Today I got some really positive feedback from my tutor on my philosophy of counselling concept. His words were, “excellent, excellent, excellent.” It should feel simple to take that in — United beat Liverpool at Anfield for the first time in ten years, my tutor gave me fantastic feedback — and yet there’s still a part of me waiting for the other shoe to drop.

That voice says: You cheated. You used ChatGPT to help you develop your ideas.
But the truth is, ChatGPT didn’t record the video, didn’t put itself out there, didn’t embody those ideas. I did.

And still, I find it so hard to give myself a break. That harshness is inbuilt, born from childhood, from an environment where self-criticism felt safer than trust.

It’s strange: I don’t miss my mother at all. That in itself tells me something. There was never really a bond there. Any sense of closeness I thought I had was something I manufactured in my head, because of the absence of connection elsewhere. Talking to her was a way of filling the gap, not because the bond was truly there.

Seeing this so clearly now is both painful and freeing. It means I can step forward into my work — and my life — without that false tie, without pretending something was there when it wasn’t. Maybe this is what it means to start really owning my philosophy, as both a counsellor and as myself.