In the last month we’ve entered a quintessential Pacific North West winter. Rain that never seems to end, slate grey skies, gouts of leaf mould clogging the drains, and shallow ponds appearing throughout the West End where gardens used to be. On Nelson Street, outside our apartment, the soil in the flower beds has dissolved into a slurry that flows downhill across the sidewalk. The tiny gnomes and fairy doors that our neighbours’ children placed next to the trunks of the tall trees have been swept away and partially buried by a miniature tsunami. Occasionally there is a hint of blue sky through a tear in the clouds; more rarely, a clear day, on which you can look up to the white caps of the North Shore Mountains, where the same rain falls as snow. The sun sets early, and it’s dark by five. If we walk out in the evening the neighbourhood the rain is still falling, glistening under the faint streetlights.

The holidays have been a time for cocooning for us. With COVID inflections seemingly at a plateau, but still high, and restrictions on social gatherings, we’ve spent much of the last two weeks at home. My break from my weekly counselling sessions has been useful for me, a chance to pause and reflect on practice. One of the core things I learned in the first semester of Clinic was to let the person I was in conversation with lead: not to go too quickly to a solution, or to try to intervene. There are certainly some similarities with teaching, and with facilitating seminars. Despite the stress on lesson plans, and meeting goals and objectives, I always found that in small group teaching asking questions of my students was important, as was building rapport and a space for dialogue. Some of the best classes I taught did not go according to plan, but students themselves took them to another place, a place I’d not conceived of. Yet even then the role of a facilitator or teacher is different from that of a counsellor. You attend to what is being said: you question, you shape, you ensure as much as you can that other voices can speak. And yet ultimately there is a syllabus, and there are things to learn, although there are also many different ways to get there.

With counselling, there certainly are goals: these are often explicitly articulated early on in the process. What has brought the person to counselling? What changes would they like to make? Can they break down these changes into smaller steps? How will they know that change has taken place? But the experience of being in session is much more connected to process, to a commitment to empathy and deep mutual understanding, and an ability—which I am only beginning to develop–to read signs, and to know what further questions to ask. This process may lead in unanticipated directions, off into the maze of people’s lives. Early on in Clinic, my supervisors presented a helpful, simplified model of how the counselling process works, one that integrates all of the very different counselling modalities, from behaviourism to existentialism, from psychodynamic to constructionist approaches. This model sees the therapeutic process as occurring in three phases, which are never quite distinct from each other. In the first, the counsellor gets to know the person they are in conversation with, and the person becomes comfortable in telling their story. In the second, the counsellor encourages facilitation and understanding, while the person who has come to counselling begins to think thoughts such as “What if?” and “On the other hand”. A process of reframing takes place. In the third stage, the counsellor encourages thoughts about action: for the person they are in conversation with, the question is “What now?” These phases do not proceed in a linear fashion, but they embody a process of discovery that leads to change or to acceptance.

This process of change can then be conceptualized through one’s chosen modality, using a detailed conceptual language. As I’ve blogged before, my deeper understanding of the process has been informed by Narrative Therapy. Narrative Therapy draws on storytelling, something that has been central to my life. It’s also deeply systemic – it does not look at the person’s problems as those of an individual in isolation, but rather sees them through the lens of a social world. It’s thus politically engaged, constructivist, and it’s the only theory I know that has a fully elaborated account of subjectification under neoliberalism and what to do about it. I won’t explore Narrative Therapy further in this post, but here’s a link to an overview from the Dulwich Centre here.

One of the challenges I’ve faced in using narrative as a framework is how to integrate other therapeutic modalities, how to bring in techniques, and what are often called interventions, drawn from the many different approaches to counselling we have studied. Sometimes this is easy, especially with therapeutic modalities that share an underlying philosophy, or at least a parallel set of concerns, with narrative. Often, I’ve learned, things work, pragmatically, even if they are not fully theorized. Yet I still feel a need to integrate what I am doing conceptually, to not simply use a technique pragmatically for immediate gain, but to think deeply about how it relates to an ethics of practice. And example of this was working with someone who had repetitive, extremely critical thoughts, that undermined self-worth. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy works explicitly on such thoughts, encouraging clients to identify them, and then to modify them. Yet CBT, with its stress on the controlling power of cognition, is a very different approach from narrative. Try to think of it as a form of storytelling, my supervisor suggested. Yet at a deep level this doesn’t really work: notions of narrative thought stress how it is very different from the logical and inductive arguments that a focus on cognition emphasizes. CBT, in this view, is likely to “work” on the surface but not address larger, systemic issues. I thought of using CBT, but eventually did not.

There are perhaps two challenges here for me as I learn more. My first is my own learning process, and to be able to conceptualise the problems that people bring to me, in a way that does not prejudge, but also leaves open the eventual construction of a scaffolding on which the processes of reframing and action can occur. The second is a deeper issue about integrative work, in which integrative practice draws on a number of different theoretical perspectives, but still maintains integrity and a particular ethics of care. For the second, I have found selective reading useful. I’m working my way slowly through Lynn Angus and Leslie Greenberg’s Working with Narrative in Emotion-Focused Therapy: Changing Stories, Healing Lives.  This is useful for me in framing the emotionally-focused interventions of EFT, and EFT’s stress on emotional empathy—something I have still to work on–in narrative terms.

Above all, I think, I’m still struggling to integrate theory into practice. I do not want theory to simply dissolve into a series of skills, which are then pragmatically applied. Doing so undermines the ethical and systemic elements of the counselling process, and what brought me to it in the first place. At the same time, I do not want to be dogmatically theory-driven, and I’m aware that I terms of practice I am still relatively unskilled. Above all, I find I have to read very differently than I did as a scholar. Much more slowly, constantly looking back, trying to think not just in terms of theory but how this theory might be enacted in session. 

And so, this winter, dodging the raindrops, I feel a little light-headed.  It’s almost as if I’m learning to walk again after a long illness. There’s an excitement, but also a real sense of my own limits. And I do wonder if all these parts of my life will remain apart, or whether they will somehow coalesce into a whole. The picture this month’s from a few years ago, but taken at this time of year and in the mist and rain: a ship, laden with perhaps too heavy a cargo, passing out of the harbour into the sea.

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