Today there has been a thaw but recently I have felt very cold. There was a freeze in the south of England that went on for almost a week and after hiding away in the house for a day or two I stepped gingerly onto the snowy pavements clad in several layers of warm clothing. The contrast to last summer with its intense and enduring heat could not have been greater. But December has been a month for thinking back much further than the recent summer. I have now completed my training as a therapist and that means looking back to the autumn of 2019 when I decided to enrol in the Norwich School and undertake a certificate in person-centred counselling.
Then came the lock down and by March of the following year I was being whisked away to St Albans by my partner where I completed the Norwich certificate by Zoom, glad of her hospitality and love. Then in the early weeks of 2021 I began my diploma course at the Albany Centre in the heart of this historic and now familiar town. In December 2022 I look back with favour on the full three years of learning, including lots of theory, practice skills sessions galore and ultimately 130 hours of experience as a trainee counsellor.
So, this website is going to be overhauled in 2023 and the literary content will be replaced by a focus on psychotherapy. It will make reference to the pioneering writers and practitioners who excite me and influence my own desire to do therapeutic work. It will enable me to present myself and the kind of therapy I want to offer, though I am mindful of one of the principles of counselling in the tradition I follow – which is that no one can trade on their own personality or imagine that they have the magic ingredient that will ‘fix’ a client.
I have also become ever more aware that I owe a lot, many years after their deaths, to my own parents. I owe much to my father with whom I disagreed on several things but who was, in his own way, as a committed pastor, focused on the well-being of those he served. I sometimes think of the births, deaths and marriages in which he played a role and of the broken hearts for which his ministry was a comfort and a guide. And yet he used to tell me that his happiest moments were spent in his study, overlooking Belfast Lough, where he pored over his books.
I trust that this website with its genesis in my literary life and its conclusion in my therapeutic concerns will reflect the humane creativity to which I was once a witness as a son. But I must also note the savvy, good-humoured intuition and resolve of my mother. She too contributed to the person I am and therefore to the therapist I hope to be.
