Related articles

• As we have always known, at the heart of good counselling is the art of communication, the ability to listen keenly and attentively and (more or less regardless of theoretical leaning) to respond clearly and empathically. This involves being able to enter the client’s world, to appreciate their position... to speak their language.
  
  In all but very few instances, language would seem to be a common bond between tutors, supervisors, counsellors and clients – we may share the same mother tongue, yet within this shared inheritance there seems to be almost endless possibility for misinterpretation and crossed wires.
  
  The truth of course is that we each speak a different version of English, influenced by class, gender, profession and cultural upbringing; we all have our own idiolect – a language store from which we choose appropriate registers for different occasions: I will use a different English in the pub with friends than I would in church with grandparents. To communicate effectively though, you must be speaking your own language – a language you own. As we come to the end of two years together as a student group, there are signs that this may be harder than it sounds.
  
  In the field of language study, the measure of a successful or well-meaning relationship is linguistic convergence. The premise is that we all start at different places on a language continuum and, in an attempt to allow our minds to meet, we move along the continuum towards each other: when a GP is holding a surgery with a hooligan, the doctor tones down the Latin and the hooligan curbs the swearing in an effort to meet in the middle and speak a language they can share. But if we begin by speaking a version of English that is misrepresentative of our own position, this can only cause confusion.
  
  In an artful simile, a clear and skilful convergence, (coming to meet me as the sole male in the group) one of my course tutors likened studying on this diploma to entering a sports academy. We have all come armed with a belief in our ability to communicate, just as a golfer might arrive at the academy with an innate ability to hit a golf ball a long way in a straight line. But just as the golfer might spend a year dismantling his/her swing in order to rebuild and perfect it, we have spent two years deconstructing and examining our modes of communication and learning new ways.
  
  At first, we are very conscious of these new ways, to the point where communication becomes stilted and jerky. We have acquired new counselling phrases and jargon, a language of mild expertise. I have heard and used a lot: ‘I wonder what it’s like for you? ...That looks difficult to hold... I may need to work on/process that...’ At times, as with new sports kit, though it has been well used, we have been over-protective of it, somewhat precious and reverent. In other ways it has resembled new kit in feeling awkward and ill fitting or borrowed. Sometimes this jargon has felt like pebbles in my mouth; my tongue has felt as if it were trying to form someone else’s words. In terms of the language continuum, it has felt, at times, as if I have set up a dry and awkward interchange where the client with whom I have used these phrases is trying to join me in a language I don’t own and can’t sustain.
  
  Within the confines of the course though, a group of individuals who adopted en masse this new language in order to become counsellors, have started to talk in an English that eschews this jargon and sounds almost brutal at times. In a whole group discussion recently, one woman described her supervision group as ‘a right bunch of b*******’. Of course she was expressing a fairly deep attachment to her supervision group – and her group knew it. It spoke volumes about the importance of language – not just words (the words are the literal opposite of what she meant) but the tone and the intent. There are many ways of saying what you mean. Importantly, the message she wanted to convey was the more powerful because she sounded like herself, not like a counselling trainee or even a counsellor.
  
  Which seems to be the message – and the end of our tutor’s extended metaphor: after the deconstruction, the rebuilt swing/conversation needs to look/sound natural, to belong to you.

• Some details have been changed to protect identities.