multiply personality and good counsellor

I attended my Counselling and Helping Skills class yesterday. I really enjoyed the session because I got a chance to talk about a lot of things. Especially in reflecting my own personality, experience, etc. and then relate it to the counselling concept or theories. Yesterday we discussed about ‘self’ and ‘selves’.

Simply said, it’s like this, in our daily life, we have different personalities and they seem to transform every time, depend on the circles we are with. Whether it the circles of friends, professionals, family and others. For example, when I’m with my colleague, I tend to be more friendly-less talkative-type woman, but when I’m with my family, I’ll be more stubborn yet fun-type girl. What my lecturer's saying is that we are not just ‘one’ but there are ‘multiple’ of us in ourselves.

Well, to me I can compare this 'self' and 'selves' scenario to an actor/actress life. Actor/actress play different roles on screen but people don't know who they really are in real life. I guess it's the same thing with us. Our friends, families, colleague may know who we are but only us who knows our true selves.

Looking at this from counselling perspective, a counsellor must understand, realise and accept the fact that their client has multiply personalities, especially now that we are living in the complex-global environment. At the end of the lecture, our lecturer asked us a question, what are the criteria of a good counsellor that suit the post-modern community that have multiply personality?

Open minded, positive, active listener, trustworthy, are some of the answers from the class. Well, to add one to that list, I think one of the important criteria a counsellor should have is not to be judgemental. We tend to be judgemental when we met new people. I knew one boy who I went with in secondary school. He’s so quite, a loner. Always walk alone by himself. I don’t think I have ever talk to him. Few years ago, I met him at a reception. I didn’t recognize it was him until he approached me and to my surprise, he even remembered my name. He introduced me to his mother who’s a foreigner. Comes to think of it, I realise maybe he’s not a loner, maybe he just had a problem in communicating in Malay language since his mother is a foreigner. Had I not been so judgemental, maybe I’d have a chance to know him better and be friends with him. At least, perhaps I could share some laughter because I seldom see his smile back on those days.

I guess it’s true when Mother Theresa said that "If you judge people, you have no time to love them."