Early Beginnings

I haven’t always been a Holistic Counsellor and I certainly haven’t always been a professional Counsellor. My career can in fact be divided into two distinct phases being before and after 2005. My first career commenced last century and lasted some 25 years into the early ‘noughties’… yes, I just said l-a-s-t century. For those like me, born in the 60’s or 70’s, this is probably no big deal. For those coming after however, in the decadent 80’s and beyond, last century now seems possibly almost no more than a figment of ‘old peoples’ collective imagination.

This observation is perhaps a whole lot easier to understand when you consider it in line with the advent of the digital revolution. The shift from mechanical and analogue electronic technology to digital electronics, which began anywhere from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. By the beginning of the 1980’s that is, humanity had almost comprehensively officially arrived in the modern world.  At this time however, I was just an optimistic and very young teenager who was yet to understand this. An old school mentality, born slightly the wrong side of the dawn of a new era.

So in the very early 1980’s I was still in High School, happily learning what it was like to have a small measure of independence in the world, earning my first pay checks as a ‘check-out chick’ at my hometown supermarket. I don’t really recall a lot more about that time, other than that I had fast fingers and an easy ability with people. I was a speedy operator in other words, with a warm ready smile. What I do recall with vivid clarity about this period, is that it’s where I was located, on the day my sister had to come and collect me in the middle of a workshift, to tell me that our Dad had died.

It’s fair to say that in the middle of that shift, something fundamentally shifted for me and my family. Dad died of a massive (the doctors description) heart attack and as anyone who has lost one so beloved knows, a big piece of my young heart had no other option at that time but to die with him. The effects of this loss have rippled through all the intervening years up until now, affecting each of my family members in different ways. If ever there was anything to be gained from the experience, it was simply to learn that love never ends and that to understand this is truly to understand everything…

Best
Susan JW
Counsellor and Holistic Therapist