A woman went for psychoanalysis for 10 years and spent £30,000 in total. Ann said jokingly, "At the end of the therapy she's even more screwed up!" Yes, seemingly that therapy is really costly. It seems a kind of luxury. I am not a proponent of psychoanalysis, but still if one feels better, why not splash out on such a luxury? What are we supposed to do with money while suffering emotionally? I wouldn't care too much about spending on a therapy if it would be helpful.

If the counselling is going nowhere, the counsellor should finish the counselling process because it is unethical to carry on, Alan argued. I don't agree. I might tell the clients about my impression. Still then, making the final decision is not my business; it is the clients who are supposed to decide whether they should continue or not. If I, as a counsellor, decided to finish counselling thinking that it is going nowhere, wouldn't I assume that I know what is good for the clients better than they do? Maybe they don't want to go to an obvious destination, somewhere specifically planned. Maybe they just want to be listened and understood without getting judged or advised. Who am I to decide if such sort of benefits the clients might be getting are actually good or bad for them?

We are all unique, so we should never assume that just because the experience is similar the feeling should also be the same, Alan suggested. Yes, instead of just assuming, asking the clients seems to be the best or maybe the only way to understand their feelings correctly. Well, I am actually not sure if I could really understand others correctly because we put the meaning we want to convey into the words and the content of the words may differ from individual to individual.

I don't remember whether my mum used to ask me in my childhood what I did at school when I came back home. Nevertheless, I seem to remember I wouldn't tell her much about what happened at school or somewhere else or inside me. I think it is probably because she wouldn't only listen to me; she had some fixed standards in her mind and she would often judge what I tell her. And today, as a grown-up, I still don't share many things with her. She still tends to give much unsolicited advice even though I have explicitly expressed many times that I did not want to receive her advice. She just ignores my expectation and keeps on doing what she thinks best. She tries to interfere with my life without my consent. She supposes she knows better than I do, for example, if I feel cold or my jumper is thick enough to keep me warm. She advices me not to read the books that seem to influence my ideas and keep me away from her conventional values. Actually, I don't find such sort of attitudes of her as annoying as in the past. I seem to have lost much of my oversensitivity, but still I feel uncomfortable when she is around, so I try not to visit her too often and not to speak to her on the phone too long. It seems to me that my current aloof reaction towards my mother stems from the accumulation of years, not only how she recently treats me. Anyway, when all's said and done I feel all right now. I even sometimes feel thankful because my mother's undesirable behaviours apparently prevented me from having a strong attachment and enabled me to develop an emotionally independent personality. Above all, I owe a great deal to the unsatisfactory parts of my past as they have pushed me into a rewarding self-improvement journey.