Endings

    . . . Personal narrative is all we have, whether as individuals or a society.
Like any narrative the Western self-view is riddled with contradiction. Decisions rarely have anything to do with the rationale that supposedly provoked them. And as with personal narratives, what does not fit is conveniently ignored. The difficulty for anyone who tries to step outside the dominant narrative to present a different view is that we cannot, by definition, provide the ‘evidence’ that is required by the narrative that demands such evidence – a bit like going into the pub at 10pm on a Saturday night and preaching the benefits of sobriety. Neither can we provide evidence from within that narrative. The minute we step back into that world we are governed by its conventions, and any attempt to explain ourselves becomes a nonsense.

William Johnson
Therapy Today March 2008

This blog has been a personal journey of exploration into the relationship between social justice and counselling and I wanted to share some of what I discovered. Some counsellors, I’d say about 10, have shown a positive interest. It feels as if I’m William Johnson’s person in the pub at 10 on a Saturday night preaching sobriety: it’s a waste of my time. Counselling as exemplified by the BACP, if it makes any acknowledgement of it's relationship with society at all, is dismissive and contemptuous of anyone who suggests that counselling might look at the way it perceives and relates to itself and to people with far less power.

In today’s Times Dr James P Smith writes about nursing, a career that includes a goodly number of excellent nurses and which prides itself on it’s professionalism but en mass seems to ignore the experiences of the huge number of patients who’ve been brutalised and neglected, often to death whilst in their care:

As a Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing since 1978 . . . I want to thank you for your editorial in which you finally explode the myth that there is a shortage of qualified nurses in the NHS. We have come a long way since 1956 when I was a young staff nurse on a 46 bed cardiothoracic unit, working five nights a week on 12 hour shifts. In spite of the intensity of our work all our patients got an early morning cup of tea. 

Even though the Royal College of Nursing knows it and the Times knows it and a great many nurses know that understaffing is not the issue the profession of nursing still falls back on understaffing as the reason why so many patients are suffering unnecessarily rather than taking a brave look inwards.

Thankfully, counsellors are nowhere near as important as nurses. Whilst we have many excellent counsellors our exploration of ourselves as people with power over people with less power is academic where it exists at all. Yes, BACP Professional Standards offer a useful tool for sanctioning counsellors and the fact that they name counsellors who’re sanctioned suggests they’re interested in humiliating individuals – do you make note of those people named and shamed in Therapy Today to ensure that if ever they darken your agencies door you can shun and denounce them? Yes, the Ethical Framework is valuable and well thought out but the BACP doesn’t apply it to itself. Letters, if not totally ignored, will be condescendingly responded to ‘in due course’ and apparently the BACP has always functioned perfectly; if any changes are made it’s not because anything may have been inaccurate or done badly.

For me, that the BACP can stand outside of the decades of debate, politics and struggle that surround the issue of abortion to support the recent Dorries/Field amendment solely on the basis that, like the punitive DWP proposals which it also supported, it offered ‘increased opportunities for counsellors’ is a reflection of counselling itself. It doesn’t matter how or where the money comes from, we’ll work for anyone under any circumstances as long as we can clutch tightly to the status and identity of ‘counsellor’. I'd be interested to know if we have any limits at all.

Have a look at counsellors social network profiles. Many only communicate in Inspirational Quotes, almost all are written as if by experts responding to people who need this counsellor’s knowledge and experience. Some are written as if the potential client is a sad idiot in need of sympathy.

A great many counsellors are probably very concerned about social justice but clearly there are not enough. Organisations like the Independent Practitioners Network have a committed core of highly experienced (and ageing) members who value functioning face to face rather than paperwork to bureaucracy and inevitably have a minute membership. They're not concerned about competing, they're vitally interested in relating - and prove it. 


I'll put a fiver on most counsellors never having heard of them.


The BACP deny monopolising counselling but why then, in the face of 1 in 6 BACP counsellors feeling fine about ‘converting’ gay people into straight people, and BACP accredited counsellors being most likely to abuse their power with clients, do they have the greatest membership, with non-counselling and counselling organisations alike employing only BACP accredited counsellors? It is not, be assured, that BACP accredited counsellors are always the best. It is because the BACP is a glossy, hugely marketed presentation of acceptability and safety which openly suggests that non-BACP counsellors are unprofessional, unsafe, and unacceptable. And you and I as individual, responsible people allow that.

Even in the teeth of raging and increasing poverty, charities providing British families with food, social unrest that made news across the western world, an increase in suicides linked to benefits, UN recognised child misery and a national reading age of 7, counselling has absolutely nothing to say about any of it. We stand above it all, perhaps watching as interested observers of rats in a cruel experiment, uninvolved unless it might offer us an 'opportunity'.

So here I am, in the pub on a Saturday night or rather, a tightly packed morgue. There are some very important rules to follow and one or two people are not in drawers with a sheet over their head able to hear and talk, but as we chat my breath evaporates and I wonder what on earth I’m doing, spending my time in a morgue on a Saturday night.

Thanks to those individuals who’ve commented, popped in or promoted my work over the last two years. Were it not for you I’d wonder if there was any vitality left at all in counselling. My final statements here are: Who’s benefiting from our current way of being? and, Follow The Money.

The Depravity Of The Poor Means That They Can Be Killed.

This blog doesn't get so many hits and as far as I know, it's the only one of its kind. It seems to me to be indicative of the state of counselling: talk about the latest research into the amygdala and there'll be some interest from counsellors. But the tsunami of poverty, anxiety, sheer misery that's sweeping the country doesn't seem to have the same urgency as, say, becoming a coach. Never mind that the state of the amygdala and the misery so often caused by poverty are often linked.


Never the less, a steady number of people do drop in here, and I'm grateful to you for that. It does feel as if I'm speaking into the void most of the time. But rather than join the apathy, I'm going to continue to post about the results of blank bureaucracy on the most vulnerable.


After returning a verdict of suicide at Westminster Coroner’s Court on Tuesday, August 23, Dr Fiona Wilcox said: “What I find particularly tragic in this case is this act appears to be pursued by a man who was not suffering from an illness and appears to have made a considered act in response to his inability to find employment. 

“The fact his housing benefit was about to be cut and the family would be at risk of having nowhere to live, and being ordered to give up his training course because of job centres rules, would appear to be especially poignant and tragic.” 

Or evil and catastrophic.


We can imagine some of the misery that Mr Sanderson endured before he succeeded in killing himself and some of it will have been caused by attitudes such as this:


"It is simply a fact that our social problems are increasingly connected to the depravity of the poor. If an American works hard, completes their education, gets married, and stays married, then they will rarely — very rarely — be poor. At the same time, poverty is the handmaiden of illegitimacy, divorce, ignorance, and addiction. As we have poured money into welfare, we’ve done nothing to address the behaviors that lead to poverty while doing all we can to make that poverty more comfortable and sustainable."

David French is honest enough to say what he believes which is what a great many people - by no means just Americans - believe, including some people who are poor. Which ignores poor people in stable relationships, without addictions or who may be innately more intelligent than a person with more income who has greater access to decent education or, after 16, any education at all.

 

We've heard a great deal about how the middle classes have begun to live hand to mouth but this is how people on a low income have been living forever. Mr Sanderson would not have been looking forward to becoming homeless with all the endless running around after bureaucrats that would have come with it. But I think it's fair to say that shame and humiliation would have had something to do with his sane decision to kill himself. Perhaps these feelings were amongst those that Christelle Pardo had as she held her child and jumped to her own and her sons death. Jenni Russell:

 

On websites there is a striking lack of sympathy for the Christelles of this world, and a marked resentment about the number of people demanding our collective help. 

 

It's quite clear: Christelle - and all the other women with babies who've been made homeless and destitute by the State, and all the men who are despairing at the thought of their families becoming homeless, and all the women wondering just what more they can do, since missing two meals a day still isn't making ends meet - can go to hell, and good riddance. 

 

If someone had stabbed Mr Sanderson twice in the heart, or pushed Ms Pardo and her baby out of her fifth floor flat window, or lynched a disabled man there'd be outrage from every media outlet and politicians making hay from it. But no one at all actually cares when it's done legally. Because they're poor.

Post Riot Musing 2

So rather than curse the dark perhaps I'll light a very small candle instead.

The Parliamentary Debate in response to the devastating riots of the last few days is on in the background as I write this and I wonder why I’m listening to it at all. Each speaker seems to have a script, saying things that they believe will appeal to voters; no one seems to be able to say anything that isn’t rhetoric.

I live in one of the areas very mildly touched by rioting: some shop windows smashed, a couple of restaurants raided and the patrons mugged, some vehicles torched. My daughter and I watched TV incredulously as Reeves’ furniture shop in Croydon became an inferno that spread to family homes. We packed a small case with passports, paperwork and a change of clothes and wondered how the cat might fare being dragged in a box to the local mosque, our nearest community place of safety. By 1am our area was quiet and we went to bed feeling safe.

The following day opinion exploded. There’s little point in repeating those opinions, we’ve all been exposed to them from every media, from friends and relatives, people at bus stops or anywhere else people might stand still for more than 5 minutes. We will all have our own opinions too. For me, what really stands out, what unites every opinion, is that everyone feels unheard.

I’ve watched and participated in any number of conversations on what looting might mean, how it began and how to deal with looters. Friends have fallen out and I’ve found myself very severely challenged by friends who quite genuinely want to give police a shoot to kill policy, to bring water canon onto the streets or, in more than one case, have suggested that all media should be shut down for a period of time and the police be encouraged to batter anyone they can get their hands on to death. “If they’re on the streets they’re fair game,” as one friend said. My instinct has been to terminate those friendships, I don’t want my social circle to include people who sanction brutal murder or a police state. But in a slightly altered state of shock, some fascination and the desire to test just how much a counselling-type approach to these horrific statements can perhaps create space for a more nuanced discourse, I’ve tried not to reject any but the most racist, ghastly comments.

Listening and responding carefully to friends has revealed that in a number of cases they’re actually yearning to move beyond concepts of vengeance but don’t know how. They know they want to be involved and, as every radio and TV programme and website seems to demand, Have Their Say but have no concept of what that really might be other than advocating extreme punishment. We’ve sometimes found ourselves at odds because the assumption has been that if I don’t want to visit violence on a looter then I must automatically want to make excuses for them. Most of my friends are middle aged, middle class and educated but I’ve found myself shocked by the poverty of genuine debate: worse, the apparent inability to debate. Absolutist statements - “Parents/police/ government/ liberalism/ intollerance are to blame.” “This is/ is not a race issue.” “Poverty is/is not the cause,” are clung to like life rafts, without them people seem helpless.

Happily this hasn’t always been the end of the story most noticeably with younger people a number of whom begin with a statement along the lines of “Take benefits and council houses off looters,” and then are genuinely interested in engaging when I ask about the teaching assistant, the law student and other professionals who’ve been charged with looting or handling stolen goods; or what homeless, penniless criminals might do to eat; or when I introduce the concept of Sippenhaft or collective punishment practiced under Nazism that is illegal under the Geneva Convention.

 Very often the conversation begins aggressively then moves to a kind of cri de coeur of “But someone should do something!” I have little idea of what can be done if as a nation we are only ever encouraged to pour hatred on a Radical Other but I’m heartened that time after time people welcome the opportunity to be heard, to be authentically responded to and to hear about different ways of seeking possible solutions. Simply knowing that it’s fine not to know has come as a relief to many people.

Because of course there are solutions that move beyond lynching or bringing a looter to live with you but they do involve opening oneself to some difficult and complex realities. Behaving like a deranged 1950’s headmaster may well appeal to some people who will never riot but vitally alienates and ignores people who feel they are hated by the rest of the population.

And they’re correct, they are hated and the realities that create their lived experience are ignored. People living in poverty seem to exist to be hated as centuries of Poor Law suggest but more than poverty on its own it is inequality that results in rioting. ¹ That arch-conservative columnist, Charles Moore recently wrote an extraordinary piece entitled “I’m Starting To Think the Left Might Actually Be Right” ² addressing Britain’s gross inequalities.  The Resolution Foundation confirm his view:

‘ The share of national income going to the bottom half of earners in Britain has fallen dramatically over the last 30 years…..These ordinary workers have seen their share of GDP fall by a quarter, at the same time as the share going to the top 1% of earners increased by half.’ ³

 One in five of the British population lives in poverty along with 2.6 children. Only 5% of the UK benefits budget supports workless, working age adults  ⁴ and London is the most unequal city in the developed world where the richest tenth have 273 times the wealth of the poorest tenth. ⁵

20% of the British adult population is functionally illiterate and a third of us can’t add up two 3-figure numbers. 70% of children permanently excluded from schools have difficulties with basic literacy as do 60% of the prison population. ⁶

If we don’t want further riots we may want to consider our response to these issues. Counsellors are part of the wider world and part of the nation in which we live: as such we’ll share healthily diverse political opinions parts of which will verge towards pulling oneself up by the bootlaces and parts of which will acknowledge that you have to have bootlaces of some description to start with whether that’s the ability to read or a safe home. Counsellors, like every other person in society, have a responsibility towards that society and we also have the huge benefit of being taught to think, taught ways in which to listen when people are distressed and saying things that they might not actually believe, and taught to create an environment in which a person feels safe enough to move beyond cliché towards exploring their genuine beliefs. Perhaps more than any other profession we have been schooled in the transformative art of empathy, something that seems shockingly lacking in recent days.

Imagine that you have been told that you can make it if you simply try hard enough and you still fail. You’ve been told you can become a millionaire if you follow your dream but the dream has withered. You’ve been told that you will be given respect and status if you wear a certain brand but you know you’ll never be able to legally afford any of it. Imagine working wretched hours at a job you hate then seeing young criminals living a life you were promised.  Imagine how you might feel when new communities are introduced to your old established neighbourhood, and that people who will never set foot in these communities contemptuously dismiss you as racist and backward for not wholeheartedly embracing something you know nothing about. Imagine knowing that your 10-year-old son must soon begin to accept being stopped and searched on the basis of who he is. Imagine what it must be like to be ignored all the times you’ve peacefully demonstrated against the endless reports of deaths in custody, but the attention of the worlds’ media is focused on 50 people from your community who go looting. Imagine being told by that you are going to kept safe and the mobile phone network shut down if rioting begins again then seeing that your streets are just as dangerous and that it’s technologically impossible to block all mobile signals.

Imagine that your voice seems to’ve been heard when you demand that looters be evicted from their social housing and then other voices talking about complex things that have nothing to do with you drown you out. I’m heartened and not a little relieved that sensible, careful analysis has already begun but it’s quite clear that it’s accompanied by a snarling retreat from people we might be tempted to call cynical but who may actually feel defeated.

Counselling is notoriously middle class, very few of us will have meaningful experience of living as part of communities who experience shocking generational deprivation, impoverishment or illiteracy, most of us will have no concept of what it is to live this way as a matter of course. People of all backgrounds who live in these communities are begging to be heard, as are solid, relatively prosperous people who feel dismissed as badly educated working class thugs. We know that when people feel unheard they very often shout louder: counsellors are members of a very small group who, with no other agenda, are able to listen and hear. It may seem very little in the great scheme of things but it seems to me to be particularly necessary now. How counsellors make themselves available to disenfranchised groups might be part of an important discourse for our profession.

1. Abbink, A., Masclet, D., Mirza, D. 2010. Inequality and Riots – Experimental Evidence Research. Association Francaise d’Economie Experimentail  Paper 2010 -13

Barro, R.J., 2000. Inequality and Growth in a Panel of Countries. Journal of Economic Growth. 

2. Moore, C., 2011. I’m Starting To Think the Left Might Actually Be Right. Daily Telegraph. 22 July

3. Whittaker, M., Savage, L., 2011. Missing Out.  Resolution Foundation. Available at: http://www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications/missing-out/. [Accessed July 2011]

4. Department of Work and Pensions. 2011. Households Below Average Income (HBAI). Available at: http://statistics.dwp.gov.uk/asd/index.php?page=hbai

5. Dorling, D., 2010. Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists. Policy Press.

6. Clarke, C., Dugdale, G., 2008. Literacy Changes Lives: The role of literacy in offending behaviour. National Literacy Trust.

Post Riot Musing 1

I don't know what to say about the past week of riots and looting but, like the rest of the nation, I'm a bit knackered by it all. There's a great deal to be said about it beyond lynch mobs and posturing, not least on the vital, fundamental importance now of empathy. Empathy for everyone, including David Starkey and for the young people who have been yelling about their situation for some time.

But since this is a blog about class and income in relation to counselling I'd like to share two things with you.

The first is a blog from the LSE which demonstrates how cuts and social unrest are intimately linked.

The second is the only response I can find after a long search for counsellors thoughts on the subject.

Keeping it simple.

 Here’s a wonderful video from the official 'No To AV' team which demonstrates just how confusing and complicated the Alternative Vote system is, far too difficult for you to grasp – not that you’re stupid, even celebrities have a hard time understanding it.

For me, this argument demonstrates a technique that we all use to some extent to disempower each other. “They want to bring in this new fangled way of doing things but it’s so complicated that you won’t understand what They’re doing until it’s too late. The way we do things right now isn’t perfect but it is simple, and that’s how you like life to be.”

The temptation is to follow that line in explaining unfamiliar concepts to people who might be resistant and threatened, particularly concepts that ask us to look at the way we are in the world, and change.

Some months ago I wrote to the BACP about the cost of accreditation. For people on benefits it’s £110, for people not on benefits £220. The UK average wage is £499 a week so is it reasonable to expect someone who isn’t on benefits to pay £998 for accreditation? Because this is equivalent to what the BACP expect people on benefits to pay.

Of course, the BACP first ignored my letter, then misunderstood it to mean that I was asking the cost of accreditation for a counsellor on benefits, then said they’d answer ‘in due course,’ then told me that these were standard rates. There was absolutely no interest in the subject. Just keeping it simple, because we like things simple.

In a world of woefully increasing simplicity some of the most thoughtful people I come into contact with are counsellors. The majority of us are able and willing to engage in contemplation at a deep level; we’re becoming more used to concepts of privilege and passing but I wonder just how many white, straight, able-bodied, above-average-income counsellors really do get it. Frankly, I’ve never expected much from the BACP, they’ve always seemed far too concerned with status over anything else and have done more than any other group, including government, to make counsellor training and practice less accessible and more expensive.

But we join them. We jump through their hoops. We say we adhere to the Ethical Framework. The BACP itself doesn’t adhere to the Ethical Framework, it publicly humiliates counsellors who have a complaint made against them, makes counselling a preserve of the high-incomed and doeesn't have the manners to address a direct challenge to their principal of Justice

A commitment to fairness requires the ability to appreciate differences between people and to be committed to equality of opportunity, and avoiding discrimination against people or groups contrary to their legitimate personal or social characteristics.

In doing so (as I have done) we give them power so that we don’t have to think for ourselves. Consequently all employers now want accredited counsellors (even though the BACP’s own research shows that more complaints are made against this group than any other) and the BACP has become the entire professions de facto governing body.

The subject is paradoxical but where there’s paradox, there’s power. On one hand it is supremely simple: people who are poor are directly and indirectly discriminated against within counselling. On the other hand it is complex and problematic: could the BACP use a principal of proportionate paying for its services? How might that work? How do you and I address the fact that people who have very little experience of counselling often counsel people with desperate problems?

Or is it true that counsellors do, in fact, like to keep things simple and don't want any new fangled, complicated nonsense getting in the way of keeping things just as they are? Is counselling another industry, like car making, banking or construction, just using the language of reflection and philosophy rather than actually practicing it? Does counselling have anything a little more genuinely human to offer itself? Or not?

Nothing About Us Without Us Is For Us.

The Poverty Truth Commission has published its first report

"It is crucial that we understand the roots of what poverty is.

First, it is structural, being systemic to the distribution of power, resources and educational opportunities in society. Second, it is a form of violence that comes from a deficit of empathy between those who have much and those who have little. Third, it is intergenerational, with its life-crippling seeds getting passed on in early childhood. And fourth, it is sustained by blindness to the full humanity of one another, showing it to be a pathology of the rich and not just a deficit of the poor. 

These four drivers are so fundamental to the human condition that they require not quick fixes but an evolution in human consciousness and in how we see our national identity. To walk this path we must allow ourselves to be challenged by Truth - the truth of where we and our world stand, the truth of where we know we are called to go, and the many truths of how to bridge that gap. Truth is an active power for change. Reconciliation is what brings us back together again in our common humanity. Both spring from the sharing of community. Truth and reconciliation are about seeking that which gives life. Life as love made manifest."

Alastair McIntosh Commissioner

We call on the people living in poverty to be involved in shaping and delivering anti-poverty policy. We challenge governments to involve directly involve those who struggle against poverty in designing, implementing and evaluating solutions to poverty.

We recognise the wisdom, knowledge and expertise of people living in poverty - the real experts without whom limited progress will be made. We challenge people who are struggling to overcome poverty to share their struggle and to work together with others for lasting change.


We challenge those concerned with injustice not only to talk about those who are marginalised but to support them to bring about change.

Where do you place yourself in relation to these words?

Budget Day, March on Saturday

So the budget was neutral, eh?

Not if you're a child growing up in poverty, or if you're on benefits and need a bed or a cooker, or if you're a poor, elderly cold person. Sadly, the media would rather report on arcane fiscal detail rather than on very basic poverty being turned into grinding punishment.

"These reductions will not save great sums of money and are therefore more about punishing vulnerable people than balancing the books."

Sally Copley, Save the Children's head of UK policy, said: "These cuts to the crisis loans will be a huge blow to those families who can't afford basic necessities such as beds and cookers.

"Families living in poverty have no savings and many are scraping by just to put food on the table.

"The crisis loan was the one place people in severe poverty could borrow money to pay for essentials they can't afford, without having to pay interest.

"Sadly they will be left with little alternative but to borrow money from high-interest lenders and loan sharks."

The Misery Index is at a two decade high which the BACP might welcome as an "Opportunity for counsellors" - until we realise that it's only people who can afford it who will approach us privately and student-led counselling agencies are already overbooked.

Our country has already factionalised: trust between different income groups has always been very tentative but when the poor become destitute while the rich pour into London because of the financial welcome we offer (and treat the poor with contempt) riots ensue.  It might be argued that rioting is the only way in which people who are totally marginalised can get any positive change for their communities, which even then is often handled hopelessly.

The cultural aspirations of the rich developers, housing trust and local council upper management,  and people whose lives and homes are perceived as units by these ideological bean counters are very different. Until the desires and lifestyles of the poor are respected rather than manipulated by the middle classes - whether they're architects or counsellors - and until a modicum of empathy is brought into the mix the problems are simply going to continue to cycle.

I know this blog gets quite a few hits and it would be great to know if anyone reading this will be at The March for the Alternative. 

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