A Responsible Healer

In my practice as a counsellor and family therapist, I do a lot of training work and supervision with upcoming counsellors. While most of them show great promise and I am hopeful that the future of counselling is in safe hands, there is still a lot that needs to be done. And I mean personal work, intense inner work.

Counselling is very serious work. We are dealing with people’s minds and feelings. We cannot afford to go wrong here. And unless we are sorted out within ourselves to a large extent, I don’t think it is fair that we hand out platitudes to our clients. The responsibility of self-care and self-growth is tremendous in our line of work. But unfortunately, a large population of the mental health professionals do not seem to understand this aspect or if they do, choose to undermine its importance.

 
I met a young graduate who was raring to go, and one of the first doubts she asked me was nothing to do with the subject or training. It was: how much do you think we can charge as our fees?
Was being a counsellor just that to her? A source of income? Though no doubt it is a profession and she was going to make a career of it, the focus seemed to be skewed to me. When I gently reminded her that she needed to hone her skills before she even contemplated employment, I am sure it did not sit well with her.

Yet another enthusiast had closed her mind to the kind of population she would not work with, which happened to be children. She said she would not feel comfortable working with them..
I wonder what history went behind her shutting herself off from children... The way the society is moving, I think children need the maximum emotional support in the coming years. What was it in her life that made her uncomfortable handling cases involving children?

Still another candidate who fitted in the above category would be so casual and easy-going, it seemed to be a defence of a quiet storm underneath. She was anxious to be seen as one who was in control at all times. Though this would be a strength in her, it would only be so, if she had worked on the deeper underlying issues, and resolved them. It is not possible that one has no problems to resolve; but according to her, there was nothing wrong in her life. Which seemed to be a total blind spot in her personal Johari Window.

And finally the kind who feel they have the power to change the world: and that the responsibility for the client being healed rested solely on their young shoulders. These people are the most dangerous ones. The sense of omnipotence they exude is frightening. They believe they have the power to correct a lot of wrongs, which has the danger of making them extremely judgemental and opinionated, two of the greatest faults in a counsellor.

The most senior of therapists come up with issues they are not able to resolve within themselves. The dangers of transference and countertransference is forever lurking in the background. Unless the person is emotionally sorted out to a large extent from within, she would at best be doing what a compounder does in the absence of a duty doctor in a hospital. And with physical wounds that may work. But with emotions, you can never say you know… you can mar a life for a lifetime if you don't know what you are doing…

Let us become strangers once again...

The hardest part in letting go is not the fact that you need to let go.  It is the fact that you are not ready to do so without knowing the reason why.  And I guess this is true of any relationship.  A friend of mine I met the other day for coffee was talking to me about how she is unable to understand why suddenly another friend just dropped out of her life without any warning.  They used to meet up every weekend, go out together as a family and share a lot of personal stories. It suddenly came to pass that the friend had her sister visiting her, and the calls tapered off.  She put it down to the visit of her sister, and she went to visit them too. But she came away feeling very cold about the whole visit, for reasons she could not explain.  The sister left, she messaged a couple of times, the response was perfunctory … As far as she was concerned, it ended here.

She also spoke about another friend, who used to practically live in her house, but of late was hardly to be seen. Of course, her new job kept her busy, but then she was not talking about meeting- even the usual phone connect had dimmed. However, she openly confronted this friend about this fact, and told her how much she felt the absence.  Though the friend did agree that she was not around as much as she was before, and she too felt the lacuna, what hurt was that there were no attempts to even minimise the distance between them, even after this talk. I guess this hurt her more.

Realigning an existing relationship is extremely difficult.  In the case of the earlier friend, she could honestly say she did not feel like even wanting to find out what went wrong; in the case of the second friend, she tried and there were no results.  What I could observe in both these cases were that the relationship had shifted gears.  The connect was totally missing, because of which the score for count, the feeling that she mattered enough in the other person’s life, was very low.

She had the option of picking up the phone and confronting them with this fact: to tell them she was nursing a bruised feeling, a hurt.  But she was too tired.  And though she was still coming to terms with the whole new dynamics of the relationships, she believed in : “If you cannot bring the story to a happy ending, then it is better to give it a beautiful turn and then forget the story... Let us become strangers once again…” Lines from an old Bollywood song!