Everyone knows the story about Alice in Wonderland. How a girl whose dad is out of the picture gets trapped in a land that is controlled by an evil queen. The SyFy channel (stands for Science Fiction) came out with a version of the movie in December of 2009. In their version of the movie, wonderland is a place where humans are used to harvest their emotions for the pleasure of the citizens of Wonderland. The whole philosophy behind Wonderland is instant gratification. Good emotions are harvested from the humans and turned into "teas" so that the citizens of Wonderland would never experience bad emotions and could experience whatever emotion they wanted, whenever they wanted. In one scene Alice is walking with a couple of guys through this hospital in which citizens of Wonderland had drank too much of a certain emotion and had to be brought down off of the "high" those emotions brought. In the end, Alice is able to help Wonderland get away from instant gratification and to just live in the moment.
In class we have been discussing what counseling is and how it can be effective. In order for counseling to be effective, we cannot just give a client and list of things to do or not to do to avoid painful emotions. By doing that, we just have just given some sort of tonic to aid in that particular moment, just like the emotions the citizens of Wonderland drunk. As counselors, we have to aid our clients in effectively changing in healthy ways. Most of the time, that is going to take some time. A person cannot change a pattern of living over night normally and we have to encourage clients to stick with counseling for the long haul.
This is actually one of my favorite movies, even after viewing it in light of this class. However, I have to remind myself that not everything can be obtained immediately. As I deal with clients in the future, I have to remember that sometimes counseling is not going to go quickly. I have to remember to caution clients to take their time and work through the situations that have brought them to me. As I write this, I also am reminding myself that God can do amazing things and move in someone's life miraculously. This movie just reminded me that sometimes we have to wait for the best things in life.