Ariadnes Thread counselling

The social dimensions to therapy   I read a very profound quote by way of Andrew Ramseys book English Grounds originally from Aldous Huxley book Heaven and Hell. “….the perception of the infinite in the finite particular, is a revelation of the divine immanence” I guess that what I was taking from this was something not religious, as in the divine imminence, but that from the very small blossoms into the very large. This small personal event, attitude, or response ripples out through ourselves into the society and culture that we are all forming. Individual events may seem to be unconnected, but they are all a part of our ongoing meta-story. Our individual relationships, including the relationship we have with ourselves, are entangled with the world we live in. It’s a lot to think about because we often are very familiar with the specific self, although Johari window (https://www.selfawareness.org.uk/2022/09/25/understanding-the-johari-window-model) might beg to differ; there is so...

What’s in a word? The word psyche relates to the human soul or the innermost self perhaps the true being. I like the thought of soul but then I guess that I might. In Greek mythology Psyche was the goddess of the soul who was said to have been a beautiful almost as much as Aphrodite, she was to inspire the love of Eros the god of desire. The word therapist relates to a person who specialises in therapeutic treatment of impairment, injury, or disorder. So, when a fellow counsellor at CAMHS described himself as a psychotherapist, and I asked him what this meant he told me that he was a healer of the soul. This person was not overtly religious and may have taken a wider view of what “soul” meant but, a healer of the psyche, nevertheless. I have to say that this has been an ongoing debate in the counselling world, within the definition of Counsellor and Psychotherapist. BACP is the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy and seems at times to not make a distinction. I underst...

For many people Christmas will now be over and new year as well, but in the Church tradition Christmas really only begins with the Christmas day story of Bethlehem. You may not know that the traditional nativity story taken from Luke (with angles) and Mathew (with shepherds) was brought into more general notice by St Francis of Assisi. Francis would have done well in our time in some ways because he had a real knack of seeing how a great narrative can be shown to people in a way that is accessible. He thought that the incarnation (the story of the birth of Christ) was so important that rather than long readings in latin, he would show people what was described. So he created a tablo in the form of an acted out play; set in a stable with cows and sheep, local people played out Mary, Joseph,shepherds with real sheep a donkey and we are told, what started out as a log wrapped in a blanket became a baby. I like to think that maybe a mother on the procesion lent her baby to the play, but w...