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This chapter suggests the counselling environment could be viewed as a professional and social stage upon which counsellors make performance works that communicate and model experiences of their authentic selves. Counselling provides unusually safe and controlled environments in which personal realities are commonly communicated, assessed, and challenged. Its processes also rely upon clear communication, mutual understanding, and the successful co-construction of narratives that recognise client needs, goals, and outcomes. It is arguable that the act of counselling, founded upon truly fundamental values, conditions, and aspirations of human relationships, may at best be described as a mutually believable performance in a defined yet temporary relational moment. However, for the beginning counsellor the therapeutic encounter may be just that. Constrained by the need to maintain harmonious relations that enhance client disclosure and therapeutic change, new counsellors may feel that to present their actual selves, a self that they perceive incongruent with the counsellor identity and expectations of the client, could be counter-productive. Consequently, for the purposes of the service relationship they may withhold self in favour of a more acceptable, personally safer, yet less effective counsellor persona. Carl Rogers’s person-centred counselling foregrounds a discussion in which Erving Goffman’s common-sense notion of the self contextualises the inner conflict that results from beginning counsellors’ struggles to present both their professional personas and their authentic selves. It suggests that performing the role and becoming the role is a natural step in counsellor development, and invites comment on the humanistic counsellor’s struggle toward authenticity in the therapeutic relationship. Whilst the exercise of counselling seems to contradict the seeming artifice of a performance, this chapter suggests that personal truths may be influenced moment-to-moment by the emergent self in both personally and professionally congruent and relationally authentic performances.
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It is not altogether uncommon, in the aftermath of traumatic life events, for individuals and groups to report that they have had experiences and faced processes that have led to significant personal changes and positive psychological growth. In the last half century psychology has begun to broadly recognise and understand the potential psychological benefits to individuals who have successfully managed the balance between the painful challenges of trauma on the one hand and the emerging effects of flourishing and personal growth on the other. Counter-intuitively, these life-enhancing outcomes can include: improved psychological well-being and health; personal and spiritual development; increased coping skills and deepening relationships; enhanced personal resources; and, changes in religious and spiritual assumptions and beliefs. As a consequence, mainstream psychology has broadened its position on trauma, moving beyond its concern with impairment and pathology, to a curiosity about the incidence, meaning, and positive potential that these growth outcomes may have post-trauma. Similarly, as these outcomes are increasingly able to be measured, this chapter suggests that psychology’s ordinarily Cartesian caution toward trauma as a singularly quantifiable experience is being gently shifted by the post-modern perspectives being applied to this phenomenon. Thus, as psychology repositions itself in the new millennium, this chapter offers a number of contributions to trauma theory, an d specifically post-traumatic growth, that informs our fuller consideration of the role of psycho-spiritual transformation in the processes, outcomes, and management of trauma beginning with: Abraham Maslow’s theory of peak experience and self-actualisation and Carl Rogers’ organismic valuing process; Stanislav Grof’s holotropic paradigm and formulation of psycho-spiritual transformation; the research conducted by Lawrence Calhoun and Richard Tedeschi’s on post-traumatic growth; and, Martin Seligman and Stephen Joseph’s conceptualisations of positive psychology. Together, these interdisciplinary strands capture something of a prevailing optimism and shared understanding that the struggle of post-traumatic experience may, for some at least, offer the potential for personal growth.
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This chapter suggests the counselling environment could be viewed as a professional and social stage upon which counsellors make performance works that communicate and model experiences of their authentic selves. Counselling provides unusually safe and controlled environments in which personal realities are commonly communicated, assessed, and challenged. Its processes also rely upon clear communication, mutual understanding, and the successful co-construction of narratives that recognise client needs, goals, and outcomes. It is arguable that the act of counselling, founded upon truly fundamental values, conditions, and aspirations of human relationships, may at best be described as a mutually believable performance in a defined yet temporary relational moment. However, for the beginning counsellor the therapeutic encounter may be just that. Constrained by the need to maintain harmonious relations that enhance client disclosure and therapeutic change, new counsellors may feel that to present their actual selves, a self that they perceive incongruent with the counsellor identity and expectations of the client, could be counter-productive. Consequently, for the purposes of the service relationship they may withhold self in favour of a more acceptable, personally safer, yet less effective counsellor persona. Carl Rogers’s person-centred counselling foregrounds a discussion in which Erving Goffman’s common-sense notion of the self contextualises the inner conflict that results from beginning counsellors’ struggles to present both their professional personas and their authentic selves. It suggests that performing the role and becoming the role is a natural step in counsellor development, and invites comment on the humanistic counsellor’s struggle toward authenticity in the therapeutic relationship. Whilst the exercise of counselling seems to contradict the seeming artifice of a performance, this chapter suggests that personal truths may be influenced moment-to-moment by the emergent self in both personally and professionally congruent and relationally authentic performances.
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The following chapter outlines a series of discussions held over a twelve month period with a group of New Zealand mental health professionals. The clinicians are associated with a residential unit and they work with clients who have alcohol and substance addictions. As most of the participants work as counsellors in settings that are influenced by the medical model, they wanted to discover how far their utilisation of, and interest in, spiritual orientations of professional practice might be recognised and developed as an aid to therapy. Naturally they were concerned to explore how they might work in this way in a perceived atmosphere of institutional judgement. As the group freely explored their own spirituality in the context of their professional relationships with clients and the institution, it highlighted the positive benefits of their own non-denominational spirit-led practices. As they discussed addiction as originating in an act of self-medicating survival that supports the individual to overcome behaviours which originate in trauma, they began to consider recovery as a spiritually inspired self-actualising process. Although the initial aim of the group was to explore the significance of spirituality in clients’ presentations and to identify similar principles and beliefs that might underpin their own professional practice, a central theme began to emerge that resonated deeply with the group’s participants. It suggested that the experience of trauma significantly disrupts, or wounds, human beings’ tendencies to actualise, forcing them down less effective pathways to achieving or recovering the capacity to reach higher levels of consciousness. Addiction was therefore conceived not only as a false or unwelcome outcome of the struggle to meaning, a detour in the human journey into actualisation, but also as an adaptive process of recovery. In this context, counsellors saw themselves working with clients in a spiritual quest to reconnect their clients with their lost potential.
Just before Sam died, his son Peter travelled from his home in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, to conduct some preliminary research with his son Oliver who lives in Leeds, Great Britain. With Peter’s interests in loss, post-traumatic growth and transpersonal experiences and Oliver’s in theatre making, performance and pedagogy they began to discover that they shared much common ground. Shortly after their time together Peter travelled to Moscow to deliver a paper on Hamlet. What follows is a weaving of the thoughts and recollections of three generations of men touched by loss, trauma and grief.
Just before Sam died, his son Peter travelled from his home in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, to conduct some preliminary research with his son Oliver who lives in Leeds, Great Britain. With Peter’s interests in loss, post-traumatic growth and transpersonal experiences and Oliver’s in theatre making, performance and pedagogy they began to discover that they share much common ground. Shortly after their time together Peter travelled to Moscow to deliver a paper on Hamlet. What follows is a weaving of the thoughts and recollections of three generations of men touched by loss, trauma and grief. First presented in 2011 in Prague, the Czech Republic, this text was originally conceived as a palliative response to Sam’s death in England a year earlier. In this new text we allow our curiosity to continue exploring those traumatic wounds that have had, for better or for worse, such a significant impact upon our lives as a father and a son. In expressing some of our loss experiences we begin to understand that our lives, people’s lives, far from the normal, predictable and humdrum are essentially and powerfully unique. Bearing and baring the scars of life’s seemingly random and unconscionable wounding, the legacy of lives fully lived, we share the paradox of these unwanted but necessary losses. We discover that traumatic events are significant opportunities for individuals to start again, to re-assemble and re-learn their lives, make important changes, and take on the challenge of a world that has fundamentally changed, become less predictable and comfortable, and more difficult to manage.
This chapter invites discussion of the uncomfortable, but nonetheless delightful, differences and similarities of interpretation of the discipline-specific methodologies of performance and therapy. Using three case studies we consider the performance of trauma: as the replication of experience; its affect on the maker, the performer, and the audience of the work; and questions that touch upon power, perception, and interpretation; and, the psychological safety and ethics inherent in the reciprocal sharing of such powerful materials.
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Abstract
This chapter presents the story of a series of nine discussions held over a twelve month period with a group of alcohol and substance addictions therapists who work with Māori clients in a residential hospital unit. Although these therapists’ practices are regulated by professional bodies and a medical institution, their personal approaches to individuals in recovery are uniquely inspired by their own experiences and beliefs, and the stories they tell about their spirituality. To avoid institutional censure, they have tended to minimise their spiritual selves in the workplace and hidden these potentially controversial beliefs and experiences from their employers. Thus, as counsellors engaged with the stories and experiences of their clients, they are adept at handling the uncomfortable disjoint between the demands of their quasi-medical roles and the authentic expression of their collaborative alliances with clients. Although the group’s initial goal was to identify and develop the use of spirituality as an aid to working with recovering addicts, it became clear that the group needed to examine its own spiritual experiences and pathways to meaning, particularly those experiences that replicated or closely corresponded to their clients’ whose core narratives resonated at a fundamental level with their identities. While they identified spirituality as a positive factor in human health and well-being, particularly its ability to reconnect their traumatised clients with lost potentials, they were also fearful that their perspectives might not be fully understood by medical colleagues. Their stories of co-existing trauma and addiction, the hope and growth of spiritual awareness, and the struggles and rewards of working in such challenging settings, illustrates their passion for engaging with clients’ spiritual resources. Their stories caution us as professionals not to disregard our clients’ spiritual beliefs but to fully utilise them in support of healing and post-traumatic growth.