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Counselling: a radical vision for the future
by John McLeod
The idea that it can be helpful for someone who is troubled in some way to seek out a trained professional who will listen, and help them to work through their difficulties, is widely accepted in contemporary societies. The question of what we call this activity has been the source of considerable debate and conflict. There are many different positions that have been taken around how the terms ‘counselling’ and ‘psychotherapy’ should be defined and understood. There are some who believe that counselling and psychotherapy are fundamentally the same thing. There are others who assert that counselling is more appropriately understood as a junior partner of psychotherapy. From this latter perspective, counsellors receive a shorter training than psychotherapists, and work with clients or patients with less severe problems.
Although this kind of debate has gone on for a long time, it has not mattered a great deal, at least in the UK, because counselling and psychotherapy have tended to rub along in typically tolerant British fashion. However, we are now entering a new phase in the debate. It seems that forthcoming government regulation intends to differentiate between counselling andpsychotherapy. This decision provides a historic opportunity to re-focus the debate around the nature of counselling.
The purpose of this article is to make the case for counselling as a distinctive professional activity. Rather than revisiting old arguments about the relationship between counselling,psychotherapy and other models of helping, or trying to map out the current roles and training levels of counsellors and psychotherapists, I wish to look to the future, and present a vision of what counselling might become. This endeavour is based on an appreciation that language is not merely used to label what exists, but also operates to bring things into being. This article can therefore be read as a manifesto for bringing a particular conception of counselling into being. As with any manifesto, the ideas that are being proposed can only be brought into being if they are embraced and acted on by a large enough number of people. This article is therefore also a call for action on the part of organisations, groups and individuals that are concerned to promote the role of counselling in our society.
What is counselling?
A vision of counselling that reflects what people want would be based on a set of core principles.Counselling would be viewed as a ‘front-line’ form of help, which is readily available within communities. Counselling would take for granted the idea that people have different understandings of problems, and different ideas about what will help. Counselling would be a collaborative process in which the service user and the counsellor work together to find the most effective means for the person to address his or her life difficulties, drawing on a flexible range ofstrategies for change. The person would be understood as existing within a life space or personal niche, which included relationships, places, institutions, organisations and discourses.
Life difficulties which might lead a person to seek counselling would be regarded as arising from disjunctions in the relationship between the person and the context within which he or she lives their life. Conversely, the everyday life-world would be acknowledged as providing resources that could be used to resolve problems in living. Counsellors would work not only with individuals and families but also with the social and cultural contexts that they inhabit. Issues of culture, class and ethnicity would become a primary concern in counselling, rather than being tacked on after the client’s psychological state has been assessed. Counselling would be defined not as a medical intervention, but as an opportunity for learning new ideas, skills and strategies (or remembering old ones) that the person can actively apply on an on-going basis to resolve problems in living. While also providing a space to share experiences of suffering and emotional pain, counsellingwould be fundamentally strengths-oriented.
In their emphasis on collaboration, flexibility and context, these principles describe a form of practice that is distinct from psychotherapy. Mainstream approaches to psychotherapy, such as CBT, psychodynamic and person-centred/experiential, operate on the basis of an individualised concept of the person. By contrast, counselling chooses to view the person in a social, cultural and organisational context. Most approaches to psychotherapy are based on the delivery of a narrowly defined protocol or model, whereas counselling explicitly involves a collaboration between service user and practitioner to find the blend of concepts and methods that make most sense in each case.
What can a person seeking help expect from a counsellor?
Within this way of defining counselling, anyone who consults a counsellor should be able to expect that he or she will meet with someone who will engage in a collaborative conversation in which the service user and practitioner would explore the nature of the person’s difficulties and goals, and identify the step-by-step tasks that might contribute to the resolution of the problem.1 The end result of this process is to enable the person to get his or her life back on track. The person and the counsellor will also collaboratively consider the possible methods that might be employed to facilitate the achievement of these tasks. A counsellor would not assume that a once-and-for-all agreement on how to proceed would necessarily ever be finalised. Instead, a counsellor would be willing to review and renegotiate the basis for working together, at any point.
These aspects of collaborative working represent a strong and explicit acknowledgement of the importance in any therapeutic work of the creation and maintenance of an agreement between practitioner and service user around goals and tasks.2 These ideas also reflect an emphasis on a commitment to a moral and ethical stance that highlights the significance of genuine informed consent.3
Counselling: a radical vision for the future
by John McLeod
The idea that it can be helpful for someone who is troubled in some way to seek out a trained professional who will listen, and help them to work through their difficulties, is widely accepted in contemporary societies. The question of what we call this activity has been the source of considerable debate and conflict. There are many different positions that have been taken around how the terms ‘counselling’ and ‘psychotherapy’ should be defined and understood. There are some who believe that counselling and psychotherapy are fundamentally the same thing. There are others who assert that counselling is more appropriately understood as a junior partner of psychotherapy. From this latter perspective, counsellors receive a shorter training than psychotherapists, and work with clients or patients with less severe problems.
Although this kind of debate has gone on for a long time, it has not mattered a great deal, at least in the UK, because counselling and psychotherapy have tended to rub along in typically tolerant British fashion. However, we are now entering a new phase in the debate. It seems that forthcoming government regulation intends to differentiate between counselling andpsychotherapy. This decision provides a historic opportunity to re-focus the debate around the nature of counselling.
The purpose of this article is to make the case for counselling as a distinctive professional activity. Rather than revisiting old arguments about the relationship between counselling,psychotherapy and other models of helping, or trying to map out the current roles and training levels of counsellors and psychotherapists, I wish to look to the future, and present a vision of what counselling might become. This endeavour is based on an appreciation that language is not merely used to label what exists, but also operates to bring things into being. This article can therefore be read as a manifesto for bringing a particular conception of counselling into being. As with any manifesto, the ideas that are being proposed can only be brought into being if they are embraced and acted on by a large enough number of people. This article is therefore also a call for action on the part of organisations, groups and individuals that are concerned to promote the role of counselling in our society.
What is counselling?
A vision of counselling that reflects what people want would be based on a set of core principles.Counselling would be viewed as a ‘front-line’ form of help, which is readily available within communities. Counselling would take for granted the idea that people have different understandings of problems, and different ideas about what will help. Counselling would be a collaborative process in which the service user and the counsellor work together to find the most effective means for the person to address his or her life difficulties, drawing on a flexible range ofstrategies for change. The person would be understood as existing within a life space or personal niche, which included relationships, places, institutions, organisations and discourses.
Life difficulties which might lead a person to seek counselling would be regarded as arising from disjunctions in the relationship between the person and the context within which he or she lives their life. Conversely, the everyday life-world would be acknowledged as providing resources that could be used to resolve problems in living. Counsellors would work not only with individuals and families but also with the social and cultural contexts that they inhabit. Issues of culture, class and ethnicity would become a primary concern in counselling, rather than being tacked on after the client’s psychological state has been assessed. Counselling would be defined not as a medical intervention, but as an opportunity for learning new ideas, skills and strategies (or remembering old ones) that the person can actively apply on an on-going basis to resolve problems in living. While also providing a space to share experiences of suffering and emotional pain, counsellingwould be fundamentally strengths-oriented.
In their emphasis on collaboration, flexibility and context, these principles describe a form of practice that is distinct from psychotherapy. Mainstream approaches to psychotherapy, such as CBT, psychodynamic and person-centred/experiential, operate on the basis of an individualised concept of the person. By contrast, counselling chooses to view the person in a social, cultural and organisational context. Most approaches to psychotherapy are based on the delivery of a narrowly defined protocol or model, whereas counselling explicitly involves a collaboration between service user and practitioner to find the blend of concepts and methods that make most sense in each case.
What can a person seeking help expect from a counsellor?
Within this way of defining counselling, anyone who consults a counsellor should be able to expect that he or she will meet with someone who will engage in a collaborative conversation in which the service user and practitioner would explore the nature of the person’s difficulties and goals, and identify the step-by-step tasks that might contribute to the resolution of the problem.1 The end result of this process is to enable the person to get his or her life back on track. The person and the counsellor will also collaboratively consider the possible methods that might be employed to facilitate the achievement of these tasks. A counsellor would not assume that a once-and-for-all agreement on how to proceed would necessarily ever be finalised. Instead, a counsellor would be willing to review and renegotiate the basis for working together, at any point.
These aspects of collaborative working represent a strong and explicit acknowledgement of the importance in any therapeutic work of the creation and maintenance of an agreement between practitioner and service user around goals and tasks.2 These ideas also reflect an emphasis on a commitment to a moral and ethical stance that highlights the significance of genuine informed consent.3