Adrian Scott Counsellor Supervisor MBACP Accred

129 people died in Paris. These people were innocent enjoying a night out in bar, restaurant, and a rock concert.
What a tragedy for their families and friends. Being a parent and losing a child is unimaginable.

But some how these innocent people were perceived to symbolise or represent something beyond their control. They didn’t ask for this: this was given to them by the perception of another.

This begins early. Depending on the circumstances of the baby’s birth the parents already have a perception of their offspring that has nothing to do with the child. She might be an accident, planned, a replacement, or born near a family death. These events will shape the family perception of the baby. This gives the birth a status and value connected to a narrative and history.

In a healthy environment the child grows up able to influence the perception of those close to them. They can contradict and challenge the perceptions of them by others. These challenges are accepted and constantly redrawn in response to information and responses given by the growing person.
In a less healthy environment these perceptions are fixed and rigid. Nothing changes them.

We never escape the rigid misconceptions of others about ourselves. We either don’t accept others’ perceptions or have to tolerate them. So to some we are representatives of governments we have not voted for, and whose foreign policies we don’t agree with. In this perception innocent is guilty.
French Death.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2015
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Disclaimer: This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique

Ian Rankin talked about his character Inspector Rebus and the small City of Edinburgh
the stories are set in. Saturday Live 7th November 2015 16 minutes 45 seconds

The point was made that the size of the small city suited his writing. He said that it was easy for people to imagine Rebus walking around a small city like Edinburgh in a day. The reader can have an overview of Edinburgh where the proximity of good guys and bad guys is closer in a small city.

Enthusiasts of Rebus can even go on walks and run the risk of bumping into the author at one of Rebus’ favourite haunts in the small city.

This kind of imagining is more difficult in a large city like London. The crime novels and TV series set in London focus on the scale and complexity of London. You cannot imagine walking around London in a day. London’s scale and diversity are used as a background to the story. It is too large to be imagined as a whole.

Does this mean that the attachment London’s population has to its capital city is any less personal?
Is London thought of as a city of villages? Is the frantic energy of Central London easier to have an attachment or fondness for?

Does this make the person in Edinburgh closer to their city, than the Londoner?
Can Edinburgh be more easily called home than London?
Small City

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2015
All rights reserved
Disclaimer: This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique

Hygge is a Danish word meaning cosiness. This is the feeling you have when surrounded by friends and family. The season of Hygge is particularly at Christmas time. Is this why Denmark is one of the happiest countries?
Pronounced “hooga” it is something the Danish want to achieve. Hygge is considered to be a fundamental idea of the Danish lifestyle.

The weather is a big advantage in Denmark. In winter it is like a cosy Christmas scene on repeat. Trees, cold, wood cabins and the feeling of snuggling up to the stove.

Hygge needs a luxurious environment, and an appreciation of small pleasures. Hygge describes a getting together of friends and family. It is a social value with a sense of community and remembering. Play and freedom are prioritised.

Denmark is a small country less than twice the size of Massachusetts with a population of 5 million people.
A general belief in Denmark is that children and young people are its best resource.

Are we missing something?

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2015
All rights reserved
Disclaimer: This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique

Thomas Evans aka the White Beast was born and brought up in High Wycombe. He died in Kenya on a failed raid on a Kenyan Army camp. The documentary is the story of his mother and brother trying to come to terms which his change of lifestyle and death.

What is fascinating is his mother’s visit to to a de-radicalisation charity. They chart Thomas’ life focusing on trauma. The first trauma was his Father leaving and cutting off all contact to join his new family in Europe. This created a traumatic vulnerability. The second a failed romantic relationship where Thomas was deeply in love. The third event was losing his job because of his appearance and attitude. Then he found another job very quickly through somebody at the local mosque.
The brutal loss of a Father who does not want anything more to do with his children is traumatic. The sense of rejection and hopelessness. The loss of a family group or gang makes men particularly vulnerable to new ideas and lifestyles that can recompense this loss. White Beast.

There is something innately human about a group of people bonding together over a task. I suspect many of us remember these experiences. They give meaning to life.
It is this absence of opportunities in cold industrial cultures that forces young men to look elsewhere. The warmth and instant grouping in other cultures is an immensely powerful force. Being in a culture that focuses on bringing people together is attractive to lost westerners without meaning or a place in their own culture. White Beast.

Add to this mixture a simplistic, black and white belief with the risk of life and death. The group experience is heightened like an addictive drug which cannot be given up.
White Beast

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2015
All rights reserved
Disclaimer: This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique

Returning Home is an emotional experience. Whether it is a house, flat, town, city or country. Once you have left can you ever go back? You have changed with the impact of what has happened to you away from home.
You return home a different person. You can see home differently returning home after a long time. Has it changed or is it you?

If home for you is the place you were brought up in, it has a strong feeling of the past, of nostalgia particularly if you have been away. Nostalgia taken from the Greek algos “pain, grief, distress” and nostos “homecoming,” Literally a pain from homecoming. Those who have never left their home town seem not to notice the past so much, as they have never been without it.

To be away from home and to return to it is a poignant experience of happiness and sadness. Sometimes we stay away not to return home, sensing that the return will be harder than the struggles of being away from home.

Adjusting to a return home is a challenge. People you know from home who have never left, don’t know what to say and feel betrayed that you did not find it good enough to stay like they did. You might have gained education, qualifications, or money. This makes it difficult to feel equal and connected to a return home.

Family and parents particularly seem unchanged by the years of being away. Interested in where you have been, you try to explain it to them but it sounds different at home. Like the wine bought on summer holidays never tasting like it did in the sun.

And to the latest version of the refugee being forced to flee from home – longing to return. When the home country has calmed – do they go back or has the place of home changed?

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2015
All rights reserved
Disclaimer: This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique

American Humorist Josh Billings popularised the idea in his poem the Kicker.
“The Kicker” (c.1870)
I hate to be a kicker,
I always long for peace,
But the wheel that does the squeaking,  
Is the one that gets the grease.

Literally the person who is always complaining, shouts the loudest, gets the most attention.
Or needs the most attention!? If you have ever line managed staff in an organisation – it is always the staff who are least effective who generate the most work. If the work culture is changing usually under the premise where cost cutting or more rigorous accountability is required, under performing staff become the “kickers”.

Perhaps worn down by long service. Unsupported without being skilled up to deal with the ever changing demands of IT, & a funding criteria demanding more accountability. The “kickers” resort to passive aggressive tactics of going slow, and not adapting to new ways of doing things. Or taking out grievances, and going off work because of stress.

It is unpleasant for both sides: staff and managers. But the same thing happens in families. Perhaps it is a “difficult” member of the family who needs to be coerced into attending family gatherings and there’s always Christmas. Is this a person who is genuinely an awkward character who doesn’t want to play ball, or the person carrying the damage of the family that nobody else wants.

Such acknowledgement at work cannot be afforded as the profit or service delivery is all powerful. But in families it can be thought about. Perhaps the “kicker” has genuine reasons to be aggrieved. But this cannot be recognised as it puts other family members under scrutiny. Part of the power of family culture is that what remains unspoken stays unspoken.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2015
All rights reserved
Disclaimer: This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique

Syrian Love Story describes the relationship between a Palestinian man and a Syrian woman.
It is a story about how the disintegration of a country disintegrates a relationship of love.
The breakdown of the relationship is subtle and brutal at the same time.

The brutality is in the adults loving, fighting and hurting each other trying to accommodate the violence and rage of the Syrian Civil war. The subtlety is in the innocence and lack of understanding in their children’s faces.

Amer is a palestinian political activist, and Ragdha a left wing Syrian activist. They meet in prison, and fell in love.
In the early days of their relationship you can see the happiness in their faces fuelled by a passion of fighting oppression against the Syrian Government.

This is a tale of a change of priorities in a relationship between two people that is humanly mundane but agonisingly traumatic for the family involved. The hook and why this was made a programme is to see a civil war played out in a family from a country in a civil war. The family have to flee Syria to a refugee camp, to Lebanon to Paris, France. Time is slowed by a sense of dislocation showing them lying down a lot, smoking cigarettes with no aim or reason to live. Chillingly at one point their young son is angry and wants to kill the leader of the Syrian Government? You wonder is this how children are distracted and want to join radical political movements?

The gender politics is reversed which you could say is the downfall of the relationship? Ragdha is famous in Syria as a political activist, was imprisoned and tortured in Syrian jail. Ragdha is caught between the dilemma of deserting her children & husband and the Syrian Freedom Movement. Amer feels he and the children have been abandoned while she keeps in contact with the political activists inside Syria. The film’s progress is charted by the visible growing up of their young son. He starts the film by speaking on the phone to his mother in jail, and asking her where she is?

This is a dilemma that she cannot resolve. Is she a mother or an activist? Would this dilemma exist for a man?
Is he a father or an activist? We are strongly conditioned to judge women by their attitude to their mother role. In the end she chooses to be an activist. Her decision is made knowing her children are being well looked after by their father in a country that is safe & where they have a future.
You wonder if Amer as the husband and father had been the political activist unable to give it up-the family might have survived? His wife might have subjugated herself to the expected mother and wife role accepting her husband’s need to fight oppression?
Syrian Love Story

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2015
All rights reserved
Disclaimer: This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique

Not Eden
Eden is a film chronicling the progress of French club culture music and its eventual downfall.   
It starts positively enough with the youth and hope of starting something new. Hollywood does this well as it is part of the pioneer spirit. But Eden describes a very European music movement in that its scale and reach is smaller and more local.

To be honest it almost gets tedious half way through. There is a coldness and disassociation to the characters’ expectation of success. But then in a totally unexpected way and without noticing it you find yourself in a drama. In the middle of a parable of grief and loss.

The transition is so subtle. The impact of the main characters still hanging on to their creation while audiences have moved on is so painful and inevitable you feel your heart is going to break. Arrogance and entitlement turn to disbelief then grief and loss.

The change from popular young gun to lonely middle age is poignant and moving as it is portrayed in such a calm but gentle way. It is this gentleness that invites you in  without you noticing.
Just like the real thing in life.
Not Eden

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2015
All rights reserved Disclaimer:
This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique

Kupari beach is a luxury hotel result on the coast of Croatia. Well it was until the Yugoslav Navy
bombed it, and then regained it back in the autumn of 1991. After being destroyed and then systematically looted the Kupari resort is a shell of what it originally was.

It was one of the prime resorts in the Adriatic sea, where Tito had a summer home and several thousand guests could be accommodated in luxury.

What is amazing is that in the Western Europe the whole resort would be sectioned off and protected with fencing and security. But today you can go visit and wander around the ruins of a once beautiful resort, destroyed and plundered by its own people.

Further down the coast road towards Dubrovnik is the Belvedere luxury hotel  complete with glass capsule lift to take tourists down to the private beach. The same story. Destroyed in war yet still able to be visited by tourists but not on the list of local travel agents’ excursion destinations!

Perhaps it is right that these resorts no longer exist. They were sponsored by dictators and their extorted billions taken from the economy of the people of their own states and countries. But they still exist for anyone to walk around and imagine and remember about the cruelty and senselessness of war.
Their war. Croatia’s war
Dead Beach

Maxwellisation is the process in which a person criticised by a public inquiry is given the chance to respond. 
Maxwellisation is what is slowing down the completion of the Chilcot Report on the Iraq War. There are a few very public figures who might be heavily criticised in the report. They are given the opportunity to give their version of events. How many versions or rewrites?

The name Maxwell conjures up corporate greed and recklessness. Maxwell robbed the pension funds of his employees to subsidise his lavish lifestyle. Does this connection taint the process with a flavour of powerful people trying to get away with something they shouldn’t?

How did this word maxwellisation stick to a serious legal process which is meant to have transparency, integrity and respect to a sceptical public? Is this a cynical media invention so that public inquires are not to be believed?

However this came about it is a very clever deceit or truth? Perhaps it reminds us that nothing can be written transparently. There is always the bias of the author to influence the meaning of the writing. Whatever the outcome of public inquiries, they always support the author. The powerful political elite.

The suspicion of vested interests delaying the publication of the Chilcot Report does nothing for us – the general public –  in believing the truth and transparency of its content and recommendations.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2015
All rights reserved Disclaimer:
This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique