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• The incidental review is used in many schools of counselling and it feels as if one is due now. We are four-and-a-half terms through our six-term postgraduate course and have just completed our second residential – a weekend of enquiry and reflection on the self.
  
  One of my fellow students commented on our final day that this weekend was the first thing we, as a group, had done for the last time. To paraphrase Churchill, it is not the end of the beginning, but the beginning of the end. The resonance of the phrase can feel appropriate too, as I certainly came away with what felt like battle fatigue. Two full days of self-examination and the excavation of feelings can be exhausting.
  
  One of the things that became apparent was that the selves we are this year now carry a lot of shared experiences and history. There was reference to last year’s residential; because we were in the same venue, some of the upsets from that time became present; there were regular barometric readings taken to compare personal and group mood and intensity. So, though this was the last time we would meet as a group, I began to see the possibility of this weekend in the calendar as a lifelong project, where we might meet and explore and expose…
  
  This notion was triggered in part by the weekend’s theme and billing: ‘the shadow side’. Last year the object of the residential was to ‘work on the self’. The theme of this weekend was to explore – not any latent evil, but the aspects of self that are aired rarely, if at all.
  
  It left me with visions of coming back to this conference centre year on year, peeling away more layers, edging further and further round the dark side of my personal moon. And there is something of this that causes me disquiet.
  
  The self suddenly feels like a never-ending project. I acknowledge that this is a universal truth – that we all change organically – but I fear that, as a budding counsellor, now I have started, I will never stop this self-examination.
  
  The analogy that comes to mind is with a painter. The picture is never finished, never perfect, but at some point he must put his brush down and stop. I felt, at the weekend, and still now, as if I want to put my metaphorical brush down. Yet even in this feeling, I am examining my motivation and response. What am I afraid to look at? What have I touched on that makes me want to flee?
  
  Ultimately, this is the shadow that I take away with me – the worry that, having been issued with the counsellor’s lens, I will not be able to put it down; that every decision I take, every feeling that I experience will come under this intense scrutiny when, before, I might have walked the dog or kicked the cat. Further, that it is not just myself, but everyone else that is viewed through the lens, that every time a friend or family member asks for help or leans even slightly, the counsellor will appear.
  
  To draw another analogy (analogy is a favourite tool of mine that I need to look at – is it a way of distancing myself from the core emotion of the situation and going up into the head?), I feel like Dr Xavier, the man with x-ray eyes. He enjoyed the novelty of his invention in the first instance, able as he was to see through the human veneer (early in the film, he uses his gift to diagnose and save a young girl) but then lost control of his invention, found himself looking beyond the physical and manifest and was haunted by visions of chaos. Xavier reaches a state where he can’t stop seeing – his eyelids and sunglasses prove inadequate barriers, and eventually he plucks out his own eyes rather than continue with the torment of his vision.
  
  As an analogy it is a bit intense, and things are obviously not at that pitch, but I did feel weary and a little anxious, and found myself listening to sports commentary on the radio, craving less care and angst and more cakes and ale; wanting to paddle in the shallows rather then dive into the deep. All the while, my counsellor self and my internal supervisor are at my shoulder, wondering and wanting me to process these feelings…

• Some details have been changed to protect identities.