#one week - self reflection and hibernating

This winter has mainly involved reading - reading for fun, reading for academe, reading with Pickle, addiction to blogs, I think you get the picture. Maybe I should post some comments on my good reads, they won't be reviews, but my personal perspective. My blog is nothing if not personal, I was rather horrified when BBF told me how much she learnt from the blog.

At the end of Autumn I wrote about starting 'an introduction to counselling' course. I loved it! I felt I had the passion and the skill to make a great pyschodynamic counsellor, aka a shrink. Sadly while I what I lack is time and money, I am 42 and working part time I would be unlikely to repay the almost £20,000 it would cost to train, so I could not pretend it was to be a profession not a hobby. I am still fairly torn and have a few weeks left if I want to get my application in to study properly.

In keeping with the personal nature of this blog, here is a synopsis of my course walk talking about my personal journey. It defines my life as well as my winter and seems to a good way to say adieu to the winter and #oneweek.

My Personal Journey
Recognition can sneak up behind you or it can hit you with a thud, such that you can not believe that you did not see it coming. In the first session we talked about links, and I suddenly perceived with utter clarity how I had misinterpreted an oft repeated conversation with my mother-in-law.
When revealed my family background can often define me in the minds of others, particularly as I have never really spent time with people from similar families. Therein could lie the source for another essay, but I will focus on my relationship with mother-in-law. I have lost count of the number of times she has fixed me with a long look and then laughs and starts a story saying: 'you are lucky that I did not know that you were a family like thatwhen I got to know you'. She recounts how that last time she met someone 'like me' who took advantageous of her and was rude. After the first few times of hearing this story I started to take exception to it. I felt that even after years of knowing me, and being happily married to her son, I was being punished for someone else's misdemeanours. I accepted that she disapproved of me, because of my back- ground, and felt marginalised.

It just took a second to make the personal link when discussing it in general on the course. Having been brought up by a Nanny, who although excellent and present from almost birth, has left me with a [jargon alert, glaze or gloss over] mildly ambivalent attachment pattern. There is fairly clear transference of the rejection that I assumed from my mother to my mother-in-law. I can now quite clearly anticipate that she had been intended to be complimentary rather than a rejection. Now that we can discuss this, free from heightened emotion, my husband can reinforce my new understanding of the situation.

....As with many blended families communication can be a darkly comic affair. I had a loud eureka moment when reading Patrick Casement. His use of language is so clear, the information so vital, that I would like to reread this quote prior to every family event to better evaluate my understanding of situations and the reaction of others around me.

It is this mis-perception of similarity as sameness that brings about the phenomenon of transference, whereby previous experience and related feeling are transferred from the past and are experienced as if they actually were the present.
I love that last quote, it can explain so much!

If you made it through that blog and need light relief can I recommend the other blogs participating in #oneweek