Therapy is Snow Joke in Arctic Conditions!

Once I'd looked out of the window last Friday morning, I wasn't expecting to see too many people that day. Like the surrounding roads, our semi-circular driveway and six plus parking spaces were buried (again!) under something like two feet of fresh snow. It looked super. It also looked like a lot of hard work.

"Deeper and deeper, Bill", intoned my wife, who has taken to using hypnotic phrases in regular conversation, and who was then on her way to spend the morning in a nice warm kitchen. "Not funny, love", I said.

In the end I compromised with the snow, and dug out two parking spaces, one entrance to the driveway, and a path to the front door. Then I went indoors to find out which of the days' clients fancied a day out in the Winter Wonderland that is now rural Berkshire.

Surprisingly, somebody did. My six o'clock client wouldn't hear of putting off his appointment - and my description of the horrendous conditions outside didn't cut any ice, if you'll excuse the pun. He was determined to go ahead.

On one level I was pleased, because a motivated client makes for very good therapy, but when I thought about the unploughed, ungritted roads outside; the half a dozen or so cars that had been abandoned earlier in the week and only recently retrieved, and the fact that my client would be driving in bad conditions on unfamiliar roads in the dark, I was really less than happy.

By 6:30 p.m. that evening I was very definitely unhappy. There was no sign of the client - and the thought that he might just have had second thoughts wasn't as comforting as it should have been. Thankfully, the 'phone rang at quarter to seven. The client was fifty or sixty yards away, in a road almost opposite - and he'd been stuck in a snow drift for forty minutes.

Off with the house shoes, on with the green wellies, and out with a long-handled shovel in one hand and a wide headed shovel in the other to provide a bit of hands-on therapy.

By the time I got there, there was another car stuck behind my clients' car, and it took the combined efforts of all three of us and nearly twenty minutes to dig everyone out.

Afterwards - fortified by tea - my client and I finally got down to business. He relaxed, and I began another kind of therapeutic digging to try get to the root of his problem.

It was a great session. Two blokes with shovels can develop a lot of vital empathy very quickly - and he was really a very motivated person...

Bill - http://www.therapypartnership.com/