Illusion and Collusion.

From personal experience of working with clients, supervising others and the teaching (and/or training) of Counsellors I recognise how easily Counsellors find themselves colluding with clients.

New Counsellors quickly can find themselves being ‘experts’ or cast in the role of ‘magician.’

No matter how good any training is, how prepared Counsellors are by their own continuing therapy and supervision (surely a requisite for the profession) clients need to feel that their Counsellor holds some better grip on life than they when they present for sessions.

These Illusions are easily picked up by Counsellors and ‘acted in.’

Within Psychodynamic tradition the analyst attempts to give no clues as to their personal circumstances. This I understood to be an attempt not to embroil the client within the analyst’s own chaotic inner world of transference, however, in later years this appears to have been translated into the ‘Counsellor must be sorted.’ This ‘sortedness’ must come from many years of therapy whereby the Counsellor sorts out their ‘issues,’ resolves them and becomes a fully potentialised human being…

This I suggest is an illusion, I have heard Counsellors profess to having had “three years of analysis and am now fully aware of my issues” and no longer needing to continue.

This arouses concern within me: the suggestion that once discovered all life’s concerns can be fitted to some template found (maybe years previously) in three years analysis.

The impact of that thinking on clients is dangerous for these attitudes contain (apart from the obvious smugness) the ideas that life is unchanging, once difficult patterns of behaviour are set, then no change can take place and to me most offensively; ‘I now know why I do these things.’

Combined, these attitudes provide excuses or labels to escape responsibility for personal behaviour: ‘It’s all my moms/dads fault for their bad parenting/lack of affection/poor role modelling’ etc. ad nauseum.

In practice Counsellors come to be seen as Magicians who through an initiation rite have found order in a world of chaos.

Or have discovered how to parent ‘properly’ through some Alchemical process involving sitting in quiet rooms talking about ‘feelings and other difficult stuff.’ This is delightful to be on the receiving end of, to be perceived as ‘sorted’ or have magical abilities to sort through difficulties in one’s own life, to be living with peace or without chaos is seductive.

Herein lies the collusion: for clients to hold onto these feelings and Counsellors not to challenge them helps keep clients in subordinate positions. I also believe that collusion keeps clients involved in lengthy, time consuming and expensive therapy for far longer than they need to be.

I understand the need for Counsellors to be involved in lengthy, time consuming and expensive therapy, for them/us to stay excited by this wonderfully chaotic thing called life.

Unfortunately there is an underlying theory held by some therapists that life is not chaotic, wonderful and exciting and that Counselling is about bringing control into life.

This joke will be discussed further in another essay.

Even experienced Counsellors can find themselves working with fear. I name the above as fear, for what else could stop us from bringing ourselves into continuing the process of understanding our lives?

We have no magic: we may have an understand one or more processes, use various tools to facilitate that process but we are still humans doing the best with what we have right now.

We are not ‘sorted,’ witness the behaviour of therapists toward each other…

If we were so ‘sorted’ then the various codes of ethics would be unnecessary.

I recognise that such statements are not popular, I offer them only to break the cosiness that is collusion, the facade we erect to hide behind around clients.

We are all flawed as individuals, if we portray the illusion that we have ‘sorted our issues’ & act that out in collusion with clients, then everybody loses.

Neil Benbow

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