The Telos of Counselling in the
Age of Critical Social Justice

Anonymous

I don’t remember exactly when I decided to start training to become a counsellor, but it was sometime in 2019.  I was working in a residential care home and school for young people with autism, learning difficulties, and various other complexities.  I was a support worker and then became a team leader.  This was when I started supervising staff.  I’d taught guitar, coached weightlifting, and worked as a learning support assistant so working with a member of my team one-to-one and helping them deal with their work, which could be incredibly challenging, demanding, and emotional, although new, had certain similarities to previous work I’d done. 

But it wasn’t quite teaching, it wasn’t quite coaching, it was often more of a mentoring, guiding role.  Staff members, often young, often inexperienced, and often quite naive would be shocked by the behavioural and emotional challenges that one could face when working with these types of children.  Types of children most people don’t even know exist, let alone have the capacity or willingness to work with.  This was where taking the time to sit with a staff member, away from the madness of it all, and listening to them seemed to become something of real interest to me. 

These hours with staff were oftentimes the highlight of my day.  Sometimes there were issues to address, practice to discuss, and problems to look at.  But other times it was just to ask someone “how are you getting on?” They mightn’t need much from me in reality, just someone to listen, empathize and understand that we were dealing with some very tough, often bizarre situations, reassure them that they were doing well, that finding this kind of work anxiety inducing, at least in the early days, was pretty normal, and not to worry too much.  It seemed to me that spending time with someone, focussing on what they were going through and needed right now, was a very interesting, very rewarding pastime.

This led to my initial interest in looking at training as a counsellor.  I was about 35 and knew that people often move into the counselling world a bit later in life so thought maybe I could get ahead if I got on with things sooner rather than later.  The idea of spending my time helping people, especially people who wanted to be helped, deal with the world, their problems, their mental health, or the catastrophe of existence gripped me, and the idea of four years plus of part-time training and study did very little to put me off.

Some of the main principles of counselling that have been drilled into me, at least in my earlier stages of training, were impartiality, neutrality, respect for the client, their worldview, their beliefs, their aims, and to work with the client’s agenda, ensuring that my own agenda is left firmly at the door.  “Bracketing,” being the technical word for pushing aside my stuff and making sure it doesn’t interfere with our being with our client.  According to Carl Rogers, the core conditions of empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard are “sufficient and necessary,” to enable a client to improve in therapy (I appreciate that “improve,” is a very vague word).  We use these conditions to ensure our neutrality and impartiality and hold a proverbial mirror up to our clients, allowing them to see themselves and their world with greater clarity and enabling them to make the changes they need to move forward in life and move toward self-actualization (another wonderfully vague term).

But, although the core conditions undoubtedly hold power and seem to lay the foundations for multiple therapeutic modalities, the further you get into your training the more you realise that you can never truly be neutral, never truly be impartial, and never truly leave your agenda at the door.  There are several reasons for this.  Firstly, you can never bracket everything about yourself, your experiences, and your view of the world, but healthy exploration of your perceptions and views can help you know what you think.  Then when a topic arises about which you have strong views you can be prepared, bracket your stuff quite neatly onto the proverbial shelf and hope that you have closed the lid tightly enough that the contents don’t spill out and interfere.  When caught off guard by a topic that you didn’t realise was challenging for you, or if a client elicits a powerful response in you that you can’t account for, this bracketing can be much harder as you are not entirely sure what it is you need to bracket. 

The second, and possibly more important reason you cannot not have an agenda is that counsellors absolutely do come with an agenda, that of helping the client.  We want (or at least should want) the best for our clients, to help them move forward in whatever way they are striving, or deal with whatever problem they are facing.  This could be to improve relationships, deal with depression, anxiety, substance misuse, or bereavement.  The list goes on.  For trainees such as myself, ethical frameworks, such as the BACP’s provide guidance on how to help in this way, laying out principles to ensure we are helping in as agenda-free a manner as possible, but still with the recognition that we are indeed trying to help.  We should respect our client, respect and promote their autonomy, not try and change them push them in a certain direction of our choosing (this could be referred to as conversion therapy in some cases), aim to improve their lives, or at the very least, and possibly most crucially, not make matters worse.

This idea, the principle of non-maleficence, feels as though it has been branded on my arm since I saw my first client on placement.  Although I’m sure I have slightly grandiose ideas of how I’d like to be able to transform the lives of all my clients and become the Welsh equivalent of Irvin Yalom, being presented with my first real client, an 18-year-old boy whose dad had recently died of cancer and who seemed to be coping remarkably well, all I could think was “don’t hurt him.” There were temptations to try and crack the veneer of his seeming to be coping, maybe he wasn’t really coping and was riddled with sadness and it was all for show.  The therapeutic choices available to me were either try to crack open his facade of wellness (because of course he must be sad…)….or to respect how he was presenting, take his word for it that he was doing ok, and gently explore his world and feelings for the six sessions we had available to us.  Suffice it to say I chose the latter. 

Although I am still in training at the time of writing this, with some clients, you do get a real sense when they are not being genuine, a sense of something hidden or uncanny.    But if you are going to break the proverbial egg and explore the realities within, you’d better be sure you can make a fine omelette, or at least a passable one.  Either way, an important aspect of this work, helping a client with their problems, or at least not making them worse, is confined to the counselling room.  My work with clients does not go beyond that room, the big wide world is not the realm of the counsellor in that respect.  You listen, you relate, you explore, you question, you challenge, you don’t advise (generally), and you don’t help explicitly. 

But this process of exploration within the safety of the therapy room, helping with “what ails,” as Yalom says, seemed to me the purpose, or telos of counselling.  Telos being a Greek term meaning purpose, function, or action.  Helping the client change what they want in ways they want, although oftentimes clients come for counselling knowing something is wrong and that change is needed, even if they don’t know explicitly what those changes are.  Not that the counsellor themselves isn’t also changed by encounters with their clients, but this is incidental.  Counsellors do not counsel others in order to change themselves, therefore that is not within the telos of counselling.  The telos seems to be to help the client change in accordance with their needs, aims, and concerns.  The primacy of their aims being underpinned by a neutral, naive, and apolitical stance of the counsellor.

As mentioned above there are many modalities of therapy.  Person-centred therapy prioritises personal acceptance and the promotion of congruence within the client to promote self-actualization, enabling them to become their truest self, psychodynamic therapy looks to resolve historical issues from their client's past to enable them to function more effectively and reduce inner conflicts, cognitive behavioural therapy can attempt to modify one's behaviour or thought patterns to reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety, and humanistic existential therapy, my own modality, aims to promote the autonomy, freedom, and responsibility of the client by helping them confront the givens of our limited existence. 

These are shamefully brief efforts to describe these modalities, but they all have one common thread, to improve the psychological wellbeing of the client from an internal perspective.  To help them deal with their emotional difficulties and function more effectively in the world.  This could of course mean many things for many people, but the focus of the work in the counselling room is on the emotional and psychological world and experiences of the client in order to allow them to be better in the world outside the counselling room.  A world that, at least up until relatively recently, has been predominantly beyond the counsellor’s domain.  The nature of the therapeutic relationship meaning that it has firm boundaries, limiting its very existence to the therapy room itself.  Although we want clients to do or be better in the world, we approach this by helping or changing the client psychologically or personally.

In the age of Critical Social Justice, however, some different theories and perspectives of counselling have come to the fore.  I was already aware of some of these theories but had my first real encounter with them recently during a college day on Intersectionality and Politics.  The intersectional approach examines how different aspects of our identities overlap, align or “interlock,” and can put us in positions of power and privilege, or domination and oppression, and how these factors can impact our wellbeing. 

The proposed theory, that our identity characteristics, some fixed such as skin colour or sex, some transient such as age, education, or achievement, some belief based such as religion, some the result of the genetic lottery such as fertility, then led to a model that presents our society as a “white-supremacist patriarchy,” in which our natural tendencies to be oppressive are expressed either consciously, for example in overt sexism and racism, or unconsciously through microaggressions, traditionalism or imposter syndrome. 

To be part of, or to uphold the white-supremacist patriarchy, whether consciously or unconsciously, means to be “colonised,” and the only solution is “decolonisation,” which appears to mean fighting against the system and becoming an activist against oppression and domination.  It is not uncommon now to hear of activist-therapists in this regard.

Regardless of whether you think this proposed model of the Western world is accurate, or see its utility for counselling, there is a fundamental way that this approach and philosophy differ from those mentioned above.  The aforementioned theories help you psychologically, to deal with the world.  The issues and problems to be solved are yours, in your head.  Not that they are imaginary, but the mind is the place where the work is done to improve your situation.  With the intersectional approach, the work is not psychological, within the mind or the client, but out there in the world.  It is the world that is wrong not the client, it is the world that has the problems, not the client, and, perhaps most importantly, it is the world that must change, not the client.  In this respect, any counselling in line with this theory is overtly political, it has an overt agenda, one that is preconceived ahead of the client, prepared for the client, possibly taking primacy over the client’s concerns.  It is not neutral.  Perhaps this is fine, or even inevitable if being neutral is technically not a possibility.  But the fact remains that this theory flips the traditional therapeutic idea of helping the client change through psychological interventions into a mode of encouraging, or perhaps demanding, the client changes the world, as opposed to changing themselves. 

This is where I feel the telos of counselling may be changing.  Above, I attempted to formulate a telos of counselling as helping the client change in ways that help them deal with their world.  But here, the telos is not about changing the client, but about changing the world.  It could be argued that helping change a client does indeed change the world, it could allow them to flourish personally, form better relationships, excel in work or romance, and thus the world is changed.  But, I would argue, the changing of the world is incidental, a happy by-product of successful therapy.  And it is worth bearing in mind that therapy is not always successful.  Following this new telos, however, means that the individual concerns of the client are unimportant, the change he or she wishes to make for themselves plays second fiddle to the primary goal of changing the world. 

Whether this is still counselling or something else entirely is possibly a different discussion. But the de-neutralising of the therapy world is clearly visible in models such as the white-supremacy model mentioned above, which is explicitly anti-capitalist for example.  Professor of Counselling Psychology Mick Cooper’s article written in 2019 urging therapists to “vote to keep the Tories out” is further evidence of this.  He justifies his overtly political advice by saying that if you want a better life for your client you should want to create a better world for them too. 

But the notion of what a better world would look like is going to vary for each client, sometimes enormously.  So, this notion is presumptuous in that it claims to know what a better world is for everyone.  I cannot help but feel this is either very naive or very arrogant but nonetheless does sound incredibly appealing.  As an academic his role is not strictly that of a counsellor in the counselling room, but the non-neutral positions being taken are clear.  It could be argued that as complete neutrality is impossible why even try? But perhaps the attempt to be neutral, much like the attempt to help a client via nothing more than providing the core conditions, is sufficient and necessary to allow the client to be unencumbered by our stuff.  If it is not enough, the eternal navel-gazing of the counselling student, designed to bring their own perspectives and views into sharper relief seems somewhat redundant. 

Hopefully, the determination to keep trying to be neutral will ensure we are neutral enough.  And this constant striving for neutrality, seems to me at least, an important part of the underpinnings of the current telos of counselling and therapy.  It is not however of concern if the advent of a new telos, more focussed on the world than the client.  This also brings into question what a counsellor is, but that is for another discussion.

Perhaps changing the world is part of the true telos of counselling.  The eradication of oppression and discrimination of all kinds is undoubtedly a worthy goal.  One I am certain most counsellors, or people in general, would happily get behind.  But it seems unclear whether these goals, which are no mean feat, can be achieved by encouraging clients toward activism and joining the fight against oppression, which is also no mean feat, is even plausible. 

This is without even considering the validity of the claim that Western society is as corrupt and oppressive as the intersectionalists seem to believe.  Regardless of this, I still do not believe that these broader societal goals should trump the concerns of individual clients who are struggling with whatever challenges life has presented them with.  To ignore the intricate realities of a client’s life and direct them toward an agenda or goal that is out there, and possibly irrelevant to their sufferings goes against everything that my training thus far has taught me, and is against the current telos of counselling, not to mention the ethical implications.  It could well be that at the end of a course of therapy, a client decides that they want to go out there and try to change the world, and that will be the answer to their troubles and help them find meaning in their lives. 

But then again changing the world, whatever that may mean, seems unlikely to help someone cope with the loss of a loved one, help you kick a drug habit, help you get on better with your family, or help you find a job.  Perhaps it could, but I feel the same concern now as I am writing this as I did sitting across from my first client, whatever I am going to do, whatever the true telos of counselling, whatever I hope to do for my clients, for their world, or the world in general, whatever the problems being faced are.  And perhaps if the telos of counselling is actually about changing the world, this thought is even more pertinent.  Helping a client change is hard, but changing the world seems immeasurably harder.  But whatever you do, be cautious, and above all… don’t make it worse.