Bearing a new vocabulary, and learning it.

Regular weight bearing exercise encourages your bones to adapt to the activity and to build more cells, becoming stronger in the process.

With regular exercise you should notice an increase in your energy levels and stamina, which in turn means you can do more exercise and get even fitter!

Entering the world of the Other sympathetically involves learning new vocabulary and meanings, acknowledging that what you thought was the case often isn't (and sometimes is.) Like weight bearing exercise it requires thought, repetition, care, encouragement and taking things slowly as well as bearing discomfort in order to gain benefit. When it's painful to lift the weight we need to be careful not to pull a muscle or break a tendon: we seek the expertise of someone who knows more about weightlifting than we do. We work more slowly and carefully, respecting our limits at the same time as exploring what those limits actually are.

When we experience weariness, contempt, dismissal, sudden loss of interest, withdrawal from debate around difference I propose we need to do something similar. Recognise that we are feeling these things, without judgement. Pause and allow ourselves to feel whatever it is that emerges rather than pretending that nothing is happening. Work a little more slowly, respecting our own limitations rather than ignoring and blasting through feelings that can be challenging and distressing fuelled perhaps by shame or sudden recognition or something else entirely which can lead us to extreme opinions that make little sense. 

We need to be careful, however, about asking for help from people who may know more than we do, because less privileged groups get very tired of teaching people with more privilege.

(How are you feeling about the word 'Privilege'?)

It's not a Black persons job to answer questions from a White person about racism.
It's not a Trans* persons job to answer questions from a non-Trans* person about transphobia.
It's not a woman's job to answer questions from a man about feminism or sexism.

Particularly since the focus of the questions are all too often about the person asking them.

The internet contains all the information you can imagine and then some and we can use it to explore the experience of people very different from ourselves without demanding one to one private education. And without experiencing overwhelm.

Try this first, written by a White man. How are you feeling? Where did you experience resistance? How did it manifest? Where did you get bored? And so on. You don't have to tell a soul about your experience, you especially don't need to feel guilty, if you do. Just attending to feelings as an exercise in observation is enough.

A reminder that you are not alone.

Psy-professionals have a tendency to feel isolated at the best of times. I've felt like a lone voice on the subject of class and income for many years and so it was a joy to recognise that other therapists have been thinking and discussing the subject for some time.

 There are a number of psy-groups thinking deeply and intelligently about the ways in which poverty, class, politics, ideology and so on interact to effect the individual, and a growing number are speaking up against the use of an economic model to punish, physically and emotionally, vulnerable people.  Here's the letter that brought attention to the ways in which people are being harmed to the profession as a whole and to the public.

. . . the wider reality of a society thrown completely off balance by the emotional toxicity of neoliberal thinking is affecting Britain in profound ways, the distressing effects of which are often most visible in the therapist’s consulting room. This letter sounds the starting-bell for a broadly based campaign of organisations and professionals against the damage that neoliberalism is doing to the nation’s mental health. 

The BACP has 40,000 members, the UKCP has 7,000 and there will be some cross over between groups. 400 therapists signed this letter.  I'm proud to have been one of them.

Managing the need to polarise.

Either you're for regulation or you're against it. Either you're for the law or you're against it. Either you despise white working class culture or you're a racist.

Counsellors and psychotherapists live in a world of nuance, listening very carefully to what people believe they're saying and actually say and attempting to discern what might actually be going on for them. But when it comes to diversity we still remain, as a profession, pretty blunt in our approach. We tend to be reactive rather than proactive - watching our professional orgs beginning to scrabble with excuses and pompous, unrealistic announcements

We . . . will continue to engage with the Joint Work and Health Unit to critically examine their ongoing work, to ensure that the full range of potential co-location options trialled are in the best interests of clients, and that the evaluations will be thorough and robust enough to pick up on all of our areas of concern.

is a good example of our need for status and our inability to acknowledge that there are huge holes in our experience and knowledge. The organisations involved in this Statement seem to have forgotten that this government dismissed their demand for regulation: they don't take us terribly seriously.

So, read Paul Mason's piece on why working class white children, particularly boys, are failing so miserably.

It was not always the case that ethnic-minority children did better than white English ones, but the reason why some of them do now is pretty obvious: their problem – racism – is defined; their language skills tend to be well-developed; their culture is one of aspiration; they have social and religious institutions that promote cohesion.

By contrast, the problem of poor white kids cannot be properly defined: not in the language of freemarket capitalism, at least. It has nothing to do with being “overtaken” – still less with any reverse discrimination against them.

It is simply that a specific part of their culture has been destroyed. A culture based on work, rising wages, strict unspoken rules against disorder, obligatory collaboration and mutual aid. It all had to go, and the means of destroying it was the long-term unemployment millions of people had to suffer in the 1980s.

At a time when we have come to believe that the individual is solely responsible for their own fate a little nuance, a little thought, a little emersion in the experience of the Other and a little reading of history will go a long way.

Discussion of research from 2013

There's an increasing amount of research around prosperity and empathy (and just plain decent behaviour) but here's a good introduction. 

A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power. This tuning out has been observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session, where the more powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing. Higher-status people are also more likely to express disregard, through facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation and interrupt or look past the other speaker. 

A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain. In 2008, social psychologists from the University of Amsterdam and the University of California, Berkeley, studied pairs of strangers telling one another about difficulties they had been through, like a divorce or death of a loved one. The researchers found that the differential expressed itself in the playing down of suffering. The more powerful were less compassionate toward the hardships described by the less powerful.

Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, and Michael W. Kraus, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have done much of the research on social power and the attention deficit.

Mr. Keltner suggests that, in general, we focus the most on those we value most. While the wealthy can hire help, those with few material assets are more likely to value their social assets: like the neighbor who will keep an eye on your child from the time she gets home from school until the time you get home from work. The financial difference ends up creating a behavioral difference. Poor people are better attuned to interpersonal relations — with those of the same strata, and the more powerful — than the rich are, because they have to be. 

Read on . . .

http://ilegal.org.uk/thread/9117/behavioural-insights-nudge-policy-applied

Five years on and it seems that counselling is beginning, just, to become aware that there may be something more to poverty than personal failure. The BACP and other professional counselling organisations have made a rather Statement about coercive therapy, a practice that has been occurring for some time but which the BACP and other professional orgs only became aware of when 400 psy-professionals wrote to the Guardian about it. 


Here's part of the reply to The Statement from the Mental Wealth Foundation a broad, inclusive coalition of professional, grassroots, academic and survivor campaigns and movements.  

There is no indication that any consultation has taken place with members of your organisations with knowledge of these matters nor with service users, clients and their representative organisations. This lack of consultation and opportunity for wider reflection has contributed to your organisations departing from your own ethical structures and frameworks, and being seen as agents of harmful government policy.

DWP psych jobs are being advertised in the professional journals at the same time as the same organisations are saying compulsory therapy is, at best, dubious.

There's a groundswell of objection to the abuse of the poor, across professions and in academia. This contrasts with the naivety - cringingly, dangerously awful - of counselling and psychotherapy. 

It's time to put as much information as possible in one place. Even if this blog gets the same amount of interest as before, I won't need to keep a tottering pile of articles on my printer any more. 

Enjoy!

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.

Knock Me Down Wiv A Fevver!

Kelvin Mackenzie teaches about the empathy gap.

Still, I do reflect that in those 60 minutes I spent with the two police officers by Putney Bridge that my previous hostile attitude to the hacked stars had changed forever.

Mackenzie isn’t known for his sweet and understanding nature but he perfectly describes that moment when the veil drops.

For the first time I felt uneasy. If you have been editor of the Sun for 12 years, if you have floated and run a public company as founder, chairman and chief executive, very little worries or concerns you any more; your nerve endings have become encased in cement. But oddly I felt quite threatened by this invasion and understood more clearly why celebrities — no matter if they were A or Z listers — felt they had been violated.

Earlier this week Online Events broadcasted an interview with Sandra Grieve and Lucia Berdondini on teaching counselling skills in a war zone. It was fascinating, very real and very simple; with language being one of many differences between these women and the people they were teaching making relationship became fundamental.

They were quite clear that on returning to the UK they experienced an empathy gap. After living and working in environments where life is cheap and intense it can be easy to dismiss concerns that don’t compare. Both women accepted that empathy gap was simply part of their process. They didn’t pretend that they could bypass it but quite comfortably said that they had to be alert to it.

Here’s one study on the empathy gap which suggests that

. . . people have difficulty appreciating the full severity of social suffering unless they themselves experience it.

Honestly, I don’t know how better to address this in relation to class, income and counselling. Counselling couldn’t be less interested in social justice. The August riots consumed every part of the media, directly affected thousands of people and indirectly effected the entire nation but remained unmentioned in Therapy Today. If homes in flames and looting children don’t pique counsellors attention I’m not sure what will. Empathy gap indeed.