My name is Mag­dale­na Rukun­do and I have always been inter­est­ed in peo­ples‘ life sto­ries. Talk­ing with peo­ple about what they are expe­ri­enc­ing in life, which mean­ing they assign to it and con­nect­ing through these talks has been a pas­sion of mine since child­hood. Peo­ple would com­pli­ment me most of the times for my con­ver­sa­tion­al skills say­ing some­thing like “it feels so great talk­ing to you”. At the same time I always cared deeply for the con­cerns and wor­ries of oth­ers. That’s why study­ing Social Work felt like a no-brain­er after com­plet­ing my final exams. Dur­ing my Bachelor’s degree I select­ed cours­es which focussed on diver­si­ty and inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty because I have always been drawn to peo­ple from oth­er cul­tures and coun­tries. This taught me a lot about how dis­crim­i­na­tion works and made me quite sen­si­tive in my own life not to repro­duce it. Also I got intrigued by the sys­temic approach of coun­selling quite quick­ly because it gave me eye-open­ing per­spec­tives on myself and peo­ple around me with­out it being an approach where you tell peo­ple how they should live their lives (very unlike me).

After com­plet­ing my stud­ies and to this day I worked in the field of migra­tion. This encom­pass­es help­ing migrants to learn Ger­man, find­ing a career or build­ing up on the one they had in their home coun­try, wel­fare, health and hous­ing and pro­vid­ing psy­choso­cial support.

As I said in the begin­ning I am inter­est­ed in help­ing peo­ple and at the same time I enjoy hear­ing about and work­ing through their life sto­ries with them. That is why I decid­ed to enrol in an addi­tion­al three year train­ing to become a sys­temic coun­sel­lor and ther­a­pist and self employed next to my work in the field of migration.

My coun­selling approach 

Is sys­temic which means that I view prob­lems not as a qual­i­ty attached sta­t­i­cal­ly to a per­son but more as a spe­cif­ic con­stel­la­tion of a sys­tem (to be exact its parts). In order to get rid of the prob­lem one has to change the sys­tem be it a social sys­tem or an intrapsy­chic one. With the help of sys­temic meth­ods such as cir­cu­lar ques­tions, sys­temic con­stel­la­tions, inner team and oth­ers I help the client dis­cov­er insights about their indi­vid­ual social and intrapsy­chic sys­tem which then enable them to make those changes that help gen­er­ate the desired out­come. Sys­tems are not out­ward­ly con­trol­lable which means that in coun­selling we can work out dif­fer­ent inter­ven­tions to change a prob­lem­at­ic con­stel­la­tion of the sys­tem but it remains a inves­ti­ga­tion process of how a sys­tem works, many times with a cou­ple of rounds of tri­al and error before we arrive at the desired outcome.

My atti­tude as a coun­sel­lor is one of neu­tral­i­ty and the belief that my client is the expert of their prob­lem (as opposed to me) and I am just guid­ing them on their way to find a solu­tion tak­ing advan­tage of my skills. At the same time it is one of humil­i­ty in front of the unique prob­lem solv­ing com­pe­tences of my client and the self organ­is­ing char­ac­ter of systems.

Last­ly I work strict­ly based on the order that I get from my client. Their con­tent­ment with the process and out­come is how I define my suc­cess as a counsellor.