In January 1999, I started a two-year course in psychodynamic counselling. One of the course requirements was to produce several work journals each term. They could be on any topic the student wished to think about or explore that pertained to the course, be it clinical or theoretical work, or professional/personal development. Three months later, I wrote one on Bion's (1962) concept of ‘the hatred of learning from experience’, after a seminar on his work. In Section 1, I present the work journal itself, in which I described my difficulties with anxiety about the course in relation to this concept: how I felt I needed to be a perfect student who ‘knew everything’; my intolerance of making mistakes; and my hatred of not knowing; in tandem with my envy of others' knowledge. In Section 2, I describe my current understanding of what I was rather desperately attempting to work out in the journal – taking into consideration both my emerging feelings, in light of my own history and state of mind, together with what I had come to understand – that the course was poorly structured and did not provide an adequately safe framework for clinical work and learning. This resulted in my decision to leave. In Section 3, I write about the arduous but ultimately rewarding process of returning to training, eventually culminating in my qualification as a psychodynamic psychotherapist. My final thouights are presented in Section 4.