I just came back to the UK after my brief travel to ‘homeland’ and as i came out this morning, i see my vision and perception of the surroundings changing…it feels as if the move from one cultural environment to another is sharpening up the way we view the world, there is a different kind of ‘sensitivity’ I am experiencing which i cannot easily put into words. Both England and Greece are two countries that I have immersed in, in different ways…as i have mentioned before, none of those feels like ‘home’, I am existing more in a ‘liminal space’, thriving for some sort of integration, which i tacitly know i cannot force… … Read more »

I will soon teach a workshop titled “Cross-cultural counselling and the therapeutic relationship: exploring our cultural selves and cultivating cross-cultural empathy”.This will be my first teaching experience in my home country as a counsellor and interestingly enough i hold a lot of anxieties around that: How will the Greeks perceive me? How will I manage to teach in my first language when am so used to operate within my counselling role in english for years now? What sort of reactions will the topic of ‘culture’ provoke to the Greek colleagues? How will i be seen by the organisers, the Greek person-centred training institution?…I just realised that “what used to be my own/native culture is a whole new culture for me” !!! and i have so much anxiety around operating ‘within’ it…It is as if I have become a stranger, a foreigner in my own ‘home-land’…. This realisation, although anxiety-provoking, is quite interesting from a research point of view… … Read more »

I realise that transcribing research interviews is a very involving, consuming process…not easy to do. It is very engaging and takes me to deep emotional places, given that what a participant may say can raise a number of responses given my involvement to the topic. Like i do when I am counselling, i need to be aware of my own process so that i can own it and allow all the space for the participant’s story. My own story is also data but i have to e able to use the one to inform the other. I know there is interesting stuff around that on Kvale’s book about Qualitative Interviewing. I also found at interesting article about the importance of transcription quality. See abstract here

I spent Easter day with 7 greek friends of mine here in Manchester. We had arranged to meet and cook together ‘greekstyle’, as a way of connecting with our own culture whilst being abroad. We spent the whole day together, from early afternoon until late at night. There were a lot of converations during the whole day around our lives in the UK, the way our move abroad has impacted the relationships with the family back to Greece, the ways that personal relationships have developed, our work/study opportunities, the dilemmas around returning or not returning back to our home country, which does not feel like ‘home’ anymore…there were many emotions in the atmosphere and some of us admitted that they felt quite exhausted at the end of the day, as a result of discussing about those issues. … Read more »

I ve been bulding up this blog for a few weeks now but have noticed a resistance in me about making it public. Is there something around self-disclosure that provokes that? Although, as a counsellor having gone through therapy, am used to ‘revealing’ aspects of myself, so it’s something often taken for granted in the counselling world…

I think, it’s time for the blog to get public and for me to overcome my kind of ‘reserved’ side…or have I become ‘too English’ by now? … Read more »