What really works

She’s a maid, and her husband left her with two kids. For several weeks, she couldn’t stop crying. She as willing to kill herself, saying she had lost her world. As she had stopped eating, she had to be taken to the hospital, where I believe she was given some pills. After two days, I met her by chance again: she was smiling and saying she would get over it.

I’m not sure if it was due to the pills, to the time, or if somebody told her something that made sense to her. What she told me was that her daughters showed a power she never thought they had, cooking to her, cleaning the house, trying to cheer her up. “Next weekend,” she promised, “I’ll take them to the park and we will have a lot of fun together.”

Back(stage)

I’m back for quite a while now, finishing my career counselling sessions for this year. I’ve been having some positive surprises and feedback, but what is still to be done is to diminish the distance between school and work, that is, to provide opportunities for the students to acquire some self-efficacy beliefs that will be useful when choosing a career. Many of them will only start doing things their own when they enter university/college. Besides, there seems to be a lack of reflexion on the world of work, like what the sense of work is, why people work, how necessary it is for them to work etc. It may seem odd, but some teenagers have no idea where the money comes from. They don’t know how easy/difficult it can be to make money and they know nothing about the cost of living.

What is the fiction of your life?

Let’s write a story about yourself.

What’s its introduction? Where does your story take place?

How can you, as a character, be revealed? How does one get to know you? By your physical appearance? By what you say, think, feel, dream, do and don’t do? Or by what others say about you? Describe it.

What kind of conflicts have you faced/are you facing? A struggle against external forces, or against your own self? A struggle against another person, against circumstances, ideas, or against your choices, against your feelings or limitations? Elaborate.

How will the turning point be? Will the conflict be resolved or not? What do you think? Do you want it to be resolved?

How do you expect the untangling of the events to be?

Self-help may sometimes help

An aunt of mine told me that, when she feels someone is willing to cause her damage, she imagines a glass cage around her: all the evil will hit the cage and go back to the person who sent it. Is it true? Well, maybe not, or maybe yes, for those who believe in the propagation of all kinds of energy; what is true is that it makes her feel stronger and better. Good for her, and I myself wouldn´t mind trying, too. Trying to imagine the cage, not sending her evil thoughts to see if they would come back to me.

Such things don´t need the evidence of science… if it works for you, who cares what the evidences are?

The right decision

“I wanna be certain, I don’t wanna regret,” he says.

We just gather enough information so as to make the best decision. How can one ever be certain?