My next counseling appointment wasn't supposed to be until Tuesday. But it occurred to me, that if I was in a similar state to after the last appointment, there wouldn't be much use in me going to Living Free. So I changed it. For last night.

I knew that this was going to be the make or break appointment. Either nothing would happen or something would click. Well, a click was probably the furthest thing that could've happened.

We studied from this. Which is all very well, but I thought counselling was about talking, and analysing, and pulling apart to gain a greater understanding (correct me if I'm wrong). After about half an hour of poorly read pages (and not a single scripture), I got up the courage to say that I needed to talk about what happened that weekend. And so I started. After barely two minutes I was interrupted. I tried to carry on but had no chance. And so gave up and just sat and nodded and smiled in the appropriate places. For another hour and a half. Half of it was read twice because the counsellor would go off on a tangent and not remember where she'd left the text. I also found her too willing to share personal information about herself without encouragement from me. I didn't think counsellors were supposed to do that?

By half way through I'd decided that this wasn't working and had made up my mind to request a new counsellor. When I spoke to Yuri afterwards (he was somewhat panicked - thinking something bad had happened to me. I don't think he expected death by poor reading) he said he'd been talking to his leader (the husband of my leader), who said my leader was so unimpressed with the first appointment (she sat and 'held my hand') that she was going to try and change my counsellor anyways. She just thought she'd have time to do it without bothering me. She didn't bank on me changing the appointment to one so soon.

On the plus side, it has given me an idea of the form I want my counselling to take and where I don't want to go with it all.