There’s a moment on any journey when you stop for a minute, and look back, and wonder why you chose this route. I’ve felt this at various times in my Counselling Psychology program, but never so acutely as now. In part, it’s perhaps the time of year we’ve reached. We had a week of sunshine, and then the winter rain has returned, seemingly heavier than ever. The days are growing longer, and there are early, surprising daffodils on English Bay, butter yellow, but already battered by the rain and wind. When we do get a dry few hours we cycle round the sea wall in Stanley Park. I am learning to name the birds we see. Those long rafts of tiny piebald ducks that dive below the water are Barrow’s Goldeneye. The brown ducks that gather in smaller flocks by the shoreline, the males marked with a yellow stripe over the top of the head, these are Eurasian Widgeon. And, thinking of the name, we joke whether there is a CMIO of ducks, a pecking order, here on this Pacific Coast. Then the rain returns, and we cycle home, up the hill in the park, past the Parks Board headquarters, under the herons’ nests that are still empty in the bare trees, and then down the hill on the Comox cycleway. Arrival home is always marked by a fumbling to take off wet clothes, and hang them up to dry, and then peeling off further layers:  my dayglo lemon cycling jacket, then the fleece beneath it, the neck warmer that I forget until I look at myself in the bathroom mirror. It is at such times, and even worse, when I must put all those clothes back on again to go out, that I miss Singapore. The warm air, the sensation of just being able to slip on a pair of shoes and walk out, totally dry, under the covered walkway to the MRT, the rain churning down the hill in the storm drain and chocolate-coloured water filling up the longkang. No need to look back, to fumble, remember all those clothes and accessories that you need, in a Vancouver winter, to back put on in a very careful order: the neck warmer and mask first, then the helmet, then the gloves.

Why am I looking back now? Perhaps because of some realizations I’m coming to about the counselling process, and my own disposition and abilities. I’m good in the initial stage, in supporting and affirming the client in front of me, in developing an alliance of trust in which we work together. What I struggle with is the second and third stages of the counselling process: the reframing, in which the person I am in conversation with is encouraged to look inwards, and to begin to ask questions, to locate contradictions, strengths, and areas for growth, and the third, in which action is then taken. Of course, I’m still learning, and some parts of my struggle reflect this learning process. Yet in challenging clients I feel less certain than many of my peers do. Challenging requires a case conceptualization, something close to a diagnosis of what is not working for the client. 

I’ve mentioned before that I like narrative approaches because they are not pathologizing, because they are not burdened with psychodynamic theories and their residues in attachment theory, and yet they do not stress rational self-control (CBT) or forms of behavioural modification (Behavioural Therapy) that seem to treat people in a mechanical way that evade systemic issues. It’s not that those approaches do not work: if someone is anxious, exercises to help the person control the anxiety in the moment may be very empowering. And oddly enough, I find myself quite good at applying CBT with clients. It perhaps goes back to that teaching experience and teacherly manner I still have. I walk my clients through situations in which they feel anxiety, locate emotions, somatic sensations, and actions, and then begin to dig for negative thoughts and the beliefs that underlie them.  Yet there’s something strangely alienating and unsatisfying about this: it’s like using tweezers to pick apart the soul. And, from the perspective of systemic theories of counselling, such an approach is individualizing: it locates change simply as a rational choice for an isolated client. It’s like, I say to clients, having a mental work out at your own private gym. And then I wonder about the metaphor. So I’m still learning, I guess, how to think about transformation and change in a systemic sense, in a way that does not simply individualize, to bring in all that social awareness. And, at times, wondering if I ever will be able to do this.

I’m also trying to think, and not yet succeeding, about how the richness of storytelling might enter into my practice, whether as a counsellor or as a facilitator of guided autobiography or other life review groups. When I glance backwards, in those moments on weekends or on evenings when school recedes, I turn to literature. I’ve recently been reading Toni Morrison. First Beloved, which as a literature academic I’m ashamed to say I never quite got around to reading, and Paradise. These are beautiful, shattering novels.These texts, I now see through the lens of what I’ve studied, are about trauma: slavery, colonialism, forced migration, racism, gendered privilege, and the violence they imprint on bodies. And about how stories of trauma can only be told in fragments that cannot be easily made whole. But also how very clear it is that while such trauma may be condensed into individual bodies, or, in Sethe’s case in Beloved, inscribed into her through the tree on her back, it is at its heart systemic. What I cannot yet quite see is how to bring a full awareness of the social into the counselling session, while still remaining attentive to and respectful of the human being who I am accompanying.