We are nearing the end of our first year as postgraduate counselling students. In common with other students at this time of year, the pressure is on. It is exam season. Deadlines loom and the array of practice files, supervision write-ups and personal development plans that require completion can look daunting. In this particular discipline, the relationship between the vocational doing (the one on one contact with clients) and the theoretical reflecting (written assessments of that very intimate contact) can feel frustrating. Some colleagues on the course do not enjoy writing and do not regard it as integral to either the work or their skill set, but the hurdle is there, between us and accreditation, so we must jump it.

The final lengthy written assignment was a watershed for us all (some experienced it as having more in common with a waterboard, such was the torture of wrestling with the material). In theoretical terms, we have looked at the three main counselling meta-theories and been armed all year with an extensive and Catholic reading list. And now, after just 24 weeks in college and having delivered somewhere between 20 and 60 counselling hours, we were asked to reflect on our very limited experience and to place our evolving practice on the theoretical continuum!  

We are on a course which delivers a humanistic and integrative approach, which can feel as if anything goes. I have felt like a kid in a counselling sweetshop at times, daunted by an array of theoretical approaches, all of which, almost by definition, have something to offer. Faced with the task of orienting myself and declaring a theoretical direction for what I do with clients, the fundamentalist pioneers suddenly began to look very appealing. For Freud, everything was about stages of sexual development. Any gainsayers could go hang and set up their own school of thought! What read initially as inflexible didacticism looked attractively decisive when I sat at the laptop faced with the potpourri of ideas and interventions I have skim read and may have utilised.

In place of Freud’s one-size-fits-all notion of psychological health, the all encompassing approach which manoeuvres round the theoretical spectrum to tailor-make interactions for each individual, even each particular context, feels daunting and sometimes disingenuous. In truth, certainly in my own case, the essay that resulted worked backwards and recorded what has often been intuitive work – ‘I said A and reflected B and when the client leant forward I noticed C and this, now I think about it, seems to tally with practitioner X’s ideas.’

Russell and Dexter produce a figure in Blank Minds and Sticky Moments in Counselling that draws a line from non-directive, person-centred (1) to directive psychotherapy (10) (the numbers are mine not theirs). Using it to compose my essay, I was dismayed, reading through client notes, to see that I have moved from being a 3 in November until I hover somewhere around 6/7 most often, but have used elements of 1 and 9 with different clients at different times! Perhaps it is my own insecurity that interprets this data as reflecting that I don’t have the first clue what I’m doing!

There is another continuum or colour wheel that I am very aware of: on this wheel, there are four points – conscious knowledge, unconscious knowledge, conscious ignorance and unconscious ignorance. At the beginning of the course, I considered myself a decent listener, reasonably empathic – ergo a promising prospect as a counsellor. I was in a comparatively blissful state which mixed this conscious knowledge with a warm lake of unconscious ignorance. Writing this essay has defined the shift that has occurred over this first year and crystallised the fact that – to paraphrase Socrates – I now know that I know nothing. Like any current crisis experienced by a client, it can feel overbearing, as if this state will continue forever. A bell was rung by Andrew Reeves’ column in the April edition of this journal – ‘I must point out… that this possibly won’t help at all…’ I picture myself with future clients – ‘Before we start, are you fully aware of how much I don’t know?’

I find myself looking back to the halcyon days of the counselling skills course where appropriate mirroring, a sympathetic nod and accurate paraphrase felt incredibly therapeutic, when observing the time boundary was an achievement. A year on, I am nodding on the outside…

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