In the last post, I shared some of my experience of the training route to becoming a psychotherapist. This week, some more reflections from a less theoretical perspective…
One main difference between a formative counselling training and a progression into psychotherapy training is that in the latter, one is now qualified and spending more time in the therapist’s chair. For me, I was conducting close to 14 hours of client work a week during my Masters, the vast majority in private practice. I was therefore immersed in theory and practice simultaneously; I was also up to my neck in my own, second order change…not pretty! Such an immersion however means it is hard to untangle what I was learning, where – the classroom, the therapy room, my own life-worlding. Fast forwarding to now, I find very little need to differentiate: as the common denominator is unravelling, and the vanishing point, ‘Helen’. Yes, ‘self is the instrument’ of the work (Clarkson, 2023); and, the work ‘does’ me! In a somewhat similar domain of conversation Greg Madison (2025) and Focusing oriented therapist Jeffrey Morrison lay out a description of a therapy that not only addresses the initial issue the client brings, but one that then unfolds into the search (which evokes first and second order change for me). Furthermore – and speaking to my own experience across both chairs and intertwining self-world – they suggest a therapy that also renews us as we change in the journey alongside the client. Different threads: sometimes weaving, sometimes tangling! Personally, opening to being has been an invitation to stop and head back into the knot (rather than the fight or flight away). Professionally, settling into the being a psychotherapist has been to not drop the role, but certainly dissolve the title. The more the theory has instructed an expertise in opening, the less consciously I am an expert and more ‘me’ is revealed. Any sense of deliberate intervention comes organically from this being. As I query with trainees, “what would enable you to get out of the way of your Self?” We probably have experiences of this in other realms: take driving a car – with more experience, we don’t need to think about how to change gear and push clutch pedals anymore while also indicating, checking mirrors and changing lane. This isn’t just about automation and multi-tasking.
For me, becoming a psychotherapist has felt like a clearer understanding and simultaneous stepping into the unknowing. The less fixated I am on helping the Other, the less I see them “over there” as separate to the “self, over here”, the more responsivity there is in my relating; its like a more pliable system. This feels to be at the heart of what Gendlin annotated ‘interaffecting’ (2018).
Hovering over this curious word of Gendlin’s takes my thought stream to words and circling back to the etymology: counselling comes from the Old French conseiller “to advise, counsel,” from Latin consiliari, from consilium “plan, opinion,”; psychotherapy breaks down into psyche (from Greek psykhē “the soul, mind, spirit; life, one’s life, the invisible animating principle”) and therapy (from Greek therapeia “curing, healing, service done to the sick; a waiting on, service”). I take on board the warning Spinelli (1994) offers when we attempt to use dictionary definitions: looking for defining characteristics in such a way might end up reifying common beliefs and extremes. In this case, psychotherapy pertains to sickness and medicine while counselling gets lowered to advice. In reality, practitioners know we are neither nor. And yet there is worth in playing with words and translations. Spinelli (1994) also mentions Freud’s seelsorger as ‘secular minister of the soul’, and cites Thomas Szasz mention of Aeschylus, a Greek philosopher (ca. 525 – 456 B.C.) who would refer to the act of discussion about one’s troubles as “iatroi logoi” (healing words). Elsewhere, Spinelli (1989) reminds us that Laing emphasised “the therapist as attendant”, pg 132). While I appreciate much of what Spinelli (1994) has to say about the differentiation debate on counselling and psychotherapy, not reducing down to ‘therapy’ and preserving ‘psyche’ when speaking to a process of deconstruction feels more congruent and precise to me. What Madison and Morrison underlined for me in that interview cited above was the search quality; a process of “something more” that enters more than ‘mind’ as a product of biology and strikes at what animates and moves.
And where I now find myself is wanting to add the importance of courage and faith – of which Paul Tillich has much to say. It was his ideas that I invested in during my Masters as I fostered a connection between my humanistic and buddhistic views; ideas that had me really appreciate dialectics and holding the both / and of being and non-being, of being-a-part and being-apart. I pull on courage to refrain from ‘helping’ clients, and hand-over to a faith that they will find a way back through the knottiness. There is also a faith that all there is to know is there for me in experiencing, IF I find the courage to open to that flow of information[1] in bodymind. Out of respect to the modality that taught me so much in travelling across an arc of counselling-psychotherapy, I want to complete ‘the gestalt’ of this section with a quote from Perls et al (1951) who conceived faith as “knowing, beyond awareness, that if one takes a step there will be ground underfoot; one gives oneself without hestitation to the act, one has faith that the background will produce the means” (pg 343)
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[1] Remembering Dan Siegel’s definition of mind as “a self-organizing, embodied, and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information”