Study Unit 1: Beginnings: Creating
context
● Complexity : assumption of world/people/ourselves are subject to re-interpretation,
pointing to us that life is complex
● Humans are never alone + are shaped by their personal + social histories; past
memories, emotions + vibrations
Multiple realities
● Anderson, Goolishian and Hoffman
● As encounter + explore newness, we are free to create new perception of reality
allowing us to experiment with alternative meanings of that new experience.
● unfamiliar generates feelings of loss of certainty + predictability +normal flow of life
we know is disrupted
● Diversity: difference from our preconceived ideas and standards of believing
● New opportunities: being able to negotiate new meanings and find new words
representing the changing reality; requires skills, flexibility and being present in the
moment
● Relatedness: relating old and new in a new context
Metaphors and stories as tools of communication:
● Metaphors + stories help people to relate
○ Enables different people in different cultures + languages to find links
between themselves + others
● Stories = powerful tools that portray our experiences within broader socio-political +
cultural spheres
● Becoming a counsellor is challenging + exciting process
● Multiple realities =people's experiences comprised of multiple layers, truths + voices
Enhancing Self-awareness through reflexivity
Davis, Sumara and Luce - Kapler:
● In every activity which involves learning or self - transformation, you are always +
already entangled in relational web
● habits, tradition + expectations play a role in shaping our experiences
● forces are sometimes difficult to overcome.
Being aware of how we affect + are influenced by interactions with others:
● Person’s experience + how they are lived + known = private matter
1
, Study Unit 1: Beginnings: Creating
context
● Complexity : assumption of world/people/ourselves are subject to re-interpretation,
pointing to us that life is complex
● Humans are never alone + are shaped by their personal + social histories; past
memories, emotions + vibrations
Multiple realities
● Anderson, Goolishian and Hoffman
● As encounter + explore newness, we are free to create new perception of reality
allowing us to experiment with alternative meanings of that new experience.
● unfamiliar generates feelings of loss of certainty + predictability +normal flow of life
we know is disrupted
● Diversity: difference from our preconceived ideas and standards of believing
● New opportunities: being able to negotiate new meanings and find new words
representing the changing reality; requires skills, flexibility and being present in the
moment
● Relatedness: relating old and new in a new context
Metaphors and stories as tools of communication:
● Metaphors + stories help people to relate
○ Enables different people in different cultures + languages to find links
between themselves + others
● Stories = powerful tools that portray our experiences within broader socio-political +
cultural spheres
● Becoming a counsellor is challenging + exciting process
● Multiple realities =people's experiences comprised of multiple layers, truths + voices
Enhancing Self-awareness through reflexivity
Davis, Sumara and Luce - Kapler:
● In every activity which involves learning or self - transformation, you are always +
already entangled in relational web
● habits, tradition + expectations play a role in shaping our experiences
● forces are sometimes difficult to overcome.
Being aware of how we affect + are influenced by interactions with others:
● Person’s experience + how they are lived + known = private matter
1
,● Most people confronted with situations that require variety of decisions + responses
+ inevitability of juggling multiple demands at same time
● People rely on common approaches that work well in 1 set of circumstances, but fall
short in others
● Experience + living that experience sometimes be matter of getting caught up in
flow, of entacting sensibilities deeply inscribed in 1’s embodied habits of acting
● Krieger (1991) - How we affect and in turn influenced by our interactions with
others has potential to increase quality of our encounters with other people +
enhance future practice.
● Hertz (1997) - reflexivity implies shift in people's ways of knowing + being in
world.
○ Achieved by internal dialogue + constant scrutiny of "what I know" and "how I
know it".
Empathy:
(feeling with another)
● opens up the possibility for bonds to be built and allows us to move beyond the first
impressions created by the person's dress, accent, mannerism or physical
appearance.
● Emergence of this bond in empathic joining with other implies deep sense of
presence, which expresses value of our humanness
○ Manifested in our talents, personality traits, cultural, educational, family +
ethic background
● When interacting with others people bring parts of themselves into context of
relating + create new realities + ways of being characteristic to interactional space.
● We become more who we are in act of relating
● We are made in such way that we come full circle with our personhood through
relating to others
○ This is how we enhance our humanity
○ Enables us to participate in widening inclusiveness of our familial beginnings
+ community
■ Able to work towards enhancing quality of our relationships to
generate common good
● We are active participants within networks of connections with others + these
connections happen across time + locality
● Our interests + preconceptions (conscious/unconscious) imposed at all stages of our
encounters with others
○ From questions we ask to those we ignore
○ From things we choose to ignore + acknowledge
2
, ● Harding (1986, 1987) - be aware of how our interests filter into how we engage with
others
○ Implying we should take serious how we located within constellations of
gender, race, class + citizenship
○ Essential to understand how these factors play out in our relationships to
produce less distorted accounts of social world
● Gender, race, class +citizenship play roles in our interactions with others.
● Reflexivity enables people to question the meaningfulness of their life experiences,
review their values and search for new, more satisfactory forms.
Sharing our story:
● Bell Hooks (2001) - sense of community + belonging essential to feel loved +
stimulates desire to give love
● In relationship, both partners have to be giving for experience of love to be
transformational
Ability to imagine alternatives:
● Reflexivity makes possible for people to:
○ Question meaningfulness of their life experience
○ Review values they hold
○ Search for new + satisfactory forms
● Ability to imagine alternatives, future courses of action + our awareness of people’s
agency (person can initiate action) mean people have to confront issue of choice
Stevens (1996)
● People have the ability to reflect on experiences (to be conscious of being conscious)
+ call it capacity for reflexive awareness or reflexivity.
● People can be aware of thinking + what they are thinking, acting and their actions.
Study Unit 2: Surveying contexts for
counselling
The "cracked landscape":
● Our social world is not a neutral background or context for human behaviour but
richly engraved with complexity and diversity.
3
