Over a game of “Bananagrams” at the dining room table shoehorned in before dinner, my daughter says,
“We have to keep a reflective journal but I don’t know what to write in mine.”
She places down letters to make the word “conundrum”, an irony I ignore because she’ll already be ahead of me.
“I’ll show you the one I made when I was doing bereavement training.”
I arrange the letters in front of me to make the phrase, “Am I Jesu” and take a picture of it on my phone because I can’t find anywhere for the letters in the game, at least nothing that can challenge “conundrum”.
Upstairs I pull out the appropriate folder from the shelves by my desk bringing a huge puff of dust I blow from the top like someone might do in a film.
Flicking through the pages I begin to wonder if my notes will be much help.
I push everything back into its clear plastic wallet, clip the lever arches shut and head back downstairs, wiping the front of the folder on the arm of my t-shirt.
She flicks through the pages blankly.
“The thing is,” I offer, “Reflective journals are all about grey areas and you prefer black and white.”
She stops reading and looks at me.
“When I read a book, I like it when huge spaces are left for interpretation,” I say.
“I don’t. If you’ve bothered to write a book, at least make it clear to me what’s happening,” she replies.
Earlier we’d been having a conversation about whether it would be right to medicate people with a family history of depression to prevent them from becoming clinically depressed in the future.
I said it wasn’t a great idea, not least because emotional trauma is sometimes the making of us.
She countered that it might save some people from suicide.
“Well if we had better support structures in place for people we might save them from suicide that way.”
This drifted into a further conversation about anti-depressants and the NHS reliance on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy which my daughter described as,
“A load of crap”
“Well, it works for some people, just not everyone,” I said.
One of the reasons that I found keeping a reflective journal easy was that I spend most of my life in my own head. I am, by instinct, reflective. My daughter is a pragmatist.
Reflection works well in therapy.
“I’m a joy for my therapist,” I tell her, “Because he doesn’t have to do anything. I’m quite happy to sit for an hour and talk to myself, marveling at the things I only know because I just heard myself say them.”
“I hate that,” she says “I need to be asked direct questions, preferably in the form of multiple choice.”
She goes on,
“Do you remember that art therapist I went to see once? She didn’t say a word to me for over twenty minutes. I just sat staring out of the window.”
“Did you reflect?” I ask
“No, I just got angry.”
My son’s girlfriend, who has been listening to this conversation, chips in, looking at my daughter.
“I feel like you do about reflection. We use “Gibbs Reflective Cycle” in medical school. Try that.”
We Google it and find it’s as close as it comes to a multiple-choice version of a reflective journal. My daughter is delighted.
I sometimes wonder how she can spend so much time watching Netflix but still get so much work done, and conclude it’s because of the time she doesn’t spend in her own head.
Unable to contain herself any longer she reaches across the table and picks my “Am I Jesu” letters up and neatly fits them into two adjoining parts of the grid creating the word “Majestic”.
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