Hope you have a great holiday. Hope we can continue our discussion when you get back.

I am a bit intrigued by your comment
“My guess is that I have a sense that learning lies closer to our core than you do.” do you mean learning as a process of gaining information from someone else? I think learning is pretty close to the core – maybe at the core of what makes us human. I don’t think it is a one way exchange though, teacher and learner. Being able to be curious and therefore learn is what happens when we get ‘unstuck’…not quite sure what I am saying here, but yes,please write more on the topic there seems to be something more to be found here.

Like you I think the heart of counselling is about finding themselves and dropping the accretions (my way of putting it – I hope this reflects your understanding).

Like the human centred therapies I think we have an innate sense of growth and it is about supporting this.

I guess I think therapy is about this human contact.

My guess is that I have a sense that learning lies closer to our core than you do. (I think ‘teaching’ lies at the heart of who I am – though by this I mean real encounter on an issue of concern, rather than schooling and formal arrangements.

I think too this goes to the heart of some understanding of what a person is and their relationship to their culture. Part of me thinks this would be a worthwhile topic for a post, another part of me thinks it is just too abstract and so not really worth doing. What do you think?

If you have more to say about this I’d love to hear. I hope you had a good time away from home and computerland.

I think you make some excellent points about unlearning.

I don’t think that you actually need to ‘do’ counselling in an educational way – I feel that at the heart of therapy – explicitly in the person centred approach I trained in but increasingly I think good therapy is just good therapy – is facilitating the client’s dropping of the unhelpful things they have learnt so that they can regain their innate abilities to sense, interpret and act out of their own experience, with curiosity and all their intelligence unblocked, in the same way that children learn to speak, walk etc. You don’t need to educate a child to speak or walk, just need to create good conditions for it to come about, love, support, stimulation. Then it happens by itself.

I think if clients want to be explicit about what they are learning then that is great, and if not, not.