skool is cool

This term I have my Counselling Skills 2 class every second Saturday. It's a pretty good group of people and my teacher is fantastic (it's the same one I had for Interpersonal Communication, I love her).

In the morning we did a practical exercise and I got teamed up with this chick Alex. We were asked to pick a real problem that wasn't too big or deep, or something that we had some "energy around" to talk about for 20 minutes. Alex was the counsellor, I was the client.

I spoke about all the shit that had gone on last weekend which had led me to feeling pretty shit. She barely said a word, and just listened (but she let me know she was listening through non-verbal communication, and asking the odd open question). It was the first time I've done one of these practical exercises and really got something out of it. By the end of the session I felt like a massive weight had been lifted from my shoulders, even though I thought I had already dealt with all the emotion surrounding the issues.

It makes me realise what a difference counselling can make to someone's life.

When we were debriefing after the session, I used Asteroids as a metaphor to describe my experience. I realised that a few things had happened in quick succession before I'd had time to process them. All the emotions snowballed into one big, heavy weight which seemed too much to bear. When I broke the big "ball of shit" - as I so eloquently put it - down into smaller pieces, they were easier to understand and process. I kept doing this until all the emotions were gone (or blasted away).