Personal Development in Counselling and Psychotherapy

Sofie Bager-Charleson

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780857259356, 9781446257111
• eBook ISBN: 9780857259363
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

There is an increased emphasis on self awareness and self care in counselling and psychotherapy training, with a focus on how the therapist as a person affects the therapeutic outcome. This timely book responds to these complex issues and is designed to help counselling students, trainees and graduates with integrating their personal development into their professional planning. There are chapters on bringing the Self into therapy, choosing the right training and how to succeed as an accredited practitioner. Activities and research summaries throughout give this book a fully-integrated approach ideal for busy students.

CHAPTER 1

What is personal development?

CORE KNOWLEDGE

• Personal development and personal development planning are incorporated in most forms of training today. Personal development involves a deliberate attempt to review, plan and take responsibility for our own learning.
• What constitutes a ‘skilled’ counsellor and psychotherapist? What skills are taught and what personal assets must already be in place?

LISTENING TO OTHERS

We are listeners. We relate to people. Can that really be a profession? What does this listening and relating actually mean? This book shares psychoanalyst Donnel Stern’s idea that therapy responds to a deep-seated need for relatedness.

There are many different ways of construing the aims and objectives of psychotherapy. The assumption guiding my view of therapy is that we provide people with a place where they can listen to themselves. We can think for ourselves but might only really listen to ourselves through the other’s ears, as Stern puts it:

If we are to know our own experience in reflective terms, if we are to be able not only to construct narratives, but to be aware of the narrative we construct, we do need to feel that we are known by the other…Our witness is our partner in thought.

(2010, p111)

Relatedness is the nexus from which experiences emerges, writes Stern (2010, p4). From babyhood onwards, we need witnesses to ‘make experience coherent and real’. The therapeutic relationship is approached in this book as a response to this need for ‘partners in thoughts’ as ‘part of the process of self-formation’.

Carl Rogers, the founder of person-centred therapy, refers to this kind of understanding in terms of understanding with the person, not about:

[U]nderstanding with a person, not about him, is such an effective approach that it can bring about major changes. [I]t means to see the expressed ideas and attitudes from the other person’s point of view, to sense how it feels to him, achieve his frame of reference to the things he is talking about.

(1961, p226)

My experience of therapy both as a client and as a therapist, as both Stern and Rogers propose, is that something happens to us when we are being really heard. Rogers describes this beautifully:

I have often noticed that the more deeply I hear the meanings of [the other] person, the more there is that happens. Almost always when a person realises he has been deeply heard, his eyes moisten…It is as though he [has been] tapping out a message in Morse code…‘Does anybody hear me? Is anybody there?’ And finally one day he hears some faint tapping which spells out ‘Yes’. By that simple response he is released from his loneliness; he has become a human being again.

(1995, p10)

‘Real’ understanding is a very rare form of understanding. It is something unusual in today’s society. We do not normally permit ourselves to hear from another person’s perspective, continues Rogers: Our first reaction to most statements which we hear from other people is an immediate evaluation, or judgement, rather than an understanding of [them] (1961, p18).

In order to ‘understand precisely’ where another person is coming from, we need to ‘enter thoroughly and completely and empathically’ into another person’s ‘frame of reference’. Rogers reflects on how this kind of hearing invariably brings changes in both parties. ‘Real’ hearing is ‘risky’:

When someone expresses a feeling or attitude or belief, our tendency is, almost immediately to feel ‘That’s right’; ‘That’s stupid’…I believe this is because understanding is risky. If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding [myself].

(1961, p18)

PHENOMENOLOGY

Modalities often overlap. The underpinning theories of the psychoanalytic Stern and the person-centred Rogers merge, for instance, in their attempt to share the client’s lived experience. One aspect of a ‘good therapy’ is here addressed in terms of a willingness and ability to understand ‘the phenomenological experience’ of the client. Therapy involves an exploration of the world as it appears to the client, i.e. a phenomenological inquiry. The concept of phenomenology derives from the Greek words phainómenon (‘that which appears’) and lógos (‘study’) and concerns itself thus with things, phenomena, as they appear to us in light of our particular lived experiences. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty specialised in the ‘phenomenology of perception’ and asserted, like all existentialists, that there is no one ‘fixed’ meaning with life to be ‘found’:

Phenomenology…does not believe that man and the world can be understood on the basis of their state of fact…We must not wonder if we really perceive the world. Rather we must say that the world is that which I perceive…

(Merleau-Ponty, in Friedman, 1999, p86)

Most therapeutic models agree on the value of a phenomenological understanding. It is when it comes to communicating back our understanding, and assisting clients in their attempts to interpret and reconstruct the significance of events, that differences in opinion between therapists can emerge. One important aspect of therapeutic mastery is, as Klein et al. (2011, p289) assert, to learn how to organise, evaluate, and convey information that is gathered. There comes a point when we have to revert to our own understanding as a point of reference, and learning to reflect over this is, as suggested earlier, an essential skill in therapy. As Rogers implies, ‘real’ hearing usually involves allowing ourselves to change with the client. Stern stresses, in turn, how the therapist invariably brings his or her own lived experiences and pre-understandings into the relationship. This can create both opportunities and potential problems.

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

Personal development encourages us to consider ‘the engine’ that drives us. It requires a third-person perspective on one’s professional life and raises questions about how we integrate our personal experiences and development in our professional planning. What drives us and why? What are our weaknesses and where lie our strengths? And how do different training and career options respond to these? What impact do we have on clients? How does a certain client affect us? Personal development addresses questions ranging from our emotional responses to situations and people, and our basic beliefs surrounding knowledge, to trustworthiness and truth. How do we think therapy works, and why? On what basis do we generate our knowledge and reach conclusions that we regard as ‘true’?

Personal development is incorporated into most areas of study today – it can be taught as a core subject or as part of career-planning modules. It encourages us to review, plan and take responsibility for our own learning and professional development, often in the form of personal development planning (PDP). The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) defines PDP as follows:

Personal development planning is a structured and supported process undertaken by an individual to reflect upon their own learning, performance and/or achievement and to plan for their personal, educational and career development.

(QAA, 2004, p4)

Personal development is, admittedly, an ambiguous concept. As Spencer (2006, p109) puts it: There are surprisingly few guidelines on personal development training, other than that courses should devote time to it. A significant feature in all references to personal development is the image of individuals as lifelong and self-directed learners.

There is also a slightly darker side to the emphasis on our personal responsibility for our professional development. Personal development has developed in the context of limited or unpredictable employment opportunities. For good or for bad, lifelong employment can no longer be expected within any field of work and the responsibility for a prosperous career rests increasingly on the shoulders of the individual. Young people are being advised to prepare to change career more than once during their working life. Flexibility and being prepared to adapt are key concepts in any type of career planning today. This uncertainty holds, at the same time, great opportunities. It encourages us to consider our options both carefully and creatively, rather than entering into professional life routinely, habitually or without much prior thought.

Personal development brings important questions into our career planning. It synthesises and draws from:

• reflective practice theory with its focus on the underlying values of the practitioner;
• evidence-based theory with its emphasis on transparency and accountability; and
• critical psychology, which highlights how psychological health or ill-health will depend on past philosophical traditions, current socioeconomic and political climates and battles over power (Youngson, 2009, p15).

ACTIVITY 1.1

Dorothea Brande, who coined the concept of ‘creative writing’ in the 1930s, contends that writing is about turning ourselves and our experiences into objects of attention. This activity is intended to be what Brande calls a primer lesson in considering oneself objectively. Brande (1934/1996, p55) writes:

You are near a door…put the book aside, get up, and go through that door. From the moment you stand on the threshold turn yourself into your own object of attention. What do you look like, standing there? How do you walk? What, if you knew nothing about yourself, could be gathered of you, your character, your background, your purpose just there at just that minute? If there are people in the room whom you must greet, how do you greet them? How do your attitudes to them vary? Do you give any overt sign that you are fonder of one, or more aware of one, than the rest?

• Try to capture your impressions of yourself in the doorway. Write down as much as you can and put it aside until later.

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT IN MENTAL HEALTH

The idea of ongoing career planning involves continuous reassessment of goals and aims. Clinical staff within the NHS are, for example, required to produce a PDP on an annual basis. Personal development is one of the essential shared capabilities, which require keeping up-to-date with changes in practice and participating in life-long learning, personal and professional development for one’s self and colleagues through supervision, appraisal and reflective practice (ESC, Department of Health, 2004, p3).

Knowledge, skills and awareness are, as Johns (2002, p4) puts it, the tenets of our traditional trinity revered in adult education; and it is the awareness that specifically underpins purposeful personal development. People within the helping professions are seldom, if ever, engaged in solely technical tasks. The knowledge required for our kind of work is, as Johns (2002, p5) puts it, more than sterile theory and skills [and] not merely a mechanistic means to an end. Scaife agrees and concludes that: the term personal and professional development acknowledges that I carry out my work as an expression of who I am (2010, p49).

Our principal tool is our self. It ought to, as Johns puts it:

be unarguable that personal development – a consistent and continual striving for self and other awareness, knowledge, understanding and acceptance – should be an essential and indeed pre-eminent element in counselling training at any level, in any theoretical orientation.

(2002, p3)

DEVELOPING WITHIN AN ‘IMPOSSIBLE PROFESSION’

Sigmund Freud (1900/1976) described therapy as an ‘impossible’ profession. His reference is likely to revolve around the idea of ‘transference’, and his ideas about clients revisiting early relationships with their therapist. When clients like us too much, said Freud, we should watch out for idealisations and displaced emotions; and when they dislike us intensely we have to ‘sit with’ the experience and welcome it as part of what the client tried to communicate as his or her problem. Freud’s comparison with politics and parenting offers us also an opportunity to go beyond the issue of transference and consider the role of the therapist in the context of the complexity involved in all forms of ‘carer’ and helper roles:

It almost looks like analysis is the third of those ‘impossible’ professions in which one can be quite sure of unsatisfying results. The other two, much older-established, are the bringing up of children and the government of nations.

(1900/1976, p45)

There is an inherent ambivalence in all strands of helping. A relationship based on caring for others is riddled with ambiguities; it is open to a range of misunderstandings with regard to giving and receiving, closeness and independency. The ‘cycle of caring’ involves, as Skovholt and Trotter-Mathison affirm:

making positive attachments, being engaged and making positive separations…It is this endless cycle of caring, with distinct phases, that makes up the life of the practitioner…It is not easy to be skilled at each phase, because they are distinct and call for different practitioner at...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• About the author and contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. What is personal development?
• Chapter 2. The ‘good enough’ therapist
• Chapter 3. Trust and support for personal and professional growth
• Chapter 4. The anatomy of healing
• Chapter 5. Theory and the therapist as a person
• Chapter 6. Accountability and transparency
• Chapter 7. Placing ourselves in context: research as a personal narrative
• Chapter 8. A therapeutic journey across cultural and linguistic borderlands
• Chapter 9. Being a listener with a voice
• References
• Index