I’m now two months into my practicum, with seven individual clients, and an upcoming Family of Origin group that I’ll be facilitating starting in less than a week. Vancouver’s mother of all Pacific Northwest Falls continues. On Barclay Street and the Main Mall at UBC the trees are now mostly bare of leaves. In previous years leaves would gather in piles, rustling as they were blown over and over by the wind. This year the persistent rain dissolves them into a brown mulch that clogs the drains and the sidewalks. The roads outside are slick with water, as if the creeks and the rivers buried beneath this land a century and a half ago were rising up from their graves, just in time for Hallowe’en. Occasionally, often just when I have my most intense days of counselling, or when I’ve got a proper commitment that keeps me indoors, the rain stops, and there’s a sudden hour or two of low sunlight, and everything turns golden. And then the gloom returns. In a cold snap three weeks ago, we rode our bikes on the sea wall on a sunny morning and saw snow on the chain of mountains from Golden Ears through Seymour to Grouse. Now the weather’s warmed again, and the temperature on the Grouse Mountain web site remains stubbornly above zero. It’s that time of year when it’s difficult to hike, but still not possible to ski or snowshoe. A week ago I began to feel a persistent ache in my right biceps, and realised that it came from holding an umbrella upright for several hours a day.

I’m getting used to the rhythm of counselling. I still find that having seven individual sessions is much more emotionally exhausting than teaching, and that some of those strategies of dealing with performance anxiety as a teacher don’t work when you have a series of individual sessions to prepare for throughout a day. I’m still too caught up in planning, rather than responding in the moment to clients’ concerns, and it’s possible to trace this obsessive need to structure to a feeling of perfectionism, of feeling that I must always show my competence to the people I am in conversation with. And yet I do find over the last few weeks that at times I’ve been able to let myself relax a little more into the role: being busier may have paradoxically reduced the time I have to worry.

I’ve also added some training into the mix. In three weekends that span late October and early November I’m attending a Grief Education Workshop organized by the Lower Mainland Grief Recovery Society. My partner did it two years ago, and I’ve always struggled to make time: this year I’ve finally bit the bullet. We meet in person each Saturday, in a room in the bottom of Christ Church Cathedral, with beautiful quilts of the North Shore Mountains on its walls, and the sounds of an organ percolating down from above. My fellow participants have all had a both personal and a professional connection to grief, and work in a variety of caring professions, but there aren’t any other trainee counsellors. It’s a good space to share, although as ever it’s a feminized space — as with many of these events, I’m the only man there. The workshop lasts from 9 through to 4, with a break for lunch. On the first day we met, the rain had stopped, and when we came out of the Cathedral we could look down Burrard Street, past the Marine Building and across the inner harbour to sunlit mountains, tipped with new snow. 

My second training is EFIT – Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy – in a four-part Zoom workshop organized by the Vancouver Centre for Emotionally Focused Therapy. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I took an EFT externship, as it’s called, this summer. EFT is most popular for couples therapy, and I’m curious about how to use it in with individuals. In EFT work with couples, emotions are explored and deepened. Someone may feel anger and frustration with a partner, and, through the work of deepening, come to realise that these reactive emotions, focused on the other, arise from emotions within the self – from feelings of loneliness, for instance, or insecurity–that often find their roots in attachment issues in childhood. In couples work, when these emotions are experienced and felt deeply enough, the counsellor turns to an enactment, in which the partner whose emotions have been deepened and “assembled” in EFT terms, then turns and articulates them to the other partner. In couples work enactment can thus take place with a real person in session, but in individual work it often addresses imagined other. In Gestalt therapy, from which EFT derives, “chair work” is frequently used. A client may be encouraged to address a significant person in their life whom they imagine is sitting in a chair in front of them, and tell this person what they need. Or a “two chair” approach may be used, in which a client moves from one chair to another, to represent an internal dialogue between, for example, a past self and a present self. I’ve practiced such work with classmates, and found it powerful, but I’m also curious about how (and indeed if) it can be done via zoom, in which a sense of three-dimensional connection between counsellor and client is lost.

What has surprised me most in practicum is how I rely less on an individual theoretical approach, and more on a felt sense of how the counselling relationship is developing. In part this is just practicality: I need time to prepare for each session, and I cannot research a single conceptual approach deeply. I’ve written before about the way that memory changes as I age, and I do find it difficult to recall approaches and techniques that I studied previously that might be helpful. I go back to look, but I’m also conscious that I can enter a tangle of research and theorization with a client that, like all research projects, never ends until I myself mark out limits. And so I often use what I know, and follow intuition, always listening to the person in front of me and letting them lead. I’m curious about this process. In one sense, I’m gaining an embodied knowledge, much as you learn to play an instrument: skills that I once needed to think about become naturalized, so that I no longer am aware of using them. In this moment, the notion of therapeutic knowledge returns for me: the knowledge that I have is not primarily for me, but is for the other. And yet at the same time there’s a critical voice wondering whether I’m just being drawn into a kind of “common sense,” whether using skills and tools is actually value free, and what motivated my judgments about clients that leads to my recognition, from my perspective, of what needs to be done.

It’s a quiet afternoon, and the rain has returned with new intensity, streaking my office window. On Nelson Street, umbrellas are going up, and dogs walk by on their leashes wrapped up in tailored gortex coats. Restaurant patios are being closed; new COVID infection rates remain stubbornly flat, with only a hint of of falling. We’re settling down for a long winter.