(Re-)constructing Lifeworlds: The Counsellor and the Social Scientist
Today I completed my counselling course. And tomorrow I’m already flying back home, three months passed quite quickly. The past couple of weeks I have been busy mostly with interviews and I have met interesting people from very different professional areas for example a counsellor specialized in anger and stress counselling.
But as today was all about finishing my basic counselling course, I want to take the opportunity to reflect a bit on the commonalities of two different professions: the counsellor and the social scientist. Although the goals are very different, both parties share the common interest of (re-)constructing lifeworlds, meaning to deepen the understanding of another human being, his every day life, his dreams, his fears, in short: his reality. Read More…
Thank you for Sharing
Before I walked into my first session of a nine weeks course in basic counselling I would not have thought that I was going to encounter a sentence that is probably the mantra of any self help group on the planet:
Thank you for sharing
But first things first. I have decided to participate in a counselling course in order to get a better understanding of the profession of counsellors, of how they are trained and which pedagogic frameworks they use. In other words: I want to ‘go native’. By this expression anthropologists refer to the phenomenon of immersing oneself in other people’s every day lives and as a consequence gradually losing one’s outside perspective. This process allows for developing a profound understanding of the topic in question. After having gained considerable insight into the everyday practices of domestic violence counselling in women shelters, I decided it was time to include a different perspective on the matter: How do you become a counsellor in the first place? And what is currently the state of the art in the profession of counselling?
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Down the Rabbit Hole 