lack of travel experience which I suppose in a way I was. But I also refrained from making the assumption that her religion dictates certain behaviours because I do not know how orthodox she is and therefore how much her faith does affect her behaviour. I felt that my observer’s reaction afterwards of well, what do you expect with her faith was far more assumption driven than mine.

One of the reasons I wanted to get this written up now is that we are on our residential weekend out in the relative middle of nowhere and we have a full on weekend with each other which all started off with a difficult journey through the snow.

Where to Next?

Tags

acceptance, forward, let go, progress, therapy

Writing this on a Sunday is too far away from the session and I am struggling to remember what we were doing. More skills practice. I found my observation difficult as I couldn’t quite work out what I was uncomfortable about and the person had given me some very good feedback and I felt that I hadn’t done her justice. She is awfully self-confident but I’m not sure that she’s right. Bearing in mind what our tutor had said last time I tried to say more / make bigger interventions and ended up giving advice.

We handed in our second assignment and our tutor still hasn’t returned our remarked first assignments which I actually find really annoying as she’s now taken longer on the remarks than she did on the first ones and I do want to know. She was going to tell us what we are doing on our residential weekend next week but didn’t do that either. I like her teaching most of the time but when it’s admin or course structure there’s a lack of direction and information.

In PD we returned to the theme of bullying. One of us mentioned the difficulty in being able to forgive herself for standing by and doing nothing so I talked about something I’m still struggling with but am actually a lot more accepting of. I didn’t stand up to bullies because I couldn’t have. While I would respond differently as the person I am now, I was not that person then. If I could have done something different I would have and the fact that I didn’t means that I couldn’t. I need to accept that I couldn’t have done otherwise and to forgive myself. Let it go. I think I have accepted a lot of it but I’m not really sure that I’ve forgiven myself.

There was another occasion like this, I think last week, when we talked about the ability to say no and a few said they couldn’t and I said you have to practice. Both times I felt that I was further forward than them, not that it’s a competition or anything, but I felt this was a lesson I have learned. I felt a bit smug. Although, did I really feel smug or is it that I am just not used to feeling confident about progress and therefore I identify it as a negative feeling. I should feel more confident about myself than I do and this is an issue I will keep coming back to. I am a lot better than I think I am, in so many ways, and I need to be able to acknowledge that. We’ve finished going through our TA questions in therapy so I think it’s time we talked about where we are going next. I am feeling, and I do in triads, that I don’t know where to start. I don’t want to talk about my week or if I do, I try to keep it to five minutes. We’ve talked about my parents endlessly. I don’t know what I need to do or focus on next and we need to talk about that.

I love my boys

Tags

board game, essay, holidays, laughter, love, positive, sons

I have done 11/13ths of my essay,  due in on Thursday. I have come to a conclusion, other that I still hate essays. School holidays are my downtime, when the alarm is switched off and I get up to my own beat. Work lessens as people are on holiday or not really trying very hard and it’s often an opportunity for me, if not to get away, at least to simply spend less time in front of the computer and thinking that I must get on with stuff.

I didn’t get my essay done before the half term, which was the plan. Something came up that was more important as something often does. I really resent having to do these assignments during the holidays. That was my big conclusion. Our next one happens over the Easter holidays with no way of doing it first. It’s a clear pattern, but not one that I like as it doesn’t suit me. My holidays are a little bit of space when I have time for me and I don’t like giving it up.

Anyway, back to school with a horrendous week up ahead. 2son came home on Friday and we had a few days with 2son so all 4 boys together. Four of us placed a new board game – Scythe. It said the gameplay was 115 minutes which is awfully precise. Why not say 2 hours? Anyway we debated the fact that we’d add on an hour for not knowing the rules and then add on a couple of hours for the amount of arguing and poking fun at each other. That was about right. We started around 7pm on Friday and finished around 4pm on Saturday. Great game that took us a few hours to get the hang of and we really enjoyed its complexity and the fact that you didn’t have to go to war and double cross other players (as in Game of Thrones). I do worry about 3son losing out by not participating in these activities but whatever we do, someone always doesn’t join in.

It really reminded me how much I enjoyed spending time with my boys. When I go to therapy or discuss them on my counselling course I often focus on the negatives or on all the stuff I have to do for them. Even on here, when writing. The truth is though, although two of them have major challenges to get through in life, that’s only part of who they are. 1son is about to go off to Italy and have a go at life there. Good luck to him and congratulations to him for wanting to do something different. 2son may be autistic, with lots of emotional and behavioural difficulties, but he’s also one of the most intelligent people I know and he makes me laugh. 3son is in a world of his own and severely struggling with depression, to the point where he struggles to get his prescription renewed and is probably about to drop another A level leaving him 1 and and EPQ. 4son’s greatest burden is living with his brothers but he has got through whatever that did to him. He has given up coming to football since December but we’re aiming for mid table mediocrity with nothing to play for and it really isn’t exciting.

They all make me laugh. They all make me think. I love it when we just sit down and talk whatever we talk about, whether it’s deep and meaningful or complete and utter nonsense (more likely). They are good companions and it’s part of the reason I feel less of a need to go out in the evening to escape. I’m almost a stranger in my local.

Having said all that, this week is going to be a ‘mare. I have to fix the car, take 2son to his first interview for Universal Credit, sort out 3son and his missing prescription, have my therapy, have my second appointment for ASD assessment, finish my sodding essay and go out and have fun five nights in a row. Busy.

From Constructive Criticism to Bullying

Tags

bullying, constructive criticism, counselling, skills practice

For this session our group was whittled down to 9. We’ve had two leave us permanently and a number taking early holiday. It felt quite cosy and encouraged those who tend to be less verbal to speak out a bit more.

We started off with a lengthy skills practice session, with twenty minutes each rather than our normal 10-15 minutes. This is long enough for the session to have a noticeable beginning, middle and end.

I started off as the listener (aka practice counsellor) and was observed by our tutor. This was the first time she had observed me, other than as the listener in the one and only fishbowl that we have done. This observation made me feel very nervous and the fact that we started off before she joined us and had to start again gave us a false start which all just felt wrong. Then she wrote a lot and you are sitting there wondering what you have done now.

I do have a problem with being examined, whether it’s in an essay being marked or observations noted. It does take me back to school and feelings of inadequacy and being found wanting. She started off her comments by asking me how I’d felt I’d done which is an uneasy question, especially when you know you’re about to be told how you’ve done.

I said, and this was echoed by several other members when we fed back as a group, that I felt very unsure of what I could say, in a way that wasn’t directed and wasn’t reading too much into what wasn’t being said, into the undercurrents. Because I felt unsure, I preferred to say nothing or be minimalist. Also the previous week we had again discussed that need to sit back and not intervene as much, that as listeners we were spending too much time talking. So I thought I had been better at not saying too much and had been tentative. Apparently not. Those paraphrasing remarks I had made seeking confirmation of my understanding did not come over as questions but as statements. I though I use rising intonation with a statement making it into a question (as in “you miss your dog a lot then”) but apparently that didn’t come over. I didn’t intervene enough early on, didn’t do enough basic reflecting and then finished on a clanger, which I totally accept. It’s very hard to not say something that is there just to be reassuring. My tutor said I should say more, be courageous and intervene. If I say too much and get it wrong then that is what all these practice sessions are for.

I said in the feedback that it would be good to have a fishbowl with the tutor as listener. I do feel confused by the right level of intervention. We’ve had comments in triads that people say too much, don’t see enough or say the wrong things and I’ve lost my ability to sense what is right in this. In some ways the further we go forward the less I feel I know. It’s left me feeling uncertain and confused, with an awareness that we only have a month or so before we’re supposed to do our audio recordings of a skill practice. I wasn’t a happy bunny.

In personal development someone picked up on a previous session, when a member who wasn’t present talked about being bullied at school. It turned out that we all had. Maybe that was because we are a self-selecting group but that 100% agreement was still a surprise. I felt very uneasy and emotional about talking about it and it took a while before I said anything. It seemed clear that some of us had been more deeply affected by it than others. I sat there with, well with what bubbling up? Anger? Fear? Was it just how I felt at the time, that feeling helpless, angry and bewildered? I think it just all came back and I really didn’t want it to. I felt slightly resentful at being dragged back there. It wasn’t my choice; it was where the group went and I didn’t want to go along with it. It’s still there, all that emotion. It’s not resolved and I haven’t let go of it. It’s the opposite of feeling empowered, of feeling able to control my own destiny and it also comes back when I get criticised, however constructive it is. It all joins up and that made for quite an emotional day.

Self-care isn’t Selfish

Tags

emotional resilience, exhaustion, paperwork, self-care

I had just worked out that the reason why the refuse collectors hadn’t come to collect mine before I hastily finished putting the rubbish out on the day rather than the night before was that I was a day early.

I considered that if I got that wrong, maybe my recollection of completing last week’s journal on Friday was also wrong. It was and so here I am trying to recollect last week’s session.

After all that kerfuffle about the essay, it took me half an hour to make the necessary changes and much of that was spent wondering whether that was all I needed to do. I still think the lack of guidelines is unhelpful but at least it’s done. I did ask whether it was satisfactory as I handed it in and will feel better to get the ticks back.

Much of our session was spent discussing self-care. The focus was on how, if you didn’t look after yourself, especially your emotional well-being, you were unable to give your clients the attention they needed. I reflected on how much this applied to me in life rather than in counselling. It’s taken me a long time to recognise that I do need to look after myself, that it isn’t selfish, that it enables me to look after my children better. However many of the signs that we talked about as depicting exhaustion have been a part of my life for a long time: broken sleep, constantly feeling tired and lacking in energy, social withdrawal (which yo-yos) and that feeling that it is all never ending without signs of improvement.

Several of us with complicated family lives took this to heart as a reflection of our existing life which was further reinforced by a self-care assessment sheet we then completed, rating different aspects of our life according the frequency and regularity we complied. This was actually quite interesting, dividing our self-care into physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual and professional. My weakest area which came as no surprise, was physical, with a lack of sleep, exercise and fun physical activity. The others though were better than I thought in recognition that I was aware of where I struggle and that I am at least trying to look after myself even if I don’t always succeed. So there were no real surprises but it was thought-provoking.

The majority of us are wanting to continue with the diploma next year and it was a relief to hear in PD that we would get priority over external students coming in. One less thing to worry about.

Self-care at home went out the window. Firstly with the lack of writing this up quickly. Then I had a reminder that I hadn’t filled in a form for a prospective school for 2son. A quick glance at it revealed why. At 30 pages I spent the entire weekend completing it, and sorting out all his paperwork at the same time. I didn’t get any work on the next essay done or anything else. But I did it, over 5,000 words of it. I’ve also almost finished my care assessment which is only 15 pages which I struggled with. Questions asking me what my long term goals and aims are in various areas left me often stumped but I shall revisit it for the third time and send it off today.

Saturday saw the arrival of one of those nasty letters from the council asking whether I thought 2son still needed an EHCP or whether he was cured. Or words to that effect. At least it’s only one page and I didn’t get quite as emotional as the last time I got a similar letter.

So the last few days have been filled with forms and quite a lot of introspection. Many of the detailed questions about 2son’s behaviour I found myself unable to answer and then felt guilty about not knowing. The care assessment is emotionally challenging as it basically asks me to describe all the ways in which I am not coping. Writing these down requires a level of deep honesty that is painful and in complete contrast to my normal coping mechanisms. Whether it will achieve anything is another matter but I did put in it that I should have done it years ago but didn’t have the awareness or the capacity.

I was also planning on booking myself a quick holiday for next week’s half term before 2son returns. I haven’t and I’m not sure I’ll get round to it now although I desperately need it as I need to finish my essay apart from anything else.

Adding to all that we had 3son’s parents’ evening where it is very clear that he is probably going to completely bugger up his A levels. If that happens he will find another way but why does life have to be so fucking complicated.