On Becoming a Counselling Psychologist: Making Sense of Presence

Abstract

This reflective essay offers a personal account of my experience during my counselling psychology training. Research highlights that the person of the therapist contributes to clients’ improvement beyond the intervention, advocating the importance of personal development beyond a competency-based model. Consonantly, counselling psychology appreciates how practitioners bring their “self” to the therapeutic relationship, thus valuing their training, wider knowledge, and lived experiences. Accordingly, I will explore significant events that illuminate the personal dimension of my professional practice while also considering the wider empirical knowledge. Furthermore, as the beginning of my training has focused on the person-centered/experiential approach, I will conceptualize my experience within the framework posited by Rogers. Specifically, I will begin by reflecting on the theme of power to expose how personal issues might affect my development as a trainee. Second, I will illustrate how engaging with feedback has brought to awareness aspects of my “self” that relate to the theme of acceptance. Third, I will consider personal strengths that have the potential to enrich my practice and are encapsulated by the theme of lightness. Last, I will suggest the theme of presence as my attempt to make sense of challenges and limitations that I have faced during my training. By presenting these themes, I endeavor to offer a picture of how I have grown into a new place in my development as trainee counselling psychologist.

Power as the Ability to Encounter Clients as Persons

If the therapeutic relationship is expression of a person-to-person relationship (Gelso et al., 2018), I have the ethical responsibility to reflect on who I am as a person and who I am with each client (Norcross & Wampold, 2019). Consonantly, in line with the requirement in counselling psychology training to undertake personal therapy (Kumari, 2011), I decided to experience the therapeutic approach I would have offered my clients. While research suggests that dyads with male therapist and male clients would have a weaker therapeutic alliance (Bhati, 2014), by seeking a male person-centered therapy, I also aimed to address my difficulty to develop intimate relationships with males which I had experienced while growing up. My closest relationships had always been with females, whereas I experienced marginalization from male groups due to an understanding of masculinity that collided with emotional expression (Abreu et al., 2000; Chu et al., 2005). Correspondingly, I found myself more comfortable with female clients, whereas I was challenged to be referred predominantly male clients on the assumptions that I could understand them better being a male myself. Consequently, my preconceived idea about the incompatibility between masculinity and emotional intimacy (Englar-Carlson, 2006; Mahalik et al., 2003) could have undermined my ability to provide a way of being to foster my clients’ process of change (Gillon, 2008; Rogers, 1980), despite their gender, thus affecting my development as trainee counselling psychologist.

Unfortunately, the therapeutic relationship with my counsellor ended abruptly and unilaterally within the same session after my therapist told me that, despite his efforts over several months, he could not feel any closeness toward me. Although clients and therapists might experience their therapeutic relationships differently (Altimir et al., 2017), it was unexpected, shocking and shameful to hear my therapist’s feedback as I was improving my ability to recognize my internal experiences, discussing personal issues and openly expressing difficulty emotions, arguably moving toward Stage 5 of the Rogerian process of change (Rogers, 1961). As I decided to share this experience with my personal development group, a twofold trust from and in others was the source of my power to acknowledge shame. Their acceptance made me feel safe, mitigating the impact of shame resulting from an experience of rejection with the provision of belongingness (Schultz, 1996). My peer group validated my feelings and confirmed my sense that ending the therapeutic process demands the adherence to the practitioner’s code of conduct (British Psychological Society [BPS], 2018; Health and Care Professions Council [HCPC], 2016) to avoid leaving the client feeling vulnerable. Reflecting further on my therapeutic rupture (Eubanks et al., 2018) made me aware of the potential presence of transference-countertransference dynamics (Horvath, 2000) as my therapist voiced anger at me for wanting to explore a relationship issue and left the room in the middle of the session. Regardless of the theoretical orientation, this experience made me conscious that the person of the therapist is in a powerful position and lack of self-awareness can cause harm to clients. Accordingly, seeking additional support and having practical knowledge of contracting helped me consider the interplay of power dynamics within our therapeutic process (Hill & Knox, 2009).

In my placements, I could further reflect on my role as trainee and the meaning of power while being supported through supervision. Specifically, I was conscious that working in my child and adolescent placement, I was in a context wherein adults were considered figures of power. Thus, I questioned referrals that were sought without clients’ consent and appeared to only include male adolescents with behavioral issues. Additionally, I enriched my person-centered formulations with the power threat meaning framework (Read & Harper, 2020) to highlight how the system was responding to my clients by pathologising their distress. Furthermore, I could explore the theme of masculinity with one male client who had been raised with the introjected belief (Rogers, 1959) that fear was an unacceptable feeling for men and unworthy of his parents’ love. Coincidentally, I was also referred a male client who revealed after several sessions to be a counsellor who had experienced therapeutic ruptures, thus reverting the situation in which I had found myself during my personal therapy. The therapy with this client enriched me as a person as he trusted me with the disclosure of adverse childhood experiences (Lanyado, 2004). Exposed to my clients’ different expressions of masculinity made me aware of their idiosyncratic experiences and my response-ability to strive to encounter them as unique individuals without prejudice. Additionally, I could explore what it meant to be a male trainee who could model emotional awareness while aiming for relational depth (Gillon, 2008).

Consequently, my clients’ power was their ability to become vulnerable in our sessions and express their suffering. Correspondingly, my power would be the ability to recognize biases and allow myself to be vulnerable. By accepting shame as universal and inescapable human condition, power can restore relatedness. Accordingly, power is the ability to respond to my client’s subjectivity and offer a safe environment to guarantee ethical practice (BPS, 2018; HCPC, 2016).

Acceptance as Process of “Self-Exploration”

Feedback has been a valuable resource throughout my training to illuminate areas of my “self” that probably were only at the edge of my awareness (Gendlin, 1981), thus prompting me to actively engage with a process of self-discovery (Williams et al., 2008). For instance, skills practice was an opportunity to hear alternative options and consider my therapeutic work from different perspectives. My fellow students observed how I look inscrutable while I am listening because they could not guess what I was thinking or feeling with the seemingly implied assumption that this might not be useful. Nonetheless, my responses conveyed care while accurately capturing the essence of the client’s account. I realized that my willingness to convey unconditional positive regard (Rogers, 1957) had become a synonym of neutrality as I was probably containing my emotional reactions to avoid misinterpretations. However, whereas appearing like a blank screen could create a sense of disconnection between myself and my clients (Ain, 2008), my facial emotional expression could contribute to my clients’ affect regulation (Rasting et al., 2005; Voutilainen, 2018). Therefore, my peers’ feedback encouraged me to explore how my bodily communication could convey care without being verbal.

Similarly, I recall a skills practice where my client was sharing their academic difficulties and the resistance to process them on an emotional level. That session was challenging because their experience was similar to mine and I resorted to cognitive reappraisal (Troy et al., 2010) to reframe my client’s experience in terms of the impact of external circumstances instead of exploring their feelings of sadness and loss. As my tutor observed the session, they challenged me on my response that colluded with my client’s emotional avoidance. Initially, I thought I had been nondirective (Raskin, 1948) and respected my client’s decision to avoid exploring difficult feelings. However, pondering over my tutor’s feedback made me realize that I was losing the “as if” quality in my empathic understanding (Rogers, 1957) and was identifying with those feelings which I did not want to address. At the time of the session, I was uncertain about progressing further into my training because of the competing demands to manage, my placements were not providing me with referrals, and I was falling behind with all my assignments. However, I did not want to focus on that uncertainty as too anxiety provoking (Carleton, 2016). Eventually, the acknowledgment that I was in a situation that was outside my control and I was losing touch with the values that led me to undertake this training. Consequently, I started prioritising my self-care (Colman et al., 2016) by taking the time I needed to feel like I was not compromising the quality of my client work or my academic assignments. Therefore, my tutor’s feedback prompted me to accept an aspect of my “self” that I could sense but with which I was reluctant to engage.

In my client work, being transparent with my supervisor helped me appreciate how my therapeutic style was developing. As an example, I had the opportunity to have my supervisor listen to a recording with an extract of one session. While my client was talking about their family experiences, I focused on the content of their narrative. Although my impression was that I could have brought the focus back onto my client’s experiencing, my supervisor noticed that I was offering space to my client’s meaning-making process as they were realising how the turbulent family dynamics had affected them (Kalmthout, 2004). My supervisor’s intuition was confirmed as my client subsequently revealed how they had longed for having a space to share their story, instead of withholding their thoughts and feelings. Therefore, my supervisor’s feedback made me aware of how I could learn to accept my felt sense of the client’s experience as I had empathized with my client’s needs beyond their communication (Gendlin, 1981).

While I was readily looking for faults in my practice, the initial resistance to my supervisor’s positive feedback would resonate with the impostor phenomenon (Leary et al., 2000). Specifically, positive feedback appeared to be raising the expectations I was supposed to meet, feeding my perfectionism (Thompson et al., 2000). As I was growing up, trying to be perfect was an armor against vulnerability within an adverse social environment (Hawley, 2019), wherein I was marginalized due to my different ethnic background (Copeland et al., 2013). As Rogers (1951) conceptualizes behavior as the endeavor of the organism to meet its perceived needs, perfectionism helped me maintain a sense of control, safety and belonging as if I had to demonstrate my right of being part of the group, while being essentially inadequate. However, by providing me with a protective covering, perfectionism would prevent others from seeing me as a real person, susceptible to mistakes, failures, and anxiety (Lau, 2019). Simultaneously, by identifying the impostor syndrome, I could also acknowledge the validity of my anxiety as I am called to be response-able when I meet my clients in their infinite otherness (Levinas, 1961/1979), thus remaining accountable for my decisions in practice.

As the recent movement of Black Lives Matter (Pellow, 2016) emphasized how ethnicity can be a discriminatory factor which also pervades the psychology professions (D’Andrea, 2005), I need to remain constantly aware of how my practice might be affected by appreciating how my own and my clients’ intersectionality and biases (Brown, 2009) can influence our therapeutic relationship (Greene, 2010). Accordingly, taking part in a support group for ethnic minorities has provided me with a safe space to explore those issues and experience a sense of belonging (Etengoff, 2020). Therefore, reflecting on unconditional positive self-regard (Rogers, 1957) allowed me to welcome negative feedback without shame (Jaremka et al., 2020) and positive feedback without the pressure to achieve, which could lead to burnout (Lombardi, 2020).

Consequently, acceptance would express my endeavor to recognize my “self” as a process (Schmid, 2013) and understand how my developmental history, and life experiences have shaped some of the beliefs I hold (Cologon, 2013) so that I can meet clients without the façade of the inscrutable trainee and appreciate how I can contribute to the therapeutic relationship as a genuine person (Rogers, 1957).

Lightness as a Transcendent Way of Being

Becoming familiar with the works of existential philosophers further enhanced my understanding of the therapeutic relationship as ethical enterprise with inherent power dynamics (Buber, 1923/1958; Levinas, 1961/1979; Schmid, 2013), which resonates with the humanistic value base of counselling psychology (Woolfe, 2010) and the growth model elaborated by Rogers (1961) in opposition to the medical model in psychotherapeutic practice. Consonantly, entering the therapeutic relationship with the other might require the embodiment of lightness as a way of being (Calvino, 1988) to express my enjoyment of what I am doing professionally (Brown & Duan, 2007).

A discussion with my supervisor made me reflect on how my training can be an opportunity to take risks and experiment how I can tailor my therapeutic approach (Cooper & McLeod, 2011), thus being creative (Rogers, 1954). While clients’ safety is paramount (BPS, 2018; HCPC, 2016), playfulness means exploring the potentiality of my therapeutic being with a flexibility that might not be possible within organizational contexts (Edwards & Karnilowicz, 2013). For instance, during our skills practice, we were encouraged to explore different ways to be in the therapy room by using objects, dolls, puppets, thus expressing our creativity and facilitate clients’ processing (Rennie, 1998). Accordingly, I brought a quality of playfulness (Axline, 1964) to my practice in my child and adolescent placement. To provide one example, one client was referred to me for antisocial behavior. We considered how their anger was resulting from a discomfort with the rules in their environment, perceived as unfair. By offering curiosity about my client’s viewpoint, we could address my client’s sense of estrangement and lack of recognition if they did not pursue what they were told was important for their academic development. As they started developing trust, they revealed their hopes and passions, such as an interest in languages. Eventually, my client shared a secret language that they had created by imagining a new alphabet. It was the first time this young person had revealed their language to someone for fear of being dismissed and ridiculed. As I engaged playfully with my client’s new language by learning basic questions I could then use in the sessions, our alliance strengthened and allowed us to further explore their sense of injustice and anger, which were rooted in a family bereavement occurred during their early childhood.

Furthermore, the exposure to different cultural backgrounds within my family (Miville, 2005) has made me sensitive to the condition of otherness. As I lived in different countries and moved from overseas to undertake my training (Kissil et al., 2013), I can potentially offer an attitude of curiosity and humility within my client work (Christodoulidi, 2010; Watkins & Mosher, 2020). Despite the challenges of the acculturation process (Kissil et al., 2015), the experience of otherness would help immigrant therapists to connect with clients who have experienced stigma and prejudice (Kissil et al., 2013) through what would be an existential touchstone (Mearns & Cooper, 2017). Immigrant therapists can develop a metaperspective to become aware of the sociocultural influences of clients’ meaning-making processes (Hook et al., 2017; Owen et al., 2016). For instance, working with a veteran made me attentive to how their understanding of collective responsibility and code of conduct exacerbated their sense of estrangement from a society that was perceived to champion individualistic values (Felder & Robbins, 2020). Additionally, as outsiders, immigrant therapists can question unchallenged shared beliefs in their endeavor to understand their clients’ phenomenological experiences (Kissil et al., 2013). Accordingly, supporting a client with anxiety, I could explore their alcohol use to manage their emotions (Buckner et al., 2006; Treeby & Bruno, 2012) and unveil how their conformity to cultural motives contributed to their external locus of evaluation (Wilders, 2007). Thus, an attitude of lightness allowed the questioning of rigid values without holding them too firmly.

Similarly, lightness can facilitate flexibility while providing grounding that does not become an inescapable dead weight. For instance, an interest in body work and mindfulness has also helped me develop a containing, and not restraining, presence for my clients. By cultivating a regular yoga (Marquez, 2011) and mindfulness practice (Baker, 2016), I am bringing awareness to how I am experiencing a session with clients. For instance, as I transitioned to phone and video sessions, I experienced anxiety-related physical symptoms which I was able to regulate prior to seeing my clients so that I could remain open to welcome their experiencing (Baker, 2016). While working with a client with fragile processing, as they were starting to have a dissociative episode (Warner, 2000), I intervened by providing contact reflections (Prouty, 1976) to ensure my client could orientate themselves in their environment and maintain psychological contact with me (Rogers, 1957). Thus, lightness meant touching on my client’s difficulties while remaining sensitive to their ability to maintain safety.

Consequently, lightness means exploring how my “playful self” can have a therapeutic role to create a safe environment to facilitate emotional exploration (Schaefer & Greenberg, 1997). Lightness allows curiosity to emerge, conveys the humility of unknowing and the sensitivity to tailor a psychotherapeutic approach to clients’ needs. By transcending the intrapersonal contextualization of my clients’ difficulties (Schmid, 2013), lightness leads toward the recognition of our shared existential givens (Yalom, 1980).

Presence as Appreciation of Distance and Relationship

The primacy of the therapeutic relationship is evidenced by research (Norcross, 2010) and is amongst the core values of counselling psychology practice (Sleater & Scheiner, 2020). Within the person-centered/experiential approach, Rogers (1959) theorized the therapeutic relationship as one instance of human relationships. Conversely, alienation would express the state of distance from one’s self, due to the introjection of conditions of worth, and from others, due to the consequent lack of authentic relationships, thus causing psychological suffering (Schmid, 2013). From a personal perspective, the COVID-19 outbreak (Horesh & Brown, 2020) exposed how the apparent antithetical dynamic between relationship and distance was negatively affecting my wellbeing, potentially impacting on my development as trainee counselling psychologist. Following the lockdown restrictions (Chinazzi et al., 2020), I felt alone as I could not see my family nor friends. Initially, their physical absence made me question my ability to maintain a genuine connectedness with them. I was torn between sharing my difficulties and aggravating their worries. Thus, I realized how self-reliance and supportiveness were conditions of my worth (Rogers, 1959), feeling that I had to demonstrate my ability to navigate successfully through difficulties, while reassuring my significant others.

Similarly, from a professional perspective, I was expected to be in my caring role with clients. Despite the evidence confirming the effectiveness of online therapy (Barak et al., 2008), the transition to remote working was anxiety-provoking as questioning my competence (BPS, 2018). Additionally, all my placements paused over a period of several weeks and I could not continue my practice. Consequently, I was challenged to express relatedness without compromising my authenticity, which meant admitting I needed support. For instance, after discussing their difficulties with family functioning, one client shared how they had felt judged as there had been prolonged periods of silence throughout the session. It was a challenging situation because that was not my intention as I was processing what my client was saying. Nonetheless, this feedback triggered my fear of not being able of being unconditionally positive regarding (Rogers, 1957). Being congruent with my client (Rogers, 1957) meant being transparent about my current training and experience with remote therapy so that they could be empowered and make an informed decision about whether they wanted to continue therapy. Thus, while working on adapting my practice over the phone, I could be open with my clients about why I was being silent so that they could know that I was still there for them.

However, my fear of not being able to overcome the physical distance and communicate care, meeting the therapist’s core conditions (Rogers, 1957), left me wondering whether clients could feel my presence. At the end of one session, one client shared their aloneness that had accompanied them since their trauma (Shevlin et al., 2015). Subsequently, in supervision I explored ways I could try to communicate my presence by being congruent (Rogers, 1957) and sharing my feelings. Although listening to my client made me anxious and tense, I was absorbed in their accounts so that I was almost forgetting my “self” to give space to my client’s experiencing (Baldwin, 1987). As I addressed my client’s sense of aloneness in our following session, they revealed how, despite feeling alone in their life, they had experienced my presence (Cameron, 2019). Surprisingly, even though during our session I had been silent and only provided minimal encouragers (Harris, 2004), my client stated that they could feel I was with them. This session made me realize how our therapeutic encounter had been incidental and that the focus on providing the core conditions (Rogers, 1957) could become a narcissistic exercise. Consequently, encountering clients could risk becoming a means to an end (Barnett, 2007), namely my need for relatedness, instead of an end in itself.

As I was experiencing distance as physical and social isolation, I could rediscover the value of authenticity in my relationships. Bazzano (2014) puts forward the concept of togetherness as acknowledgement of being in a relationship with one another while recognising mutual separateness. Consonantly, being “alone together” appeared to be the oxymoron that featured the pandemic as collective trauma (Horesh & Brown, 2020). During the transition to online training, attending weekly peer support group was not only valuable to reflect on our training experience (Scharff et al., 2020) but also to reciprocally share our personal life difficulties within a holding space. Regardless of whether I would have managed to meet all training requirements, my group was there to support me. Thus, expressing my relatedness (Schmid, 2013) was an act of caring for my “self” (Bazzano, 2017), which reverberated through my therapeutic work. By realizing the meaning that living amid a pandemic had for me, I was open to uncover my clients’ idiosyncratic experiences, acknowledging our distance as ethical act of respecting their alterity (Bazzano, 2017). Consequently, awareness of my meaning-making process helped me avoid identifying with my clients’ experiences or imposing my frame of reference (Warner, 2000).

The uncertainty in client work is maybe the expression of a sense I could lose either my substantial or my relational self (Schmid, 2013) as if I needed to integrate them to be fully my “self.” Similarly, on a personal level, my resistance to intimate relationships would uncover my idealization of freedom whereas my longingness for relationships would expose my existential fear of loneliness (Yalom, 1980). While Bazzano (2017) advocates the person’s aloneness as expression of their existential autonomy, Schmid (2013) identifies a conceptualization of the person as “relational–substantial” as underpinning the humanistic foundation of the person-centered/experiential approach to acknowledge both interconnectedness and self-determination. However, if my “self” is plural, the imperative “know thyself,” which resonates with the reflective practitioner model in counselling psychology (Woolfe, 2010), exhorts me to identify how different selves might emerge with different clients, calling for my therapeutic responsiveness (Stiles & Horvath, 2017). For instance, I could be nondirective and allow silence (Harris, 2004) with one client to avoid interfering with their processing, whereas I could ask more questions with a client whose anxiety was expressing their fear of the unknown (Carleton, 2016) and demanded my congruence (Rogers, 1957) as transparency (Kolden et al., 2011). Accordingly, I could shift between different levels of interventiveness within a person-centered framework (Warner, 2000) to meet my clients’ changing needs (Cooper & McLeod, 2011).

Correspondingly, being conscious of my inner struggles made me reflect on their potential impact on my practice. Betraying a need for control, my endeavor to be congruent, unconditionally positive regarding and empathetic could easily lead to the illusion that I am the author of clients’ change and that if I offer a certain way of being, my client will actualize. Acknowledging that I do not hold that power is anxiety-provoking because it throws me into a dynamic wherein I cannot know the outcome and I face the existential threat of meaninglessness (Yalom, 1980). Consonantly, Rogers suggests that being a therapist means letting go of one’s “self” into a process that transcends understanding and needs to be experienced (Baldwin, 1987). Perhaps, the question is not whether I need to choose between autonomy and intimacy but how I can use distance therapeutically to promote my clients’ self-management and relatedness (Mallinckrodt et al., 2015).

Consequently, presence means exploring my use of self, which is one of the distinctive features of counselling psychology practice (HCPC, 2015). As I experience the tension between the anxiety of being separated from competency as an impostor, while retaining the drive toward arriving, I hold the fear of never meeting my client despite my endeavor to offer the core conditions (Rogers, 1957) and the hope that our encounter as I–Thou relationship will occur (Bazzano, 2017; Ellingham, 2009). Perhaps, being present means experiencing distance and relationships as a twofold human process, making a leap of faith (Kierkegaard, 1843/2013).

Choosing to Become

As I have attempted to share my experience in the first stage of my counselling psychology training, I could orientate myself with four cardinal points. Power leads my ethical response-ability to the difficulties that might prevent me from fostering my clients’ actualization. Acceptance directs my endeavor to relate to my “self” with an attitude of positive regard and remain open to feedback to aid my self-exploration. Lightness guides how I aim to contribute to the therapeutic relationship by enjoying the process. Presence illuminates the tension in engaging with relationality while appreciating my clients’ and my own subjectivity. Therefore, on the path of becoming a counselling psychologist, I remain open to exploring and unknowing in an evolving meaning-making process.