The Making of a Counsellor

Ms Ellen Noonan, Ellen Noonan, Dr Laurence Spurling, Laurence Spurling, Ms Ellen Noonan, Ellen Noonan, Dr Laurence Spurling, Laurence Spurling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134917310
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In The Making of a Counsellor case studies illustrate work done with `impossible' clients; other essays about orphans and debtors, accountancy trainees and expatriate employees explore new ways of thinking about these groups of people. More traditional, perhaps, are essays about work with neurological patients, adolescent youth club members, traumatised families, and the chronically mentally ill. Each essay breaks fresh ground in understanding the complexity of the problems and the richness of the counselling relationship.
In vivid narrative, The Making of a Counsellor. conveys the experience of thinking and working as a counsellor. The original and thoughtful essays make this an invaluable source of ideas and techniques.

Chapter 1
Debt counselling
The unfortunate, the incompetent, and the profligate

Angela Mann

INTRODUCTION

There is a scene in David Copperfield where Mr Micawber offers some advice on how to be happy:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the weary scene, and – and in short you are for ever floored.¹

This study is an attempt to examine debt and its effect on the individual, using as a basis the debt counselling service currently offered in a New Town Advice Centre, which is run by the local authority. Although debtors’ prisons such as featured in David Copperfield are thankfully a thing of the past, it is still generally agreed that debt and misery go hand in hand. Clients using the debt counselling service are often severely depressed and describe fears of imprisonment and destitution. Sometimes suicidal thoughts are expressed. Counsellors working in the service often feel that in taking on debt counselling they are presented with problems that cannot be resolved simply by money management exercises. They discover a prevalence of Mr Micawber’s attitude of linking money to happiness, and find that money problems often arise because of deeper unresolved conflicts in people’s lives.

Debt can be the trigger which brings about a request for help. The client/ debt counsellor relationship, in my opinion, provides a potential framework for a therapeutic working-through of problems which have surfaced.

CREATING ORDER OUT OF CHAOS

Serious debt has become a major social problem in recent years. In the 1980s, lending to individuals doubled. By the end of the decade more than £130 billion was owed in mortgages and £36 billion in consumer purchases. The number of mortgage repossessions has risen eightfold since 1980. In 1986 8 per cent of council tenants were in serious rent arrears. Ninety thousand households a year had their electricity disconnected and 60,000 lost their gas supply in 1987. Between 100,000 and 200,000 families are thought to have multiple debt problems.²

It was in response to the problems created by multiple debt that a debt counselling service was established in a New Town Advice Centre in 1986. The service offers clients counselling and support, representation at court and enhancement of relationships between debtors and creditors. After ‘maximizing’ the client’s income, a repayment programme is worked out with the client, using disposable income (however small) to distribute proportionate payments to creditors which are within the client’s ability to maintain. Debts are ‘prioritized’ according to the sanctions available to creditors if they are not paid, and priority debts are dealt with first. Clients are supported and encouraged in the process of negotiation and repayment. The aim, as one counsellor put it, is to create order out of chaos, to change a crisis into a manageable problem, and to convert a mood of confusion and despair into one of understanding and light at the end of the tunnel.

Each case takes considerable time to resolve; some are never resolved. Some clients have been receiving help since the service first started in 1986. This is often not because of the technical complexities of debt problems but because of the emotional difficulties which accompany debt. Counsellors, however, find themselves working under immense pressure to close cases. Results are measured by the agency in terms of statistics. There is also pressure from people needing the service; there is a long waiting list for initial appointments. The effect of these pressures on the debt counsellor cannot be ignored. All too often a client is ‘patched up’ for the moment and no attention is paid to the long-term effect. This is counterproductive in the long run, as the client who receives this type of assistance almost inevitably reappears at a later date requesting further help.

Counsellors within the service see emotional support as crucial to helping a client, quickly establishing relationships with their clients and becoming treated as confidants. The starting point for assessment of a client’s needs may be to consider the meaning of indebtedness for the individual.

THE UNFORTUNATE, THE INCOMPETENT, AND THE PROFLIGATE - THE ORIGINS OF DEBT

The way in which a client got into debt, however long ago, is of primary importance to establish, as for me it determines the whole focus and shape of the work to come. In my opinion, the client’s account of his or her situation is the key to understanding them. I find that I never have to ask how they got into debt; the information is always volunteered. This seems to indicate that at some level the client is also aware of its significance.

Mark, aged 36, came to see me because he was at risk of losing his flat due to rent arrears. He also had a number of bills which he couldn’t pay. He said that he had been very depressed since the breakdown of his marriage and subsequent divorce nine months ago. Things came to a head when he was sacked from his job six months ago because he didn’t bother to turn up for work. Since then he had lived on a loan and his bank account, gradually sinking into debt and deeper depression.

Mark had an apparent need to talk to me about his marriage and subsequent deterioration. His ex-wife had recently moved out of the area, with their three children, telling him that she needed a break and was feeling pressurized by his demand that they get back together. She would not give him a forwarding address, but said she would get in touch, and Mark was feeling quite desperate about this. Of all his debts, the telephone bill was the one he was most anxious about. If his telephone was disconnected, he said, she would be unable to contact him.

During the session he was able to talk about all of this and experienced obvious relief. I had the impression that the problem with his wife had taken him over and become the focus of his life, and that underneath there was a man who was perfectly able to manage and organize himself, and I conveyed this to him. He reacted positively and agreed that he had been functioning in the hope that his wife would take pity on him and return. Before he left he acknowledged that he had some responsibility to himself. He rang me the following week to cancel his second appointment because he had found a job; he was feeling a bit better and had already managed to pay some bills with his first wages.

This is an example of someone who, on the face of it, has plunged into debt because of marriage breakdown and unemployment. However, plenty of people survive such crises without going into debt. This encounter shows that it is important to give the client the opportunity to tell his story. Mark responded to the opportunity swiftly and was able to use the experience of one session to start thinking more positively about himself. My minimal intervention was all that was necessary, for Mark then found the resources to go from that point to negotiate repayments himself. If I had taken a more active role immediately, or denied Mark the opportunity to discuss his feelings, the outcome might have been different, the danger being that he might have become dependent on me to sort out his problems, as he was hoping his ex-wife would, and his feelings of depression and inadequacy would have continued.

Andrew (aged 34) and his wife, in contrast, have been receiving help from the debt counselling service for three years. The original debt trigger was attributed, as was Mark’s, to unemployment. Andrew has been in and out of jobs, none of them lasting for longer than a few months. He approaches each new situation hopefully, but inevitably each employer complains about his incompetence or lack of adaptability. Andrew has fallen victim to the lure of consumerism and the easy availability of credit. He manages to get credit for the purchase of items whenever he starts a new job. Optimistically, he will manage the first few payments and then lose his job and the problems start again. He goes in and out of court as his creditors lose patience with him and invoke sanctions. Because his income fluctuates so much he cannot manage repayment programmes. When it appeared at one stage that things were stabilizing, his wife became pregnant. The extra expense of the child caused further problems. His indebtedness could be linked to his instability and difficulty in sustaining a situation, and it is only now that this basic problem is being addressed that there are some signs of progress.

Contrary to popular belief, the person who gets into debt because of calculated, irresponsible spending is in the minority, but such people do exist and it is important to address this issue. In my experience, the person who milks the system is usually doing so to cover up some pain or failure which is unacceptable to them. Rosemary, a single woman aged 32, built up a huge scale of debt. She owed a total of over £24,000 in consumer credit, and her monthly repayments at one time totalled as much as her salary. She attributed the origins of her indebtedness to taking on too much credit over a period of years, without fully realizing how it was accumulating. She had for some time been managing an incredibly intricate balancing act of setting one creditor off against another, paying just enough to prevent them from taking further action, a sophisticated way of ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’. When she was made redundant her system collapsed. She experienced no apparent worry or guilt about her situation and insisted that creditors treat her with respect. Within a few weeks of initially seeing me she found herself alternative lower-paid employment and started borrowing again. She told me that she felt she had to maintain her standard of living and surround herself with good things. Rosemary was virtually unable to tolerate any frustration of her desires.

Rosemary’s indebtedness and pattern of borrowing can be linked to very infantile feelings and fears. In Melanie Klein’s view, the prenatal state and being part of the mother contributes to the innate feeling that there is an object which will fulfil all needs and desires. This feeling is first directed towards the breast and persists in the unconscious throughout life.

The infant’s longing for an inexhaustible and ever present breast stems by no means only from a craving for food and from libidinal desires. For the urge even in the earliest stages to get constant evidence of the mother’s love is fundamentally rooted in anxiety . . . his desires imply that the breast, and soon the mother, should do away with these destructive impulses and the pain of persecutory anxiety.³

Some frustration in relation to the breast and to the mother is inevitable and necessary for healthy development. Rosemary found it very difficult to tolerate frustration. Rosemary’s relationship with her mother had apparently always been fraught with difficulty. She described her mother as a very cold woman and refused to tell her mother about her debts because she felt her mother would morally judge and condemn her behaviour as unacceptable. She related this to feelings she experienced as a child, when her mother would lecture her on her poor manners. Her failure to build up an early secure relationship with her mother meant that she now denied her own capacity to give or receive love and gratitude which could have enabled her to stand some frustration. Money, for her, was a way of magically bypassing anxieties: a feed from a bountiful breast. After many sessions with me she admitted that she was experiencing great distress about her boyfriend’s infidelity, which she had chosen to ignore, and she surrounded herself with expensive material possessions in order to compensate for the love which she felt he was withholding from her.

Although aware of her level of debt, it was very difficult for Rosemary to face her own destructive use of credit, the destructiveness of her own nature. She became very critical of me and devalued the help I offered as insufficient or inadequate. She would undermine my work with her by making her own arrangements with creditors, based on her own criterion of paying those who were most likely to lend her more in the future. She was unable to confront her partner with her knowledge of his affairs and carried on def...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1: DEBT COUNSELLING: THE UNFORTUNATE, THE INCOMPETENT, AND THE PROFLIGATE
• CHAPTER 2: THE INSIDE STORY: ON SEEING CLIENTS IN THEIR OWN HOMES
• CHAPTER 3: ‘I WAS SICK AND YOU VISITED ME’: FACILITATING MOURNING WITH HOSPITAL PATIENTS AND THEIR RELATIVES
• CHAPTER 4: WHO IS AFRAID?: MANAGING ANXIETIES IN A YOUTH CLUB
• CHAPTER 5: THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN: RESPONSES TO TRAUMA IN THE FAMILY
• CHAPTER 6: CULTURE SHOCK: PERSONAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL RESPONSES TO AN EXPATRIATE LIFE-STYLE
• CHAPTER 7: EXAM FAILURE IN THE ACCOUNTANCY PROFESSION
• CHAPTER 8: BEING AND BECOMING: A STUDY OF GIFTED YOUNG MUSICIANS
• CHAPTER 9: MIRRORS ON GIRLS AND MATHS
• CHAPTER 10: POOR ORPHAN CHILD: AN EXPLORATION OF SIBLING RIVALRY
• CHAPTER 11: JAMES: WORKING WITH A STAMMERER
• CHAPTER 12: THE MAN NO ONE WANTED TO SEE