Moving on to Sexual Abuse and Trauma...

Originally wanting to tell you guys a little bit about the course material, think I might talk about my classmates instead.

Today was the first day of the Sexual Abuse & Trauma course.

Since we get moved around at the end of every 3 weeks, I'm finding myself in class with most of the people that was in my first course at this school. I do not like the dynamics of this group.

While I think it is very enriching to have elements of personal experience brought to class, this is certainly going overboard. Sitting in class today, I was once again overwhelmed with the feeling of it being a support group more than an educational setting. It felt like half the class were survivors of some form of trauma or another, and all of them were of course triggered by the subject matter. Some of them were very touchy and vocal about it too. As a result, the 'discussion' ended up being more on moral principles than anything else.

To add to this freakshow, the person sitting beside me in class is a 70 year old Catholic nun. She was imposing all her 'you shoulds' on us. It certain got feedback, I'll tell you that much.

Something too that came up today was the idea of counsellors as 'wounded helpers' working in the field. I wonder if it's better to have a long history of personal experience, in which case one might be better able to understand what the clients are going through. Or to not have much history (like me) where you go into the counselling session with no preconceived notion of what things should be like, thus reducing the chances of leading the client towards a particular direction.