Clients‟ experience of counselling within a narrative framework
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219 CHAPTER EIGHT CREATIVE FINDINGS 8.1 Introduction This chapter aims to explore the relationship between the client‟s experience of counselling and established theory, where this is relevant to the study. It feels important to compare the participants‟ experience with how that experience may be understood by counselling theory. The main counselling theoretical orientation drawn upon is psychodynamic. There may be links between established theory and the construct which will be explored alongside the client‟s experience. The connections between poetry and counselling are examined including poetry and the unconscious, loss and death, and opposition. 8.2 The transferences Transference, which may be positive or negative, is understood as feelings from other relationships, either from the present or past which the client transfers onto the counsellor. Originally Freud (1895) observed transference in hysterical female clients who tended to fall in love with their counsellor and he regarded this as an obstruction or irritant to the therapeutic process. However, depending on how the counsellor reacts to, or uses the transference it may become a “corrective experience” (Winnicott 1958; 258). It seems possible that Wiggling Fish experienced a negative transference when she experienced her counsellor as cold. Whether or not the counsellor was cold is not at issue here. What is thought to be important is that the counsellor stayed with the anger. Her responses enabled Wiggling Fish to experience anger without the 220 counsellor reacting to it. It seems crucial for Wriggling Fish that she felt the counsellor did not like her because she liked to be liked. Only because she did not like her counsellor did she feel she could show anger. After this episode the relationship changed. She started to feel safe with the counsellor, and was able to use the relationship, after what may have been a corrective emotional experience, brought into being by the transference. However it is also important for the counsellor to fail, or to repeat, disappointments in relationships from the past. It is then possible to share these with the client and help them by working through their feelings about failing (Winnicott 1958). This could also have been what happened between Wriggling Fish and her counsellor. The counsellor may be seen as failing in that she appeared cold to Wriggling Fish and this led to her being able to have, express and work through her angry feelings. It is also worth considering another perspective. Countertransference can be the feelings within the counsellor as a result of being receptive to the client‟s transferred feelings (Salzberger- Wittenberg 1970). In other words the counsellor may have been mirroring the client‟s feelings. It could have been Wriggling Fish who was cold and this coldness was perhaps transferred onto the counsellor, so the client was seeing a mirror image of her own feelings. The outcome is not necessarily changed by this but it is another way of perceiving what may have taken place. The reality perceived by Wriggling Fish was she experienced her counsellor as cold. The impact on her was to be angry and experience an emotion that she felt she did not „do‟. This helped her make progress in the relationship and discover that it could be safe to be angry. This experience also made her determined to be a warm empathic counsellor herself, to attempt to show others empathy as she felt empathy encourages a more intimate relationship. Perhaps counsellors need to find the grace to acknowledge a client‟s differing perceptions and be more real as Lott (1999) 221 suggests. This episode could also be understood as the counsellor‟s theoretical stance preventing her from feeling real to the client. Even when the client‟s perceptions seem unreal to the counsellor, the client‟s perception is real to the client and having this acknowledged may encourage the intimacy of the relationship. Wriggling Fish was showing concern, being real when she wondered if her counsellor had a cold. Although it may not be appropriate for the counsellor to disclose too much about herself the question here could be whether or not it would be harmful to acknowledge what the client perceived if it was true. In this case it might have stopped the client from finding her anger, or it may have enabled her to feel safe with the counsellor sooner than she did. But this is only conjecture and perhaps it is important to stay with what was experienced by the client. Transference can also be positive. Alice appeared to have a relationship with her counsellor that enabled her to risk examining her monsters and the unknown. This could have been enabled by a positive transference that allowed her to feel like the counsellor as she did when they laughed together or talked about some dancing they had both watched. Such a positive transference may help a client feel safe enough to explore themselves and Alice was certainly able to do this. It could be argued that a positive transference disables the ability to work because it may stop anxiety or frustration being felt in the client. However Kohut (Siegel 1996; 76) suggests that the positive or “idealizing transference” be treated with interest and respect (Kahn 1991). This is because the positive transference may enable the counsellor to discover something the client lacked in their relationships with parents or main care givers. Alice seemed to lack the ability to 222 be spontaneous and free. However she experienced this with her counsellor during the session after the dancing, so this could be seen as a corrective emotional experience. It could also be seen as adding to the “structure” of herself (Kohut 1977; 88), or her “selves” (Speedy 2004; 26) as she grew through the counselling experience. The transferences as they appeared to be experienced by the participants may be seen within the categories. When Wriggling did not like her counsellor and felt these feelings were returned by the counsellor uncontained-unfree was used because she felt stuck. In the second entry she feels herself to be caught and wriggling so she is able to look around inside herself and feel where she is. By the third entry she still appeared stuck but seemed to see that her counsellor was astute and senses herself as squirmy. It may be the negative transference is experienced by the client as being caught, disliking the counsellor and feeling disliked herself, but this omits the client‟s perspective. So although the client may not understand this is transference this is how it may be understood theoretically. However within the positive transference that seems to be part of Alice‟s relationship with her counsellor, (when she feels a similarity between them), the construct that appears at this time in her analysis is a desire for containment-freedom. The positive transference may be seen then as a desire to be like the counsellor or even to be liked by her. This is seen again in Wriggling Fish‟s journals when she experiences her anger, which the counsellor stays with enabling her to feel safe. This could also be interpreted as the transference shifting from negative to positive. 8.3 Making links between the past and the present Making links between the past and present is used particularly in psychodynamic counselling. The transferences discussed above may be used to make these links. An overall explanation of 223 the reason for making links to the past is described by Jacobs: “the view of development taken here is that unfinished business and unresolved issues from the past can have a damaging effect on living in the present, just as by contrast satisfactory resolution in the present facilitates negotiation of the future” (1986; 5). A good example of the usefulness of linking the past to the present is given in Alice‟s journal. She tells the story of feeling abandoned when left in hospital at four years old, which appears to be unfinished business in that she stills feels abandoned. The image created in her writing was that she was imprisoned. This also seemed to relate to her mother being a survivor of the holocaust. Alice feels alone through much of her journal, where she seems to be underground looking through a spy hole in a leaf. Even in the present she is underground, yet it is decades since she was abandoned in hospital, alone and crying but she still feels abandoned. Making the links to her past would enable her to see why she still feels alone in the present. There had been no resolution for the little girl who felt abandoned. Perhaps because of the holocaust her mother was unable to be emotionally present for her even when she was with her. Thus from an early age Alice may have felt as if she cared for her mother‟s feelings so when left in hospital not only was she alone but she could no longer care for her mother. If she felt as if she was keeping mum alive, by carrying her burdens then there would be a primitive fear of the real loss of mother when she was without her. Such a huge void may well have felt like death, terrifying the infant Alice. To reflexively re-experience the power of such past feelings would enable some resolution to be found in the present. Through understanding, through compassion for herself and through 224 the intimacy of the counselling relationship her story was listened to and accepted as real to her. Alice was becoming aware of more aspects of herself as the journal progressed. Being in touch with a greater range of feelings confirms the relevance of linking the past to the present. It seemed to enable her to be herself and make her own life story rather than having her mother‟s, or the one her mother wanted for her. Turned On presents a good example of making links to the past for she acquired a way of being early in life that made her the family carer. She was unable to say no to any request and was expected to be the family carer both for her mother and her disabled sibling. By examining this way of being in the present, and by making links to the past, she found some resolution to this problem and began to see she was allowed to care for herself by saying no to others. Her future changed in that she could now see one for herself and she began to live life more fully and start to learn new skills. Both of these examples confirm the relevance of the theory and in the journals it is possible to feel the client‟s progress as they make changes in their internal and external lives. All the journals seem to demonstrate how the participants used their past to make links to their present, whether or not this was their intention when writing. Little Girl made links to the child self who still needed to grieve for the loss of mum. Wriggling Fish brought her ancestors into the journal and they seemed to help her integrate different aspects of herself. Who Am I looked back to the feeling created by being an abortion that never happened so all of the participants used their past in their journals suggesting that it was present in their counselling. 225 When Alice was remembering being in hospital she was angry with the counsellor for not being available when she wanted her. When Turned On was thinking of her family she was angry that they still seemed to control her. She even experienced the counsellor as controlling. In these two instances the category chosen was fighting containment-freedom as both were struggling to free themselves from a way of being they no longer wanted. It was as if they were fighting to change while also fighting to remain the same. However when Little girl was remembering and grieving the mother she lost in childhood the category was towards containment-freedom because she was having feelings that seemed to be appropriate for what she was re-experiencing, as opposed to fighting these feelings. The same category was used for Wriggling Fish when she was remembering and using her nan for she seemed to be shifting towards freedom. Who Am I was also allocated this category when she remembered that she was an abortion that never happened. But again she was feeling her own affect and owning change as opposed to fighting it. So although all the participants made links to the past the construct that was designated for that particular entry depended upon their feeling response to what they were remembering. The question I asked was whether they were feeling their own affect appropriate to what was being remembered/re-experienced, or whether they were feeling emotions that had been learnt from previous experience and did not actually fit the situation. 8.4 The unconscious The participants show they have an internal world, peopled by internalised parents and others who have influenced their lives. This also seems to demonstrate that unconscious processes exist and influence their lives and their internal worlds (Waddell 2003). This feels a difficult concept to demonstrate for it feels impossible to show how an entry held unconscious processes. However it seems worthwhile to look at how the language used may have hidden and revealed 226 something of unconscious processing. Heninger (1978) suggests: “Poetry exposes unconscious forces to consciousness and organizes them into understandable form. This is a therapeutic process. It makes arrangement out of derangement, harmony out of disharmony, and order out of chaos” (57). The opposition in Alice‟s journal, her fighting to have her own feelings seems to have brought harmony out of disharmony through the counselling and the journal. Although she may have had some sense of this at the time her feedback reveals that with hindsight she gained more understanding of what was happening. For example she wrote in her journal about a headache that was all of her which feels like the disharmony/opposition of her sense of self. At the time this was all it was, a headache, yet now it may be seen as the burden of the holocaust she was carrying. The unconscious process of bringing this burden into greater awareness seems to be an aspect of the whole journal as she revealed to herself the harmony of the feeling adult and child who were both concealed by this burden. Who Am I, on the other hand appears to be very conscious of looking for herself. However the frozen child seems to conceal as much as she reveals. Only by staying with this metaphor was it possible to imagine how feeling frozen trapped her in a life that she did not want. It seems that finding the image helped her to think differently about herself as well as helping me to understand her „thawing out‟ (WAI) process. This gave a sense of her need for the warmth of the counsellor and the importance of the relationship she needed to help her come to life. It may be suggested that her unconscious gave her the image and the counselling and the journal enabled 227 her to be receptive to previously hidden aspects of herself. The use of metaphor, like the headache and the frozen child seems to show how metaphor and symbols influence participants‟ journeys towards understanding themselves. Such images appear to demonstrate how the way the journals were written encouraged the formation of symbols and metaphor and agrees with Ansell (1978): “The poem and the unconscious share a major feature; both are represented in compressed form” (13). The participants appear to have compressed their thoughts and feelings and provided themselves and the research with meaning that is concealed in their words and revealed in the analysis and their feedback. Finding their child selves by writing in a poetic way seems to agree with Edar‟s conclusion that attempts to find: “Empirical support for the Jungian hypothesis that the self emerges in hierarchy - the child being the first manifestation, followed by the hero, the immediate prototype of the self. The investigation of the poems of three patients suggests that the first projection may be a parapathy itself; the individual writes about his preoccupation, the illness. When the child archetype first appears in the poetry of the patient, this may be taken as evidence of movement in therapy” (1978: 39). 228 He suggests that writing poetry may do the same as dreams in awakening unconscious elements and thereby instigating emotional movement in the client. All the participants wrote about their child selves. Little Girl found the child who was good, bad and grieving and who needed to let herself feel. Turned On found the child who was moved from one school to another so often that she struggled to learn. Alice found her underground child who could not explore, while Who Am I discovered her frozen child who needed warming and Wriggling Fish found an angry child who needed to find her freedom. For all of them, finding the unconscious child archetype appears to be part of their journal stories and leads to their eventual movement to finding themselves. 8.5 Splitting All the participants demonstrate splitting (Klein 1975; Greenburg and Mitchell 1983) in their journals. A simple explanation of splitting is provided by Gray: “A defence that allows us to keep separate what are really two sides of the same coin. It is a mechanism that we see in operation all the time: good/bad, black/white, god/devil, male/female, etc” (1994; 154). The very definition of splitting fits with the concept of opposition and the metaphor of Beauty and the Beast in that the idea of splitting is about dividing something that is a whole. For example it does not feel possible to have light without dark for even in sunlight shadows are cast. Every person has male and female chromosomes within them. And perhaps it is impossible to consider the idea of a god without the opposition of a devil. Near the start of her journal Little Girl demonstrates splitting when she writes a nursery rhyme as 229 one of her weekly entries. It is about a little girl who is very, very good when she is good, but when she is bad she is horrid. Klein (1975) suggests that the hatred of such bad parts of the self result from them being experienced as persecutory. For example the horrid girl who shot herself to pieces in the journal did appear very persecutory – a Beast. This split between the good and bad girl almost sets the scene for the journal. Yet it is also a place from where Little Girl moves and the counselling seems to enable her to discover new and different aspects of herself which she begins to integrate rather than separating them by denying one aspect. It is in discovering new selves that seems to enable Little Girl to realize that there is so much more to her than just the good and the bad girl. The relationship with the counsellor and perhaps with the journal appears to help Little Girl feel safe enough to examine these split off parts of herself. The bad girl feels hated to begin with but there is a sense by the end of the journal that Little Girl no longer has to hate parts of herself that others might feel are bad, she can have her own opinion about this and discovers that she no longer has to persecute herself. It is as if she has married the Beast and uses him to give her confidence. The category when Little Girl writes the nursery rhyme is uncontained-unfree because she feels stuck in childhood where grownups and others are good and she is bad, but bad under the guise of being good. Who Am I, may be seen as split when she writes about being a frozen child for although she senses this part of herself, she feels very apart from it. Because of this the category uncontained-unfree is chosen, for the metaphor of being frozen suggests an inability to move. However Alice actually writes that she is „split in half‟ (A), but she is beginning to see that she concentrates on blankness in sessions as a way of avoiding her feelings. She appears to process this information and begin integrating the split during the session so the category given here is 230 towards containment-freedom, as she appears to demonstrate that she wants to stop concentrating on blankness. 8.6 Object relations Splitting may be seen as part of object relations theory (Fairburn 1952; Guntrip 1961; Greenberg and Mitchell 1983) which understands that the individual‟s main drive is through relationship with others in different ways throughout their life. These others may be external as well as internal others that have been introjected (Greenberg and Mitchell 1983) through life experience. Early relationships may be internalised (Brown and Pedder 1991) in that a child who experiences mother as often cross may internalise the cross mother so she becomes a part of the self that is always telling the child off even when she is an adult. Turned On seemed to have internalised a caring role for the family which felt particularly strong because she could never allow herself to say no when asked for help. Perhaps emotionally she had to care for her mother‟s feelings from a young age, making her the carer rather than mother. In fact she became the carer of a disabled relative feeling that she had to do this. Over the course of her journal she became enabled to talk to this part of herself and discover that she had a right to a life of her own. This dramatically changed her life as she was able to let her disabled relative move to an appropriate care home. The internalised parts of her that kept her in the role of carer lost their power and Turned On was able to make decisions for her life that were hers as opposed to those that seemed to have been internalised from others. Internalising objects, both good and bad (Jacobs 1986) seems to occur throughout life. Little Girl may have internalised a good mother before her mother became ill. But ill health may have distanced and spoiled this relationship so that Little Girl began to feel unloved and therefore 231 unlovable, or not good enough to be loved. This could account for the many parts of herself that she seemed to dislike. Part of the counselling process may then have been about integrating these disliked, unwanted or denied aspects or herself. She seems to demonstrate the process of integrating (Brown and Pedder 1991) her selves/objects through her counselling journey, the journal and the research. Different unwanted selves come into focus through the journal as if she has conversations with these internal objects. In this way they become more integrated because they are recognized and known rather than being ignored and hidden. The different parts of her are made explicit in the finding poem „Little Girl‟ because these differences were so explicit in the journal. The research itself seems to continue to help her integration as she discussed the changes in herself during our meetings and also demonstrated emotional movement in her feedback. Construct categories varied with internal objects. When Alice‟s internal object is the burden of her mother‟s history she appears to be uncontained-unfree because she seems stuck but able to look around. However when Wriggling Fish uses her nan as a good object to help her change the construct is a desire for containment-freedom, because she is wanting to change and experience her own feelings. The categories allotted varied in that it was the relationship to these objects that was a deciding factor in the choice made. 8.7 A psychology of the self Finding the self may be linked to object relations theory in that the participants seem to be attempting to differentiate themselves from internal objects, or trying to find themselves through these objects. This feels closer to Kohut‟s (1977; 14) notion of the “restoration of the self”. This restoration seems to become possible when the idealization of parents or others are gradually 232 withdrawn (Siegal 1996) from the client‟s internal world. Then new structures are created that take on the functions of the idealized parents but without the personal qualities that were internalised by the child/client. Siegel describes how this psychology of the self maybe understood: “A psychology of the self describes how self cohesion evolves from early and later self-object experiences and culminates in the healthy expression of the self‟s innate nuclear programme” (1996; 117). This perhaps explains the participants‟ sense of becoming themselves, finding themselves or simply discovering that they were able to „be‟ themselves from a theoretical viewpoint. Whenever participants made discoveries of different selves the category used tended to be towards containment-freedom as there was a strong sense of movement within their internal worlds. This notion of the participants constructing or reconstructing themselves through their counselling and the journals also fits with Kelly‟s (1963) theory of personal constructs. While keeping the journals they seemed to construct their own identities/stories and started to make their own choices whereas initially they seemed to be more influenced by others, and struggled to be the person they wanted to be. All the participants felt they had changed during their counselling and the research and all still feel that they continue this process of growth and change. However the search for the self may also be linked to the creation of the stories of the participants‟ lived experience which becomes a joint autobiography founded on the idea of 233 multiple selves (Bruner 1990; 91). Wriggling Fish seems to confirm this in her response to her finding poem for she wrote of her sense of there being more self to be created soon, as she seems to see the creation and re-creation of her selves to be an ongoing process. This perception of a self or selves is explained by Speedy (2000) as: “A self, range of selves, or sub personalities, that are „inside‟ waiting to be disclosed”(630). This concept seems closer to the participants‟ experience of finding different parts of themselves. Having looked at object relations, Kohut‟s restoration of the self and the notion of multiple selves or sub personalities it seems possible that there is a process through these different concepts. The first part of such a process would be recognizing the internalised objects that appear to control the client, as when Alice recognized the burden of her mother‟s history. The second stage would be the restoration of the self, where different experiences enable the client to restore their own self. This is demonstrated clearly when Turned On starts to be able to say no when she is expected to help or care for others. The third stage may then be the discovery of multiple selves who may be influenced by the original internal objects but not controlled by them. A good example of this could be Wriggling Fish for she wriggled in the trap of „previous generations‟ (WF) as she recognized that she was caught by them. She then began to find herself and with the help of her „golden nan ascending‟ (WF) she was able to let her ancestors help her find freedom. With this new found freedom it seems she finds much more of herself or even more of her selves which enabled her to create a whole new life. 8.8 Empathy The participants‟ experience of empathy seems to be a difficult notion to demonstrate from the journals yet it also feels to be one that is crucial to their ability to work with their counsellors. Empathy may be understood as a skill of the counsellor that enables him/her to enter into the 234 client‟s world, which helps the client to feel heard. If, for example, Wriggling Fish had continued to feel that her counsellor was only cold it seems unlikely that she would have chosen to continue or been able to work with her. Empathy feels crucial from the client‟s perspective in that there is a need to feel safety and warmth from the counsellor in order to work with her/him. Safety may also be provided by the boundaries but it appears that empathy is also part of this safety. Rogers (1961) describes the process of empathy as experienced by the client when: “the therapist is sensing the feelings and personal meanings which the client is experiencing in each moment, when he can perceive these from “inside,” as they seem to the client, and when he can successfully communicate something of that understanding to his client” (62). Perhaps feeling understood creates an internal sense of safety with the counsellor who appears to understand the client from „inside‟. Such an internal feeling of safety seems an important part of the client‟s experience of empathy. The participants appear to experience empathy as feeling heard, understood, safe, secure, close, supported, held, warmth, acknowledged, cared for and loved. These words appear in the journals when participants describe their experience of how they feel when with the counsellor. They imply that participants have felt understood by the counsellor, or that the counsellor was with them in the shared experience. Even though Wiggling Fish found the experience of being with her counsellor difficult, it seems that there must have been some sense of feeling understood that enabled her to stay and work. It was getting angry with the counsellor, and feeling that the counsellor stayed with her anger that enabled her to feel safe, which she states in week five of the journal: 235 Extract 48. From WF journal to show the client‟s experience of anger Line 3. I DID ANGER!! Line 4. And she stayed!!! Line 5. It felt safer Line 6. I began to like her. Line 7. It feels like a huge release Line 8. A movement. This safety, to feel anger, enabled Wriggling Fish to start to appreciate her counsellor and may be seen as the empathy of the counsellor letting her know that her feelings were understood. Empathy according to Kohut (Siegal 1996) is the means by which the counsellor gathers information about a client. He gave empathy two levels of experience, a higher and lower level. In the lower form of empathy the client experiences being held in the “empathic merger by the understanding” (Siegal 1996; 189) of the counsellor. This feels very similar to what Dosamantes (1992) describes as the counsellor providing the matching words and meaning to the client‟s unconscious experience, which she suggests creates a way out of a merged state of being. Kohut however adds to this by proposing that only after the empathic merger created by the lower level of empathy has been experienced, can the client mature and experience the higher level. Then the counsellor is experienced as more distant (or separate, as opposed to merged) as interpretations or explanations of the client‟s history are provided by the counsellor. This enables the client to understand their own life experiences. Alice seemed merged with her counsellor on several occasions when she appeared to see them as having the same emotion, laughing together, both 236 being angry, and watching some dancing together. But perhaps this can be seen as a process of empathic merging, rather like the early holding the baby experiences with mother when the baby feels very physically close, or the same as mother. Alice realizes she carries her mother‟s burdens, yet she struggles to let these burdens go. Perhaps understanding more about her history and how it impacts on her enables the process of finding her feelings and her own self. This could describe an experience of Kohut‟s higher level of empathy being present, as Alice begins to understand her own history of a „charmed‟ (A) life. She certainly makes this clear in her feedback as she does her need to be understood both by her counsellor and by me. 8.9 The relationship between poetry and counselling Gray (1994) describes the function of the counselling frame: “ the frame is not intended to inhibit spontaneity, its function being to contain and embrace all feelings” (13). The intended function of the journals was also to encourage spontaneity and feelings. The participants‟ feeling selves became transparent on the page. They seemed to show that they felt safe as they did in their counselling sessions, and that they could be spontaneous within that safe place. The idea that creative writing can be a place that holds feeling is confirmed by Eriksson (2004): “A poem gives shelter to and can contain what it evokes, such as strong emotion. The poem can be a place of safety” (50). Just as counselling may provide a safe place in which feelings may be contained, the poem also 237 may be used as a safe container for emotions. This quote also suggests that the poem evokes feelings, which is similar to the spontaneity suggested above by Gray. It seems the experience of a safe place both in counselling and in writing poetry may evoke feelings, or encourage spontaneous feelings to come into being. This confirms the idea that feeling is embodied in the writer and that this embodiment may be transferred to the reader. Hunt and Samson (2006) suggest the writer calls up the „reader‟s body‟ so that: “Bodies are thus an immanent physical ground on which text grows. And in this sense all texts could be called vocative. They call up the reader” (149). Wriggling Fish, demonstrates safety and spontaneity embodied in her journal in her first entry, which was experienced in me as the reader. It is also her first session with a new counsellor and she appears to feel safe enough in her writing to express her feelings: Extract 49. From WF journal to show spontaneity Line 1. Want my old counsellor back! Line 2. Feel resentful! Line 3. She does not like me! Line 4. I do not like her! Line 5. Coldness, aloof, psychodynamic! Line 6. Ugh! Do NOT want this! Her use of exclamation marks suggest her spontaneity and she demonstrates her feelings in the desire to have her old counsellor back and in the feeling words she uses like resentful, and ugh. Feeling is also expressed in the phrases that say she does not feel liked by the counsellor or like 238 her. Feeling also seems to be expressed in the upper case letters in the last line. The power of this last line was felt in my body as I read it, confirming the concept of embodiment. Turned On, tended to write quite long entries which are detailed, but her fifteenth entry is short and feels more spontaneous because of this. It also seems that it is safe enough to be herself: Extract 50. From TO journal to show spontaneity and safety Line 1. Really don‟t feel much Line 2. different than last week Line 3. still feel lost in limbo its Line 4. as if I‟m waiting for something Line 5. to happen. Don‟t feel today as Line 6. if I have gained anything Line 7. this week. This entry is full of feelings such as „lost in limbo„, „waiting for something‟ and a feeling of not having gained anything from her counselling. There is also the feeling evoked by the whole entry which seems flat and sad. The frame provided by the journal seems to give her the safety to be how she feels. Each participant‟s journal contained spontaneous strong feelings suggesting they all found a safe enough space, within their journal writing, to evoke and contain their feelings. Yüklə 1,47 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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