Inside Counselling

Becoming and Being a Professional Counsellor

Anthony Crouch

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9781446230176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicoterapia

`Anthony Crouch examines the internal and subjective reality of being a counsellor. Using a series of vignettes, rather than case studies, Crouch builds in all participant perspectives, counsellor, client and supervisor... [the book] proves to be eminently readable, like a good novel. And like a good novel, as opposed to merely a "good read", it takes the reader into the world of its characters so that we might understand them. From the outset, Crouch asserts that the effective counsellor is one who can enter the intimate subjectivity of the client and use that reality as a catalyst for change and growth. By the same token the counsellor should grow through that interaction. The book also contains a series of challenging personal development exercises which the author invites the reader to undertake? - Counselling and Psychotherapy, The Journal of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy

This innovative and creative book explores the experience of becoming and being a counsellor, and engaging in the therapeutic process.

The book enters the internal, subjective world of counselling through its characters: students, counsellors, clients, supervisors and the author himself. It weaves together their perspectives and uses `talk? as its main medium - the talk of counselling and supervision sessions, training groups, workshops and students? journals. In so doing, the book breaks away from traditional methods and conventions to present complex theories, difficult concepts and serious information in an engaging, focused and manageable way.

The book encourages readers to think subjectively, to question theories that come solely from outside, and to stay with and use their internal world as the main focus of counselling work. It also provides personal development exercises to help readers access long-forgotten feelings.

1

Introduction – the Subjective World of Client and Counsellor

At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: ‘This is the real me!’ (William James, Letter to his wife, 1878)

Something about how counselling ‘works’

If this book is not about finding answers then what is it about?

I feel very stuck again with the writing. I want to give up.

I have found it very difficult to try and write such a long work as a book. I was reasonably OK at writing shorter pieces – articles, essays, and so on, but a book is so big. Most of all I have found it difficult to write to a plan. I have been great at coming up with the plans but useless at writing to them. Over the past few months I have been sitting at my writing table and ‘squeezing out’ the odd few hundred words – in a morning. Useless. And today, once again, I feel completely stuck – so I have decided to give up. There – ‘The End.’ Fuck it!

I have become quite good at what I do. People, clients, who come to me in a state of crisis or confusion, generally go away ‘better’. Yet this does not mean that I can avoid the everyday pains of living or the pains of growing old.

Today I feel quite down and hopeless. Right at this particular moment I don’t really believe in what I am doing as a professional – as a counsellor and tutor – and I don’t want to write this book.

In fact I don’t want my working life to be the way it is. I want to be a film director or a travel writer (no, scrub that one – forget about writing). I want to be younger. I want to be a young Anthony at university travelling around Europe in the summer. Most of all I want to be excited by life!

Today I’m not so sure about my personal life either. Are we really right for each other – or do we argue too much? Do we have enough common interests? Does she really love me – rather than her image of me or what she would like me to be? Do I really love her for her? Does she really want to be with me, and I her – for the rest of our lives?

I feel I am growing old and life is not quite what I would have wished for. I feel a failure. I do.

There is sometimes an abounding optimism in the field of counselling – that somehow counselling can sort it out. That counselling is the answer. Things get tough – send in the counsellors.

It has been good for me – my own counselling – and I believe it has been good for most of my clients. But I’m not a ‘sorted out’ person with all, or even a few of, ‘the answers’ to the problems of my life. I still feel down – like today. I still feel stuck, bored, hopeless, frustrated. I still have bad arguments with my partner. I’m still quite capable of being very selfish and insensitive. I’m still ‘himan’.

What really bugs me about some people is that they expect a counsellor to be ‘sorted out’ and ‘good’. Inherently sensitive, kind, caring, always willing to listen, etc. etc. Sure we are ... NOT!

I’m nice, and nasty too.

What is good is that I can sit here and write that I don’t want to write this book, that I am giving up, that I feel down and hopeless, that I don’t have the answers, that my life is still very difficult and that I’m still very unsure about things. What is good is that I am no longer denying my thoughts and feelings and then pretending to be ‘the writer’, the ‘teacher’, the person who ‘knows’. Today I don’t know anything, today I’m quite unsure of everything.

And, at the same time, the fact that I have just written the above, and decided to make it the introduction to the book, now begins to make me feel as though I have achieved something ...

In fact I almost feel quite hopeful.

Perhaps it is the most difficult thing of all – to be who I am, whatever that is. To live my life in a way in which my subjectivity is not denied. To know myself and be true to myself. This is also one of the key things I am seeking to help my clients to achieve – to accept their personal experience, to be true to themselves.

I have found this to be enormously liberating – to become more and more able to live my life in touch with my personal experience. Today it has been liberating for me to write exactly how I was feeling about writing this book.

And perhaps there is something here about how counselling ‘works’, or at least an aspect of how it works. I was sitting here trying to ‘be an author’. In the same way the client sits there trying to be the person they think they are supposed to be. I was feeling hopeless about the whole enterprise of writing; the client might be feeling that life is hopeless, that the counselling is hopeless. If I, as the counsellor, can help the client to accept and express how he or she is feeling then the client will, in my experience, begin to feel better, become ‘unstuck’ or whatever. Most of all they begin to accept themselves more.

This is not, however, always easy – especially if the client’s feelings concern the counselling process or me, the counsellor. What would it be like for you, as a client, to be free to express your thoughts, feelings, fantasies and desires – including those directed towards the other person sitting there with you? What would it be like to be helped to do so by your counsellor, and for your counsellor to accept your words without rejecting you, or defending him/herself, or counter-attacking, or avoiding your thoughts or feelings, or pretending to be ‘tough’? What would it be like to be helped to explore them, whatever they were? What would it be like to be free to be whoever you are during your counselling session, including being free to express your personal experience of this other person – your counsellor?

Client: ‘I am feeling quite frightened – of you’

or ‘I am in love with you’
or ‘I feel very hurt by you’
or ‘I feel angry with you’
or ‘I feel disappointed by you’
or ‘I feel rejected by you’
or ‘I feel sexually attracted to you’

And what would it be like for you – as the counsellor – to help the client to express her experience – including her disappointment in the counselling, in you, or her anger, attraction, rejection, hurt, or fear, in relation to you? How would it be for you to hear and feel this from your client? How would you automatically want to react? How might you respond differently – in a way that enabled you both to explore your client’s experience? How would you deal with your client’s attraction to you – in a way that maintained the boundaries of the counselling relationship but didn’t make the client feel that it was not OK to have these feelings and desires? How would you keep the boundaries and yet maintain the counselling as a space to explore – free to feel and express and work through, but not to act out?

Valuing the subjective

The Western world view all too often subtly excludes personal experience from its picture of what is ‘real’: ‘That’s very subjective!’ is the kind of statement that is often made – meaning that the subjective is not important, not real, not to be valued. In some situations it may be important to try to put a person’s subjective experience to one side and try to see the world in an ‘objective way’. This is perhaps particularly true when we realize how easily the subjective can be coloured by the past, or by strong emotions in the present. But this is no reason to deny its reality – that’s like throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Because the subjective can be ‘distorted’ we, in the West, tend to undervalue it – yet it is the essence of our lives because we subjectively experience everything. Even an objective event such as a bump on the head only has meaning because we experience and respond to the pain subjectively. One person experiences and responds to a bump on the head in a certain way – shouting out and hitting the low branch. Another person, however, experiences and responds to it very differently – perhaps saying to herself that next time she will look before she leaps.

We are the subjective

Counselling is all about the subjective – the subjective world of the client and the subjective world of the counsellor. Most of what makes a good counsellor is her ability to empathize with the personal experience of her client, her ability to notice her own personal experience and her ability to work with these two interwoven subjective perspectives. The former we call empathy, the latter self-awareness. Self and other awareness. Awareness of thoughts, desires, feelings, sensations, intuitions – all that makes up the subjective world of direct personal reality.

This all sounds very simple – valuing and focusing on the subjective – but I have worked with many students and one of the most difficult aspects of the training, for so many of them, was just this. This is why I haven’t written this book in the normal way. I do talk about this or that theory, this or that technique, but much of the writing isn’t like that. The book is mainly written from the subjective point of view – of imagined clients, counsellors and students. Two subjective worlds – experiencing and responding to each other – that is the essence of counselling and I have tried to take you inside that world.

But what you need to do is to explore this for yourself. If I was your tutor I would ask you to write a piece for me, a piece that took me into your subjective world – the world of your experiences and responses to being in your training group, to the course and to being with your clients. In my experience, most students don’t find this very easy – it takes practice and is significantly helped by your own personal counselling.

I’ve been in my own personal counselling for many years now. I always tell my students this in the hope that they will all, over time, come to value and take up their own personal counselling. I don’t believe it’s right to require novice trainees to have counselling because being forced to have counselling isn’t the right motivation for such a potentially important and intimate relationship. There’s no way, however, that I could have got to where I have without my own personal counselling. It has been really important to me – both professionally and personally. I often think that it’s been the best bit of being in this profession – through it I’ve learnt from the ‘inside out’ all about what it is to be a client and, most of all, I’ve learnt about being myself. In many ways I have actually become myself – where, for example, there were fragile areas in myself I feel there are now firm foundations. Foundations that hold me in the world in a much more ... I was lost for words for a few moments then ... it’s very difficult to describe exactly what it is ... I feel much more at home in my subjective reality’ is about as close as I can get. Then, because I feel more at home in myself I’m much better able to invite clients into my ‘home’ – to be open-hearted.

Inviting someone to come for counselling is like inviting them into your world. Although most of the time your attention is on your client’s world, they are actually sitting in your world. If you are at home in your world, they will feel that; if you are not at home, they will feel that too. One of the problems is that you may not even quite realize that you are not that at home in yourself. I certainly didn’t: I thought I was fine, not perfect, but certainly OK. Looking back I can hardly believe that now. I was, in comparison to today, a psychological wreck full of gaping holes and driven by fears and desires that I had very little awareness of. That’s what it looks like now – some 13 years on from really starting my personal development process.

I am feeling tired now so I shall stop writing in a minute.

Feeling at home in your subjective world; empathizing with what is going on subjectively for your client and checking out your empathic understanding with her; knowing what is going on for you subjectively when you are with her – these are all vital aspects of the everyday process of counselling. I suggest that you learn to value your subjective world and the subjective world of your client – make it the focus, the centre, the heart of your attention and thus the counselling process. In my view this is of the utmost importance.

Honest and open communication

Jamie: So what’s the procedure with this counselling lark?

Robert [thinks/feels: ‘Off to a good start here – this guy really has a lot of faith in counselling. I wonder if he’s been forced to come here by somebody or other – wife, or girlfriend, perhaps? Not the easiest of clients.’ Robert remembers various clients he has had in the past who could be described as ‘reluctant’ to be sitting there in the client’s chair. The worst was a drug addict referred by the court. For much of the time with Linda he thought they would have been better off not bothering to talk. ‘No, each of us could have got on with something else – me with the case study I was writing for my diploma and she with planning her next robbery. Yes, well perhaps it wasn’t as bad as that – just almost as bad. No, I definitely have a bit of a block nowadays with reluctant clients.’] Well there are certain things we have to get clear about, certain rules of the game if you like. The number one rule is that if you turn up under the influence we cancel the session, OK? [Jamie’s eyes turn a little wary, but he nods.] There are various other things we need to agree on too – things to do with confidentiality, when we’ll meet up and for how long, initially; what we’re going to aim to achieve in that time and a couple of other basic rules of the counselling centre here. We can take a look at all of that before the end of today’s session but to answer your question I guess I’ll say a little bit about what counselling is and what it can achieve. How’s that sound, Jamie?

Jamie [thinks/feels: ‘Sounds bloody stupid if you ask me but then I wouldn’t be here if it was up to me. Anyway, since I am here I might as well give the guy a chance. Not that bad a sort, really – I was expecting a puny old woman with a snooty nose, Mrs Bloody Goody Good. He actually looks like an ordinary kind of a bloke.’] Fine with me.

Robert [thinks/feels: ‘Let’s give it a go then – can’t say I’m any more enthusiastic about this than you, mate. Maybe I should get out of this agency and start working privately. Not so much for the money – though it would be nice to be paid a decent amount for my time – but because you don’t get many reluctant clients in private practice. Not easy, though – setting up in private practice. I guess I could start things while I’m still working here – a couple of evenings perhaps. How to go about it though, that’s the question. Guess I just haven’t had the confidence. Maybe I do now, though. Anyway I’m not doing very well here – mind off all over the place. Hardly the attentive, accepting, warm, empathic listener today.’ At that moment something Robert’s first supervisor Sue had once said springs to his mind. ‘You need to develop the habit of looking for reflections between your responses and those of your client – they can often be the doorway to what you’re looking for. (Robert always felt that half of what Sue said made as much sense as a raincoat on a sunny day but today it did make sense – he could see that both he and Jamie were caught up in a similar mood of lack of enthusiasm as if neither of them really wanted to be sitting there.] I don’t know, Jamie but before I go into what counselling is all about I’m just wondering if you need to say something about why you’re sitting here. I wouldn’t normally bring it up but, I don’t know, it feels like you’re less than enthusiastic about coming to counselling and perhaps you need to get that off your chest first? [Thinks/feels: I wouldn’t normally have said that – hope I haven’t gone too far?]

Jamie [thinks/feels: Well there’s giving it to me straight! You don’t pull any punches do you, Robert? I like that. I’m impressed.] [Robert closes the pages of his case study.]

Robert: So as a result of noticing that I was tuning into Jamie’s feelings I was able to almost lift myself out of the bad mood and try out a challenging intervention that actually initiated a relationship with Jamie.

Clara (Robert’s current supervisor): I agree with you. If you hadn’t remembered your first supervisor’s little recommendati...