Freedom Philosophy

Our increasing use of Web 2.0 technologies makes communication both more intimate and distal at the same time.  The news of this article, a video or a useless fb status telling you that a former high school classmate is out of yogurt instantly invades your consciousness all without the physical presence of the person who created it.

One potential impact this holds for counselling is that we are possibly more attuned to each others’ subtle shifts in mood but further removed from an actual experience of each other. This mode of existence may leave a therapeutic domain that relies on such fundamentals as empathy and understanding deficient in the millions of opportunities to practice and hone these skills.

Bergum & Dossetor (2005) proposed that:

While not obvious in this short quotation, this comment was primarily a response to a detached pathological view of therapy work. I offer that it is also a useful response to an expanding interpersonal culture with increasing rates of interaction but arguably decreasing intimacy. To me, the idea of deep and meaningful interaction is akin to “presence” as pointed to over two thousand years ago by the questions of Lao Tsu in the Tao-Te-Ching.



Can you coax your mind from its wandering
 and keep to the original oneness?
Can you let your body become
 supple as a newborn child’s?
Can you cleanse your inner vision
 until you see nothing but the light?
Can you love people and lead them
 without imposing your will?
Can you deal with the most vital matters
 by letting events take their course?
Can you step back from you own mind
 and thus understand all things?

Counsellors must work to be more and more helpful amidst a decline of certain forms of intimacy.  A look at modern day idea of embodiment against a backdrop of a Taoist interpretation of presence offers us meaningful direction and insight into where we should be placing our emphasis.

Bergum, V.,  & Dossetor, J. (2005). Relational ethics: The full meaning of respect. Hagerstown, MD: University Publishing Group.

Lao, T. (1995). Tao-Te-Ching (S. Mitchell, trans) Retrieved June 01, 2009 from Academic Brooklyn, academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu: http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/texts/ taote-v3.html. (Original work published 6th Century BC)

Counselling Study, Technology counselling, Technology, therapeutic alliance

Shadow Climbing in Grass Valley

Because outcomes are so influenced by the nature of the therapeutic relationship, counsellors and counselling related research pays close attention to the development of the working alliance. To that end, Gerald Corey (2009) defined “therapy at its best is an active collaborative process of working with the client as an active self-healer” (p 18). This week for GCAP 671 Course – Developing the Working Alliance we were asked to post a response to this question.

The working alliance can be said to exist in nearly every relationship, counselling or not. Are there any situations where you might not find a working alliance?

I enjoyed this question and appreciate the responses that preceded mine citing vast differences in value systems and beliefs. I chose not to go that path with this, below is my answer to my classmates. I look forward to seeing what kind of responses I get on the grad school forum.

(Please don’t read too much emotion into this post. I wanted to present my dissent as convincingly as possible but am not on a mission about this.)

If I can take a respectful oppositional stance, I disagree with the premise of this question. Isn’t the title of this course, “Developing a Working Alliance”? If working alliances were so commonly available why would we be spending an entire unit of this program (conceivably more) on how to create them? I would argue further that to state it this way cheapens the process of cultivating an effective working relationship and denigrates our professional skill-set.

A more accurate premise for me would be to say that “nearly every relationship has the potential to become a working alliance”. In absence of that addition, I would offer in response to this question that, semantics aside, any relationship that lacks Corey’s (2009) starting eight behaviors of the therapeutic relationship would not fall into the category of a working alliance.

I’ve heard things in North America have changed since Obama came on board in the US but I can’t believe they have changed to the point where nearly every relationship contains these qualities. Prove me wrong, please. ~ Adam

Corey, G. (2008). The art of integrative counselling (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Brooks Cole.

Counselling Study counselling, therapeutic alliance, working alliance

This past week through GCAP I was introduced to Keeney’s (2001) work in tracking client issues and galleries. A simplified description of Keeney’s gallery idea is that clients present content of therapeutic sessions as if taking you through a tour of their life gallery. The first is the presenting gallery that would include descriptors of current thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. The second are bridging galleries that contain openers that can be followed up on to further explore the content of the presenting gallery. Bridging galleries may involve stories the client uses to illustrate the sources of their emotions, thoughts, or behaviors. A third component of a counselling session is the therapeutic gallery wherein change work can occur.

We were given the following case study to analyze:

A female client presents to you with some apprehension regarding a fairly new relationship. She has been dating and spending time with someone that she thinks might be worth a longer-term commitment. On the one hand, this person shares many of the same values and beliefs as your client. The two of them enjoy time together watching movies, taking walks, and eating out. They also share some core beliefs about religion and education and the value of on-going self-development. Your client says that she is really developing feelings of fondness and caring in the relationship. On the other hand, your client is worried because her last relationship started well but ended badly and unexpectedly. She describes the last relationship as starting in much the same way, and after a period of closeness and intimacy, her last partner left unexpectedly. Now she fears that this may happen again and is scared that her reluctance to connect further might be a kind of “catch-22″ – she fears going deeper because it might fall apart, but the fear of going deeper might be the thing that leads this relationship to fall apart.

Here is a graphic depicting how the information can be tracked using Keeney’s gallery approach.

Taking this further, yesterday I entered my notes from sessions with clients into a hosted form very similar to this sample immediately following or during session. (Don’t mind the Japanese formatting on the form, its because of my region) Try punching in some details into the form. Go ahead… I made a sample to goof around with, you can’t hurt anything. The button at the bottom should say “submit” but reads in Japanese for me here so I’m not sure what you’ll see exactly.

Once information is entered into the form it automatically gets put into this spreadsheet. Obviously the spreadsheet with my client notes on it is password protected so that only I can view it, but for this demo I hosted the form so you could see how it works. I put in the “Pierre” information just so it wouldn’t be empty.

I can keep a weekly or daily log using the spreadsheet and it gives me an automatic time stamp. Like any spread sheet it enables me to sort the data by name etc as I want. We use a separate database at work but it wasn’t hard to cut and paste the content from these cells into the fields at work.

What suggestions or feedback do you have? Do you think this would be useful for you? We have wi-fi everywhere and heaps of bandwidth. I am on a MacBook so it is dead simple to open and use wherever I am. It might not work without that infrastructure..other issues?

Keeney, B.P. (2001). Improvisational therapy: A practical guide for creative clinical strategies. Guilford Press.

Counselling Study counselling, Technology