ABSTRACT
I think I’m a jack of all trades, I’ve tried a whole lot of jobs and areas of study, but I can’t always source where I’ve learnt something which I use in my practice. However, these experiences are a good source of stories and allow for ways of walking in others’ shoes. So having a wide range of experiences along the way means I have been influenced by many events, like the Vietnam War and hippies and travel and family experiences like the profound impact of my mother’s early death and my brother’s mental illness and the disintegration of the family after my mother died. I like the Buddhist idea of if you look at the cause of something, then there’s the cause before the cause. If you go back you can ask where did it start, was it way before with my mother’s brother dying in the second world war, or my hassles at school? I guess I went on a journey to sort that out and attempted to identify explanations for what was happening in the world including my role in it. I went through all sorts of viewpoints such as attributing my issues to my parents, but then thinking, in turn, they were as much a consequences of their upbringing. So eventually studying psychology, I come back to the conclusion that this is the way for me rather than the broader sociological or political view. I just really enjoy it; I love psychology, reflecting on the ways you can learn about human behaviour. I think I’m with Jung on that one: that a human being and his/her behaviour is the smallest functioning being you can break humanity down to at one level. While I acknowledge the political, and I studied a lot of politics and a bit of economics, these and other approaches such as philosophy are all ways of looking,
but none of them are the way I can best understand humanity and contribute to it in a positive way.
