Hand To Mouth.

I detest the mindset that produces these trite little aphorisms. So lacking in imagination, so devoid of distinction, and so fucking smug. So that's the world summed up, then. If you don't plan you will fail. If you plan you will succeed.

It makes my hair stand on end.

Counselling has a tendency to grab on to any new idea. How many of us took CBT courses so that we could get a job in an IAPT service? How many of us have internalised the concept of 'resilience', so noxious to the lived experience of people who might be labeled 'low achievers' or 'fragile' but who have overcome experiences that would hospitalise most of us? How many of us believe that employment is good for mental health? How many of us bung up 'motivational' memes on our social media professional sites? Ugh.

People who live in poverty learn not to plan. Any plans you make are likely to come to nothing. You learn to curb ambition, not want, endure repetition, not hope too much, learn always to sound positive. Despair comes and goes, it achieves nothing apart from the involvement of authorities who, it is feared and often with good cause, will just make your life worse. There's little point in saving because after bills have been paid you are often in debt. If you're not in debt you might have a whole £10 from your £71 a week left over, and frankly a McDonalds fills you up, is an achievable day out for you and the kids, and you know exactly what you are getting, no surprise extras.

How wise and worthy are those who can squirrel away their £20 a fortnight and live on home grown kale. How much better life would be if everyone was wise and worthy. But life isn't like that, thank god.

Hand to Mouth is written from an American experience which is different from the British. But we tend to take our lead from the US where people can work two jobs and take home less money than they would have from social security benefits. But our attitudes towards employment and unemployment are all too similar: employment is equated with morality and we can see exactly this sentiment in the British narrative. Either you're a Striver OR you're a Scrounger. Either you're a Hard Working Tax Payer OR you just can't be bovvered. You will be considered a better human being if you don't see much of your own children and have less money to spend on them than if you (managed to evade the brutal social security system and) live on benefits. Now that's the same in the UK.

British political rhetoric is  tending towards the American Dream motif: Just work hard enough and you can become rich. Tell that to the women working two jobs. Please spend 5 minutes reading any history book.

I worry that counselling has immersed itself in this nonsense, too. We admire extroverts and are concerned about introverts. We embrace endless voluntary work becauseWork Is A Total Good. Too many of us have explicit goals for clients: how many more of us have less conscious outcomes in mind for clients? We are people living in society and it takes energy to resist the fashions and climate of that society.

How are you feeling about a counsellor swearing? A counsellor voicing strong opinions?

Neoliberalism and Education

This is a blog about education but I was struck at how so many of the themes the author recognises are similar to how many therapists conceptualise the world.

Many of these young men negotiated their identities

I consider the act of ‘aspiring’ a negotiation; a continual process of desire, reflexivity, defense mechanisms and guarding against shame as one comes to understand

As the young men in my study came to navigate their schooling and the labels placed upon them, they found ways to constitute themselves as ‘subjects of value’ though it is a process that involves daily reaffirmation.

some students who embody certain desirable characteristics are saved, while many students are written off from the moment they enter the school building.

they were adept at discussing how their current constraints were in contrast to the rhetoric of achievement and social mobility.

white working-class British children are less resilient 

My time spent with these white working-class boys, in an era of high-stakes testing and extreme pressure, showed me how fear and shame can haunt working-class relationships to education.

Please read the whole article. What did you think?

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!