In the last week of June, we had a glimpse of summer: two days when the temperature was in the high 20s, and cycling in the West End became perilous again. We’d ride from dazzling light to dark shade under the thick horse chestnut and maple trees, and out into the light again: cars would jerk to a halt, their drivers’ eyes struggling to adjust. And then, on the morning of July 3rd, it started to rain again, soft, something less than a drizzle, like the “hair rain” I knew in Taiwan. I was working on my computer in the study, looked in my inbox, and there it was: an email confirming that I now have registered clinical counsellor status with the British Columbia Association of Clinical Counsellors. The final part of this stage of my journey is complete: I can, if I wish, move into practice. Later this month, we’ll return to Singapore for several months, and in this time, I’ll hit pause again. I hope to facilitate a guided autobiography group while I’m there, and I’m also scheduling group work in family of origin or guided autobiography when I return to Vancouver in December. In terms of individual practice, I’m less sure. It’s difficult to do things by halves, and I’ll need to commit time and focus to practice, to working with a supervision and a community of practice, neither of which I have yet found. My time in Singapore offers possibilities for reflection, for re-establishing connections and making new ones.
I started this blog in late 2018, when I was still taking prerequisite courses for my masters’, and almost a year before I started the program. I’m now, having jumped through the very last hoop after graduating, taking a pause in my monthly posting. In the last week I’ve been looking back at my earliest posts, which were all about the future, about discovery, mapping out a new path. I thought of the blog at the time as almost an autoethnography, a description of not simply an intellectual journey or a process of professionalization, but an entry into a culture of care. My early posts were guided by a distinction I made between critical and therapeutic knowledge. I’d leaned critical knowledge in my academic career, and ability to rigorously question received knowledges and narratives in a very precise way, through writing, conversation, and oral presentation. I’d also in my life experienced knowledges of care, whether in close relationships, in teaching and mentorship, and in wider work in the community. What I thought I might find was a way of connecting each of these areas of knowledge, in such a way that each would reinforce and support each other and enter into productive dialogue. Finally, I was also curious about self-knowledge. I don’t think that all the ways of figuring the self in society that we label as counselling psychology or psychotherapy provide the only way to self-knowledge, but they offer another repertoire of approaches. In particular, the experience of being in a counselling relationship, whether as counsellor or as the person receiving counselling, made me more aware of the embodied nature of knowledge, of emotion, of elements beyond cognition.
My program, of course, did not go as planned. I and many of my classmates did not realise that UBC’s Counselling Psychology programs were in transition, with many senior faculty having left, and their replacements not yet hired. Seven months in, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, and we moved online. In many ways I’d want to pay tribute to the way in which administrative staff and faculty handled this: the transition wasn’t smooth, but we still got an education, and my Clinic class in the second year of the program was, I understand, the one of the few that met in person in the whole of the Faculty of Education. Doing individual counselling via zoom was a challenge, but also a learning experience. What I missed out on mostly, I think, were those informal spaces of learning: time spent with classmates, and in communities of practice. My primary practicum site was welcoming and accommodating, but I interacted with the experienced practitioners there entirely through zoom: to this day I have not yet either of my supervisors in the flesh. My experience of graduate studies during my first masters and doctorate was very different: an unbounded search for knowledge in which the classroom itself was only one focus. Looking back, I wonder also if some of that closeness didn’t also come from all of us being at a similar stage in life, preparing for an academic career. In my Counselling Psychology masters’, I was much older than most of my cohort, and at a very different life stage. My accent, too, not as malleable as it was when I was in my twenties and thirties, marked me out as foreign.
I learned a great deal from the program, from individual teachers and colleagues on the way, and perhaps most strongly from those whose lives I shared in session. While most popular psychology books, blogs, and programs are edited to describe success, I found I learn most from someone with whom I was a relative failure: we parted, on amicable terms, after three sporadic months of sessions. And yet, writing about this now, I face one of the contradictions of this blog that I hadn’t thought through clearly when I started. The core events of counselling remain confidential, and I feel often my writing has been a series of elaborations around an absent centre, something that is ephemeral and cannot be told. And I still struggle to bring together critical and therapeutic knowledges. It’s impossible, of course, to find a place of action without contradiction, but I still look for a non-pathologizing space and community from which to work, one that nods to expertise and professionalization, but keeps a core engagement with social justice central. As I write, I’m still searching.
At the moment I’m reading a biography of Erik Erikson, Lawrence J. Friedman’s Identity’s Architect. It’s engaging and informed, although perhaps a little too close to its subject. Reading biographies of major figures I’ve studied such as Carl Rogers and Erikson’s always a curious exercise for me: I begin to realise how much their vocabulary informs modern understandings of selfhood and social relations, from Rogers’s valorization of empathy, to, Erikson’s stress on identity, and an identity crisis. Of course I and those I am in conversation with in all their frameworks, fitting, but not quite fitting. In Erikson’s psychosocial theory of stages, I’m attracted to the notion that I’m transitioning from concerns of care through to wisdom in late life, and yet I can’t quite shake off the suspicion that that “ego integrity,” the goal that Erikson claims we aim for in late life, isn’t completely untainted by the “self-absorption” that we should, in middle age, avoid. And then I look outside, to see the crows making long catenaries through the pale green linden blossoms; I open my window to the smell of hawthorns.