Ariadnes Thread counselling

  All too much - just go fishing When it all gets toooooo much One of the constant things I get asked about is anxiety, or “it’s doing my head in”.   For many people today life is just too stressed and out of this is born our anxieties. It may be simple to suggest that much of this is something that as humanity we have done to ourselves, it does not make the anxiety any the less real though. Putting religious sentimentalities aside for a second, we are not so long out of the hunter gatherer stage of development. Within this we had an important part of our social structure in both the closeness of relatives but also in the tribe that we lived in. No one was expected to care for babies, children, the sick or the elderly on their own. These were community issues and others helped and brought knowledge and other support to a communal wisdom. The sense of the individual was less prominent. I think that also it might have been easier (although maybe not better) that people knew thei...

Nostalgia and impermanence I was walking past my old school today (I only went there for a year having moved with the family after my dad got a job with Devon County). 50 years ago, the part that is being demolished was a 5 th form block, that specific bit was a lounge coffee bar. It was here that I set the KitKat red wrapper four finger ripping record. Having collected 100 of the outer wrappers using just my fingers ripping them apart. It was heralded as a world record! The rest of the building was also significant for me. By the coffee area (I don’t remember coffee being served much there) were the private study booths. Downstairs was a workshop that facilitated apprentice level wood and metal workshops. Here I created my nearly 2-meter interlocking forms (triangles) sculpture for my CSE art. I spent three hours in the private study booths building up enough courage to go to the local youth club later that evening and began a friendship that was to totally change my life, with someo...

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...

Water into wine. The biblical story of Jesus turning water into wine at a wedding is one that is well known. It goes something like this. Weddings are the responsibility of the bride’s family to provide for and as it is a Jewish wedding there is a duty of hospitality on the family. Now this is not just a basic hospitality. [I have on occasions been present at modern day traveller funerals where there is an equal obligation that extends to the minimum (or so I was told) of providing a cup of tea and a sandwich (jam in this case) for everyone. I think that the wake had more than this and possibly the after funeral do, but for those travelling to the funeral this was the minimum.] In Jesus time blessing was equated with generosity and for the host to run out of wine would have been a terrible social shame. Mary informs Jesus that this is about to happen, clearly expecting him to do something about it. He says, “Oh come on Mom it’s not the right time to be doing flashy things.” But she say...

Cormorants on the breakwall at Dawlish Devon I love to see the cormorants drying their wings like this - I took 10 or so shots and this was the best - but still lacks much of the reality of the happening. The reason I like them is because they are like so many birds who live from food beneath the surface founced to stop what they are doing occasionally to let their feathers dry. They are also by coincidence one of the animals that can live in all three forms of space - they fly, swim and walk on land. As a child I learned to draw great crested grebes another fish catching bird usually found in freshwater. Cormorants are loathed by freshwater fisherpersons because they are seen as the reason why there are less fish and I guess that this is valid but birds got to eat and with the invasion of the natural fishing grounds of the cormorant, plus the over fishing of inshore areas then the birds just move to places where there are fish. Nice stocked club water is like a banquet. The trouble is...