Week 3 Journal 1
It is so good to be on a counselling course and I’m really looking forward to helping people. Today the focus was on empathy and how important is. Empathy means to understand, it means to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. I found it interesting to learn that it is impossible to be empathic if I sit in judgement of someone.
I am a very understanding and non-judgemental person. I think this is because I have seen and done a lot in my life. I am a very open person and have no problem talking about my life. In skills practice when I talk about things that have happened to me, my peers say they learn a lot from me. I forget sometimes that other people had a different upbringing to me. My upbringing was violent and my father was an alcoholic and when he was drunk he would hit my mum and me. Once he strangled her until she became unconscious. I thought she was dead. When he left my mum had a lot of different boyfriends and some of them sexually abused me and my sister. Maybe that’s the reason I left home and lived with my boyfriend early. He was violent too and he kicked me so hard in the stomach when I was pregnant that I had a miscarriage but even then he would insist on having sex with me. We did go on to have a child together but he went into care when he was 5 because school noticed he had bruises from where his dad would hit him. He also had some burn and bite marks. I felt so guilty that I hadn’t known what was going on but in some ways he’s better off away from his dad. I am still with him but he is not so violent now and I know that underneath everything he’s a lovely person. Saying that he did give me a sexually transmitted disease and that caused me to have another miscarriage. I was also raped by someone I worked and he was very perverted and caused me quite a lot of physical harm.
I have many other life experiences and think they all help me to empathise because I know that there’s a good person in everyone even my dad and boyfriend and the man who raped me. I think it is because I have the ability to understand everyone that enables me to forgive and let go.
I did a one day workshop on Carl Rogers and person centred counselling. I think the core conditions of unconditional regards, empathy and congruence are fantastic. I definitely have unconditional positive regard and believe in all people.
In one skills practice session when I was talking to the helper (Denise) about what my mum’s boyfriends used to do to me and what they got me to do to them, she said she thought I should go to counselling. In my feedback to her I thanked her for listening and fed back that her body language was open and appropriate but I also had to tell her that it is not ok to give advice as she doesn’t know what is best for me. Only I know that. I of course ended my feedback with a positive and that was that she had covered boundaries really well at the beginning. I am very grateful that I don’t need counselling as I have forgiven and put the past behind me and can’t wait to help others do the same.
1
2015/16