This week's class reminded me of some success books. Break the problem into small bits, set specific goals, and start with what you can do so that you get motivated. It is good advice. I know it works. Yet sometimes I just want to abandon myself to the flow of life without setting goals or planning future; just being contended with whatever my destiny has to offer. If death makes everybody equal, why bother? Death is inevitable, isn't it? No matter what you do, at the end of the day, you get nothing. So don’t try so hard. Just wait and die. Reasonable argument? It is, to me. However, there is the excitement of learning. I want to explore, understand and satisfy my curiosity. I feel that it isn't right to live without struggling to discover the meaning of life. Plus I don't know what happens after death. There is some serious promise and threat. Oh, I wouldn't mind an eternal bliss. And who could stand an everlasting torture?

Everybody is prejudiced, proposed Alan. There were some objections. But what is prejudice? Maybe we could have gone through examples. Anyway, I accept I am prejudiced. When I talked about our prejudices, I mentioned my dislike against bully type of people. It could affect my counselling session as a counsellor. I would probably very difficult for me to be a non-judgemental listener before a client who tells me that, for example, he beats his wife and children.

I think there is an ideology in this counselling stuff, which may conflict the counsellor’s own believes. If the counsellor has 'a sort of' faith, as Ann stated, it might not be very difficult to be non-judgemental and to cope with possible conflicts between the counsellor's and the client's belief systems. However, if the counsellor has a very strong faith, and believes that, for instance, what she believes is the law of God, thus is the ultimate truth, she could hardly accept the client as he is. Let's say the client is telling his problem with his live-in girlfriend. The counsellor may say to herself, "Oh, you live in sin, then! You had better forswear and leave her or get married." In such cases it could be so difficult just to help the client make his own decision and keep on living his 'wrong' lifestyle, couldn't it be?

Alan demonstrated the importance of getting factual information beforehand by giving a remarkable example of one of his cases. I am too the first child in the family. I have got two brothers and two sisters. My dad had been closer to me than my mum in my childhood. It wasn't the amount of time we spent together. My mum was a housewife and my dad worked full time. I would see my mum much more, but I used to like my dad more. Maybe absence made the heart grow founder. Maybe my mum took the stress of looking after so many children out on me, which could have kept me emotionally away from my mum. Was she interested in the second child so she didn't give much attention to me? No, I think not. My first sibling was born three years after me. I might have been jealous of him, but actually I think my mum gave me too much attention to mould me according to her standards, as I vaguely seem to remember myself thinking about what my mum would say about how I behaved. I didn't like the way she treated me. Maybe she wasn't really too abusive, but I could say that discipline based on threats and fear was an essential part of her parenting style and child rearing practice.