A Soul In Tension That's Learning To Fly

Becoming a counsellor isn't a 9-5 job where you start it when you walk in, do the job and you leave it when you close the door behind you.  You can't detach yourself from your work because knowing yourself and being aware of where you are in the processes is essential.  Going back to studying counselling is exhilarating and exhausting, driving and draining all at once.  On a Thursday evening my mind is buzzing with thoughts and increased awareness of who I am, how I am, where I am.  It's also more tired than it's ever really been before.  I thought having done the diploma and doing so much personal development work through that, and being a qualified counsellor, and having breezed through a degree before, that this degree wouldn't have such a huge impact.  Got that one wrong then.  Four weeks in and 36 hours of bloody intense work about counselling in contexts and I've got far more questions than I have answers.  Today we were looking at the impact of parallel processing between client/counsellor/organisation.  I've been feeling very unsettled in my life these last few weeks and not sure why.  I had a light bulb moment today and realised parallel processing is going on between what I'm learning and how my life feels.  Uni is fast, and busy, and intense, and scary, and overwhelming, and great, and exhausting, and lacking in time, and full of people I'm not sure on where I stand with, and limited contact to close friends, and revisiting introjects I'd rather pretend I didn't know about, and a huge feeling of responsibility to my job.  Those words can all be used to describe exactly how my life feels too.  Realising this has brought some degree of comfort - it's good to know what's causing these feelings and what they're actually about.  Next step, figuring out how to ease the anxiety causing bits attached to uni and to work on grounding myself while I'm there to help it's affects on my world outside the classroom.