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All the World’s a Stage and We are but Actors — NOT!!
Knowing and respecting yourself
Introduction
A good part of counselling involves creating a safe space for clients to articulate their thoughts and feelings and in so doing, discover attributes about themselves.
A man may discover during therapy that he has a strong aversion to talkative women; A woman may discover that she has attraction to men with a particular accent.
Two key conditions in counselling are non-judgement and unconditional positive regard.
This means that the man is not criticized for having an aversion to talkative women. Perhaps the counsellor will help him uncover the source of that aversion — possibly an abusive former female teacher who also happened to be talkative.
Similarly, the woman is not labelled as being superficial. The counsellor accepts whatever she presents and helps her to unearth the source of this attraction.
With a greater understanding of the cause of the attraction she can then choose to flow along with the attraction (Choosing a dating partner with the accent) or to act counter to it (Deliberately choosing a dating partner without the accent), while acknowledging its presence.
