Lessons from counselling
Credit: Boris Smokrovic, Unsplash
Over the past four years, I have been training as a counsellor alongside working as a researcher at Community Research. Training has gone way beyond learning new skills and adding a new page to a portfolio career. I have been introduced to ideas and theories that have completely transformed how I see the world and the people around me. I have had to take (often torturous) journeys into my own past and psyche through weekly personal therapy, and I am learning how to recognise and hold the turbulent emotions that the process brings for my clients in the counselling room.
As I complete a three-year diploma in psychodynamic counselling, I have been reflecting on what I have learnt – and continue to learn – in this new role, and I have been thinking about how the lessons from counselling are influencing my work as a researcher.
At the end of a sustained period of counselling, clients sometimes say, ‘I know I have changed, but I don’t know how.’ Psychodynamic counselling works at an unconscious level – we remove some of the blocks we didn’t even know were there! Similarly, I find it hard to articulate how becoming a counsellor has changed me or what effect it has had on my research work. However, here are some of the things I can pinpoint, and they are perhaps seen most clearly in the research work we do with people in vulnerable circumstances and on sensitive issues:
There is huge power in being listened to: all counselling works on this principle, but we should not overlook it in our work as researchers. Too many people carry too much stuff that nobody else would ever care to hear. Asking people about their experiences, their responses, how events have affected them – whether in counselling or research – lets them see that they matter. Ultimately it tells them that they exist, what has happened to them is important, and that their voice counts.
With power comes responsibility: like clients in counselling, participants in research make themselves vulnerable when they share their stories. Careless practice risks harming already vulnerable people, who may be exploited for purposes that don’t serve them. We have always taken a careful and considered approach to research with people in vulnerable circumstances (see here for more about that), but my training has reinforced my confidence in identifying and enforcing boundaries. This includes saying ‘no’ to projects that start from a basis of little understanding or that risk exploitative use of findings (please don’t come to us for quick ‘dip-stick’ research with marginalised groups to tick a strategy development box, but do reach out to talk about a better way of doing this!).
Paying closer attention to how research participants (and clients!) make me feel: in counselling, this is known as ‘counter-transference’. People unconsciously communicate to us what cannot be voiced, and – if we learn to tune in – we can pick up these subtle messages. Counselling training has strengthened my ability to listen on a number of different levels. Being curious about feelings participants evoke in me (and sometimes bringing this into conversations) can lead to a deeper understanding, particularly of the emotional factors and unconscious biases at play.
Greater capacity to field and hold difficult questions and responses: working as a counsellor has a knack of surfacing issues and questions that go to the heart of your insecurities. This doesn’t get any easier, but the practice of noticing and being curious about my responses to difficult conversations has reduced the blind panic I used to feel. I have noticed this shift in my research work too – recently, while sitting in a panel discussion with a large audience, I was asked a direct question on a topic that fell outside of both my comfort zone and the research we had just completed. Instead of having a fight-flight brain-block, I noticed a calm space open up within me, allowing me to pull together a vaguely coherent answer! Perhaps those years of being encouraged to go towards and sit in areas of discomfort, rather than run from them, have begun to reap rewards elsewhere too.
Lucky me! My final reflection is one of gratitude. I now have two careers that bring me huge fulfilment. I am constantly learning, both about new subjects, but also about endlessly fascinating human beings. It never stops feeling like an enormous privilege that – in research and counselling – people let you into lives and inner worlds, sharing all the joy, pain, beauty and ugliness that make us human. In so doing, they open a door to making the world a slightly better place.