Personal Development in Counsellor Training

Hazel Johns

• Editore: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Anno: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781446291306
• Edizione: 2
• Argomento: Social Sciences
• Categoria: Social Work

This book provides the answers to that all- important question: what are personal and professional development and why are they necessary for counsellors?

This new edition explores:

@! the importance of personal development and the core concepts that underpin it

@! the aims, commonalities and differences of personal development in different settings and levels of training

@! the key differences in theoretical approaches and their implications for personal development

@! communication and relationships between counsellors and professional organizations, society, and the ?virtual? world, with all its demands on identity, privacy and congruence.

@! the trainee and trainer and the challenges of personal development.

Packed full of vivid accounts of personal experiences, questions and points for reflection, this book will prove an essential companion for anyone wishing to grow personally and professionally as a therapist.

Hazel Johns is a Fellow of BACP, and has been for many years a trainer, supervisor and BACP-accredited counsellor.

1

THE CONTEXTS OF COUNSELLING TRAINING

“Counselling and counselling training are about individuals and relationships: what else might affect them?”

This chapter will explore the contexts of counselling training in the 2010s, in particular changing pressures in society; suggest some of the consequences and challenges likely for counsellors; and what the impact of the following elements might mean for personal development in counselling training:

• strains and stresses;
• ethics and ambiguities;
• threats;
• resources and supports;
• realities.

Strains and Stresses

Counselling and counselling training do not happen in a vacuum. In an article entitled For thirty years we’ve stopped believing in a better world, Neil Lawson wrote:

What place is there for people if what matters most is profit? What hope for compassion in a world of endless competition? (Lawson, 2010)

He outlines a pessimistic view of British society’s priorities in the last thirty years, driven by financiers and economists and colluded with by politicians of most political persuasions. From the political left-of-centre, he argues that we have lived in a culture permeated by greed, market forces and the power of the financial sector, so that for the majority of people life has become:

relentlessly anxious, stressful and exhausting, as we desperately try to keep up on the treadmill of a learn-to-earn-to-spend culture in which there is no time for the things and people we really value; no time even for ourselves.

He questions whether we have any hope of finding ‘any meaningful sense of control and therefore freedom in our lives’: crucial questions for all of us and especially, perhaps, for counsellors. Margaret Thatcher said ‘You can’t buck the market’ and consequently questions of injustice, honour or integrity became secondary or irrelevant. In the same period, we have been engaged in legally debatable wars, have seen the erosion of much individual liberty and the rule of law and face the ever-present threat of international terrorism, all a long way from the hopeful postwar decades of flourishing healthcare and education, expanding personal freedoms, the end of the Cold War and the long years of apparent economic growth. Meanwhile, from the political right-of-centre, many writers bewail the erosion of family and religious values, leading to the fragmenting of traditional society structures. They fear the increase in immigration with its threat, in their view, to British cohesion and values; the loss of respect for position, class and privilege; the changing attitudes to marriage, race, sex, sexual orientation, the position of women; and the painful threat for some of the realities of political devolution – a disintegration of the United Kingdom.

Similar confusions and conflicts of values are reflected in these comments in a trainee counsellor’s tutorial:

When I was in my twenties and most of my life seemed in a muddle, I thought that by the age I am now, everything would be sorted! Instead, some days I feel as if I’m clear about less and less and it’s still a struggle to make sense of things.

(Helen, forty-four-year-old teacher)

Counsellors and clients live within the same society, must face similar moral ambiguities, and have to cope with the same financial, economic, political or social firestorms, with potential costs in unhappiness, disturbance, identity confusion and conflict. The demand for counsellors to work on their own self-knowledge and awareness is at least as great as ever in order to cope with all those pressures – and what they trigger from personal histories – before they can begin to support clients therapeutically. The pressures and strains come from many directions and, although they are by no means new or unique to this century, the degree to which they impact on all of us and our unavoidable exposure to them through the mass media and information overload are both more intense. Despite decades of political rhetoric, the differential between rich and poor is increasing rather than diminishing, ageism and sexism are still rife, and many people live in fear – of poverty, unemployment, violence or despair. Many forces such as capitalism, materialism, global politics and destructive climate change have combined in recent years to create a prevailing culture of selfishness, particularly in self-indulgent Western societies. Writers such as Gerhardt in Britain and Akst in the USA have written powerfully about the consequences for both personal development and social/political progress. In Gerhardt’s The Selfish Society (2010), she argues that a mature, unselfish society is based on the same elements human beings need from a secure family: meeting basic needs, validating each other and working through conflict (a familiar curriculum for many a counselling relationship), yet these are frequently missing in many people’s life experience and perhaps significantly so for those who seek positions of political power. In We Have Met The Enemy, subtitled Self-control in an Age of Excess, Akst (2011) demonstrates the extraordinary demands on self-control in a ‘landscape of temptation’ – full of the dangers of excessive freedom and endless choice in a time of excess in every arena of modern life – in, of course, the Western developed world. Again, when restraining influences such as religion, family and tradition have lost much of their power, and affluence (and banks lending too easily) removed financial limits, Akst argues that human willpower and ethical resolve are tested almost to self- and other-destruction. In an age lacking clear norms, standards or ideals – what Durkheim, the father of modern sociology, called ‘anomie’, a demoralizing condition of purposelessness – this exacerbates the difficulty of finding and maintaining a coherent, healthy identity and positive relationships with others, core concerns for clients in counselling and similarly essential in the personal development of counsellors.

Ethics and Ambiguities

Many of the issues and confusions of our society are reflected in the debate – or lack of debate – about ethics: these inevitably impinge on counselling. It is not chance that some of the most important publications of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy have been the successive versions of, first, the Codes of Ethics and Practice for counsellors, supervisors and trainers, then the Ethical Framework for Good Practice in Counselling and Psychotherapy (2001, 2002, 2007, 2009, 2010). Associated questions of religion, morality or virtue are also important but come with suspicions of vested interest or intrusive prejudice, while ethical debate is crucial and should be at the heart of politics and of counselling training: what it is to define lives of meaning and fulfilment; what kinds of habits and characters shape compassionate societies; whether empathy for others matters more than individuality; what values will allow us to live well, rather than just consume; and, since identity is constructed both internally and in relation to others, how do we manage our internal struggles for self-understanding alongside an awareness and concern for others. These questions are all the more vital in the second decade of the twenty-first century, since we seem to be living in a time of increasing moral and ethical ambiguity and ambivalence. There is, for instance, draconian monitoring of the appropriateness of teachers’ or youth workers’ behaviour and frequent panics about protecting children from abuse, yet casual sexualization of children is rife in advertising and the media; the legal system offers injunctions to protect privacy for those who can afford them, yet destructive media invasions of personal lives through telephone tapping and harassment are condoned or encouraged in the guise of ‘public interest’; and some members of parliament apparently play fast and loose with expenses, yet ‘benefit scroungers’ are vilified. The Coalition government which came into power in 2010 is proposing the ‘Big Society’ with its emphasis on volunteering and community involvement, while at the same time undermining, by savage financial cuts, the many existing supportive elements of the ‘good society’, as defined originally by Aristotle, essentially social, communal, compassionate, equal and democratic.

What other manifestations with implications for counselling are there in society of ethical ambiguity and uncertainty? The Office of National Statistics published in 2009, as one of its priorities, the intention to measure the emotional state of the nation; the government now in 2011 has introduced plans to create a ‘Well-being Index’ and Professor Layard and others have launched their ‘Action for Happiness’ (2011): all well-intentioned plans to acknowledge that economic success is far from the only or most significant factor in a society. Toynbee (2010) describes succinctly the power with which in France Nobel Laureate economists such as Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, together with books published in Britain such as The Spirit Level (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010), Affluenza (James, 2007) and Inequality (Dorling, 2010), all demonstrate that the most unequal societies are the most unhappy. Even the rich in unequal countries are less happy than the best off in more equal countries – though they do have a higher standard of living. Yet, here in Britain, massive financial cuts are destroying jobs and many of the services and supports that enable people to survive the hardships of their lives, while bankers continue to reap outrageous bonuses and profit dominates the market: society becomes more unequal by the week. Talk of happiness and well-being – as if they are commodities that everyone should have – seems oversimplified, ironic and hard to accept and the implications for clients, counsellors, counselling services and counselling training are profound. Counsellors will need clear understanding of their own and others’ value systems, including a critical awareness of the implications of political views, to prepare them to face the anger, despair and cynicism which may result from all these confusions. The political is personal.

Threats

We are faced, then, with contradictory presentations of our society; at low moments, the threats can seem overwhelming. Within perhaps the greatest long-term danger – for those who choose to believe in it – that of the irreversible damage being inflicted on the planet by our abuse of its resources, there are many other threats to individual well-being and social health, which will almost inevitably be brought to counsellors. The traditional steadying influences of religion and the churches have weakened and not been replaced by any other consistent moral or socially-safeguarding framework; our rampantly consumerist society appears to be making many people, especially women, more unhappy rather than less, as Bunting (2009) describes trenchantly in The Narcissism of Consumerism. The cult of youth and persistently ageist policies in the arts, media and professional worlds lead to a hugely wasted resource of people with experience and maturity: the old need to make way for the young, but our culture has lost sight of the kinds of positive roles and identity possible for older people. We have, though, yet to manage well the potential problems from increased life-expectancy and the demands of longevity – many babies born in developed countries will live to more than one hundred years of age, with possible physical and mental infirmities and the consequent strain on families and care systems. Meanwhile, the mass media and their often-inflammatory pre-judgments of people, issues and policies stop many people thinking for themselves and risk fostering a mob mentality. There is a real danger that security fears and the pervasive threat of terrorism may be promoting hostility to other cultures, leading in particular to a growing sense of ‘Islamophobia’ and the confusion of faith with extremism. Perhaps most pervasive and invasive of all, our society has come to be dominated by a ‘celebrity’ and ‘reality show’ culture with the ensuing confusions of aspirations, values and identity: many young people when now asked what they want to be respond only with ‘Famous!’

So, is this too bleak a picture? There are perhaps too many choices, too many negative influences, too much inequality, too many threats, too much instability, too much unreality, too much political cynicism, too many confused values – an overload of very real pressures distorting people’s lives and desires, creating much unhappiness, lack of purpose and meaning, confusions of identity and dysfunctional relationships. And any of these issues or their consequences may end up in counselling rooms across the country, since in the affluent Western world, therapy is an available resource for many, though not, of course, for all. Training – and especially work on their own confusions, blind spots and fears – must equip practitioners to shore up individuals’ emotional health, to facilitate the search for purpose, meaning and self-esteem, to support the struggles to save or grow relationships: all these demands place huge pressure on counsellors who face all the same threats in society and the same tasks of maturity in our stressful culture. Fortunately, as the next section will suggest, for all these pervasive threats and dangers there is another perspective offering more support and hope.

Resources and Support

Many clients and some counsellors suffer under the strain of all these pressures, but there are countervailing influences that save us from despair and remind us of sources of hope. Many theorists have implied that the principal difference between sanity and insanity is the ability to adapt to change: human experience in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is a testament to that. In science, neuroscience, medicine, the law, politics, space, we have had to learn so quickly of matters beyond our awareness a hundred, twenty, even ten years ago. In the UK, our new learning has been lived out in profound legal changes in society in the direction of diversity and in the potential for living longer in better health though with all the uncertain consequences of longevity. We have made, too, conceptual leaps of understanding concerning our place in our physical universe and in space and in movements towards kindness such as Human Rights legislation and the abolition of capital punishment. We have also faced the ethical and moral responsibility of such as the Freedom of Information Act, so that we can no longer plead exclusion from knowledge of actions taken apparently on our behalf by politicians, business leaders and legislators.

Despite the greed, competitiveness and instabilities outlined earlier and despite their underpinning by neo-Darwinian concepts of ‘the selfish gene’ which, so it is argued, will always out-do altruism, the twentieth century, despite all its horrors, was also the age in which Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela modelled in their lives compassion, forgiveness and goodness, against all the odds of hostility, scorn and brutality – and alongside their own human frailties. It has also been an age of philanthropy for charities and the arts, and the flowering in Europe and the USA of the great charitable foundations, such as the Gulbenkian Foundation. More recently, in heartening exception to the traditional view of economics as ‘the dismal science’ extolling only competitive behaviours, the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded to a woman, Elinor Ostrom. She has demonstrated that cooperative, collaborative systems of resource management in, for example, common land and shared wetlands, could work well, with ingenuity and resilience, showing human behaviour as much richer and more creative than ‘market theorists’ would allow. In parallel, recent research, for example the RSA Social Brain Project, suggests that we have underestimated the social nature of the brain, its primary ability to recognize, interpret and respond all the time to the input of others, enabling our capacities for empathy, cooperation and fairness (Grist, 2009). This research posits that we are social creatures, with an inbuilt tendency to cooperate and seek out approval – possibly more significant ultimately than narrowly conceived self-interest. In microcosm, all local newspapers and television programmes, alongside the crime statistics and local scandal, week after week hail stories of generosity and kindness, of compassion and heroism. And many of us are fortunate enough to experience acts of kindness and love from family, friends or neighbours – even ‘random acts o...