The last two days have been quite incredible. I went to MC's community training course with a heavy heart and reluctance - feeling I should be doing something more useful - say 2,000 words on Conscience, or actually posting the TFY submission... and... it was not like that at all.
I felt intensely sceptical, as I usually do, about anything that involves any kind of specialised jargon, and the preliminary handout was riven with it, leading to feelings of disgust, abhorrence and generalised despair.
I felt distinctly spikey from the moment I got into the car with S and we began tentatively to discuss what we were expecting.
The first day was incredibly hard work, it's a form of coaching which involves something called Clean Language. It was so hard to drop one's normal prejudices in favour of subjective, 'helpful' response. I got ticked off, even when I was performing at my best for being too warm! Mind you, MC says she doesn't do 'feeling' so anything might be a bit too warm.... yet she is a very warm charming person when she wants to be. Perhaps - and I say this in the nicest possible way - she is really a psychopath.
The process involves learning a pattern of questions, and taking the 'client' through them to help them arrive at a plan of action. Unfortunately this will have to wait until next week - at the moment we are dealing with the fantasy element of the process.... you begin with the words.
"What would you like to have happen?"
And you then continue to respond with "and then what happens?" - unless things take a turn for the worse, when you change to "what would you like to happen instead?" - then there are questions which seem almost surreal, but which are important to helping the client to understand where they are going/coming from. One had to fight the urge to help on the first day, but by today I realised it was a very painless activity compared with any kind of therapy or even a conversation with a friend. There is no emotional engagement with the client, and thus no emotional expenditure. I described it as 'lazy'.
The group is interesting - we are meeting in B at N & C's offices - a former Red Cross centre. I knew a number of the group before we started - the two S's, I knew SB slightly, and K I met at dinner with MC and C who I met at another dinner with his partner HC, a good combination. I have got to know some of the others, one a slightly cynical man who is expert in all this sort of thing, a nice gay man called A, a lady called M who I had met before who has confidence and anxiety problems... and two other women who I don't warm to as much, because they are problematic in different ways. There's also K, a business assoc. of MC's and her partner B - a nurse. Interesting dynamics. I'm glad S gave me the gig - I was a bit annoyed about it first., She has used her time pricelessly to schmooze all the players at the Destination History thing on Monday, so we have lots of promised meetings.
I would like to write more, but I am too knackered - a side effect of the hard intellectual work done in the last couple of days.
When I came home I found my dear old Pa had sent me a cheque. This enable us to have fish and chips with a light heart. God, I love fish and chips, what on earth G was thinking of, being too posh for it! Silly cow.
I am now looking forward to things more. I was horrendously anxious last night and kept waking up with misery, but today I have been feeling so much happier. Mark has had a good work promo idea, and I am having a bit more faith about happier outcomes to our current situation. Sometimes we just have to wait for things to happen, to prepare the ground, then wait for rain as the I Ching says (somewhere).
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