Class has
more or less vanished from the counselling lexicon, argues Clare Slaney in this
powerful collection of essays and interviews with experienced practitioners
from myriad counselling and psychotherapy schools, educations and trainings.
But you cannot take politics out of counselling. To be truly therapeutic,
counselling relies on depth of relationship, non-judgemental attitude and an
acute awareness that we are all fundamentally shaped and changed by our
environments, past and present. The class we are born into powerfully influences
who we are, our expectations and opportunities and our ability to (in Rogerian
terms) self-actualise. If counselling is to be truly in service to its clients,
the profession has to welcome practitioners who do not conform to the
stereotype – White, middle-class, degree-educated, comfortably affluent and
female. But the drive towards professionalisation, led by market forces and
operationalised in the form of increasingly rigid hierarchical standards and
manualised practices, has made counselling all-but out of reach to working
class folk and those without a reliable income, both as a profession and a
therapy. Its training has become unaffordable and its culture increasingly
hostile to anyone other than those who conform to the stereotype.
Thought-provoking, challenging, confrontational and angry, this collection
fills a gaping void in the professional literature and makes essential reading
for every counsellor and psychotherapist, supervisor, tutor and academic
researcher.
Table of Contents:
It begins
here (Introduction)
1. Class, culture, power, Pierre Bourdieu
and me – Pete Sanders
2. Crossing the class line: From shitwork
to status – S
3. Power and professional silences: How
class shapes therapeutic culture – Maria
Albertsen
4. How can we not weaponise our privilege?
The complex intersection of class, race and caste – Rhea Gandhi
5. Keeping up
appearances: Authentic empathy and its shadow – Gillian
Proctor
6. A choice
is only a choice if you know you’ve got one – Richard
Church
7. Between
nations, between meanings: Ancestral legacies, migrant status and the spaces
where we miss each other – Lucia
Sarmiento Verano
8. No one likes a tourist: Belonging,
identity and the mirking class – Katy
Alexander
9. Beyond the White mask: From submission
to active citizenship – Rotimi
Akinsete
10. When the only tool you have is therapy:
Class, naivety and harm – John Radoux
11. Unseen labour, unspoken costs: Covering
up the classism in the therapy profession – Roxy Birdsall
and Kirandeep Kaur
12. You can’t keep politics out of the
counselling room – Clare Slaney
13. The violence of certainty: Holding a
space of safety in an unsafe place – M
14. Too many therapists sitting on their
hands: Social justice in counselling – Callum
Jones and Craig Johnson
About the Author :
Clare
Slaney is an established counsellor, groupworker and supervisor based in
Central London. She qualified as a psychotherapist in 2007 and completed the MA
in 2009. Her practice is rooted in the person-centred and existential
traditions and grounded in authenticity, paradox and the continual negotiation
between self and society. Alongside her clinical practice, she speaks and
writes on the structural challenges facing the counselling profession,
particularly the exploitation of unpaid labour and the impact of poverty on
both clients and therapists. In exploring the themes of marginalisation,
power and ethics in the counselling professions, she advocates for more honest
and equitable practice. She is an accredited member of the British Association for
Counselling and Psychotherapy.
