Category: Opinion

I was really bothered by a news story a few days ago and very angry at the ignorance the individual at the centre of it displayed.

I don’t want to link to it and give it more attention, but basically a young man had no idea on what it was like for women to have their periods but felt qualified to spout opinions on the tampon tax which completely denied female anatomy.

How would I work with someone like this in the therapeutic space? Could I?

As therapists we can hear opinions that we disagree with every day, our client’s views and values may be different to ours and it’s something we have to find a way to cope with.

Like any model of therapy, the Person-Centred Approach has a lot of theory behind it but Carl Rogers the founder crystallised it into three Core Conditions. If these are present, then change can occur for the client.

The first is congruence, that the counsellor is congruent with the client. In respond to the opinions above, my first thought would be “You are a bloody idiot” but that really doesn’t sit with the next two conditions so maybe I will come back to that.

The second condition is that the therapist extends unconditional positive regard to the client. Rogers described this at times as “Prizing” his clients. If I think my client is an idiot, then that doesn’t really work.

The third condition is showing empathic understanding to the client. Letting them know you really get where they are coming from. It’s when I thought more about this I felt my views shift. What does a young man really know about a female body? He might have done some biology but not have been academic or too busy sniggering to take much notice. When it comes to the topic of our periods, we as females don’t on the whole share the details with men. If we don’t talk about the details, how do they really understand? Especially someone who is young and inexperienced.

So a way of showing my empathy might go something like “I understand that this is what you believe based on your knowledge of the female body….” because from the point of view of this person, that is truly what he believes.

Showing congruence with this perspective might mean adding “I know from my experience as a woman you are wrong in your view and I have to say that to you as otherwise it will get in the way of our working together”. How I say this, with an open and friendly manner can let the client see that I can still prize him while disagreeing with his opinion on this topic.

Unconditional positive regard doesn’t mean accepting everyone does as ok, it means being able to still value the person even if we dislike some of their behaviour or opinions.

However, I have to confess it took me a few days to really be able to begin to feel empathy with these views, so I don’t know if I could have got there in a therapy session.

I’ve been doing some training (as counsellors always do a lot of additional training every year) and came across something called the Easterlin Paradox. It may be something you already know about but the name was new to me.

 

The basic premise is that while some money makes you happier, lots of it doesn’t increase your long term happiness. There are lots of fancy graphs online if you are interested in those but I found it gave me something to reflect on.

What makes me happy? What makes you happy? It may be different for each of us, but how often do we really take the time to explore it?

Giving ourselves the gift of time for self-reflection is such a valuable thing, possibly one of the greatest gifts we can actually give ourselves. Thats one of the things therapy gives us, the space for this self-reflection. To explore our values, what we really want out of life, what enhances our well-being and allows us to live a fulfilled – and happy life.

Why not give yourself that gift?

Have you heard of the term reflective practice? For counsellors it is incredibly important and plays a big part of our work.

As counsellors we have duty to provide the best service possible to our clients. You trust us with your inner thoughts and feelings, we have to respect that by ensuring that we give you the best of ourselves.

We have a number of ways to do that. The first comes during our initial training. We explore our own history in detail and attempt to identify our sore spots, the parts of ourselves that are difficult to revisit and cause us pain. This includes our prejudices and why we want to be counsellors.

But as we are only human we have to keep checking into these things and watching out for new things that may come up in our lives.

If a client brings something into a session that we can identify with but haven’t worked on in ourselves that will block the client from being able to deal with it. For example if we have had a bereavement that we are still struggling with we would find it very hard to stay in the clients frame of reference.

So we spend a lot of time reflecting on our practice and the sessions we have with clients to pick up any areas we need to develop. This can start with some initial reflections after each season but we also have supervision.

We are duty bound to our professional organisations to have a minimum of 1.5 hours a month supervision. During this time we look in detail at some of the things coming up in our work to ensure the client is getting the best service we can provide. This can be one to one with a supervisor or in a group environment to get different perspectives. Our clients anonymity is still held in this space, by that I mean that although we may discuss some of the things they bring to sessions they are not identifiable. Confidentially is still covered.

We also engage in a great deal of training each year to ensure we keep are professional knowledge up to date and we are working on the areas that we feel we need to develop. We identify these from our own reflections, from the sort of themes our clients bring and feedback both from clients and those we have supervision with.

All of this effort put into reflective practice means that as counsellors, we are working safely and within our competency levels. It also means that we can identify our limits and recognise when self care is required.