To thine own Self be true

Those of you who help other people professionally might find this interesting.

I was at a meeting of fellow humanistic psychology professionals on Saturday last and the discussion turned to the impending statutory regulation of psychotherapy in the UK. I am not a psychotherapist but I am married to one and I use a psychological dimension in my coaching. So I was very interested.

A lot of the debate centred on the apparent preference in government for psychotherapy and counselling to follow the Cognitive-Behavioural model. It doesn’t seem to allow for the potential validity of other approaches for particular conditions or for the choice of the client, and respect for diversity is central to humanistic practice.

There are those who are concerned at the increase in the dominance of the “medical model”, whereby one is diagnosed and held to be “unwell” and have a “deficiency” or “disorder”, needing treatment by an expert. For humanistic practitioners, no one is “unwell” and each is the best expert on him or herself. In my training, for example, we talked instead about past creative adjustments to life which might not always serve us and about how we might choose differently in future as we created new meaning.

Also, there are those for whom being regulated and humanistic is a contradiction in terms. After all, a humanistic practitioner is committed to helping a person become fully self-regulating. I also heard that the government felt that the “patient” had to be protected, although I was not clear that the psychotherapy profession were doing a particularly bad job of regulating themselves and didn’t feel very impressed by the record of other professions who already had statutory regulation.

I’m not going further into the debate as it gets very technical and is probably more relevant to those in the field. However, I was aware of how strongly I was feeling about it, even though I’m not a psychotherapist, how caught up in the drama I was. Yet again I was hearing about a tendency for those in authority to extend the arm of regulation into another area of life. This last decade in the UK has seen a large amount of this. So, was this a fit of “John Bull” or John Wilkes, leaping to the cause of liberty? Was this a resonance with the politician David Davis who recently resigned in protest at the extension of imprisonment without trial in the land which originated “habeas corpus” and Magna Carta? Yes, I can do liberty pretty well.

Is this another of the strong feeling that’s around at the moment of feeling besieged by forces beyond our control? There’s a lot of people at the moment feeling under an enormous amount of economic pressure right now as fuel and food prices rocket and redundancies increase. People are feeling very concerned. Going to join the next fuel protest?

Was the rebel part of me out in force? Yes, that can certainly be the case. I can do rebel big time, accompanied by doses of paranoia. I can also do the cause of justice pretty well too - any person or persons suffering perceived injustice.

I guess if there is particularly something I feel passionate about, it is that, behind the ups and downs of human affairs, there’s a healing process at work within us. Yes, there is a frequent oscillation between the individual person’s impulse to discover and realise more of their potential and the need of the group to manage interpersonal relations in the interests of all. But what I care deeply about is that whatever government “does”, I am also self-realising. That is my process. But I need also to appreciate that what happens “out there”, like interfering government, is also something that I am creating, even when I give my thought to it.

When we are faced with seeming adversity, when things don’t seem to be going as they should, that is in part because that is how I am thinking. I am giving my energy to it, I am helping to bring it into being.

I can and do express how I feel and support others in what they wish to do for causes I support. But I also need to look within and ask myself in what way I am contributing to what is occurring.

Put it another way, I might shift my awareness into conceiving ways of taking responsibility for my actions rather than be a victim, be fully present with being a totally professional person committed to service for its own sake, be unattached to feelings of paranoia etc., model in my own life and in my awareness and feeling how I am self-regulating and self-actualising, and let go of my shadow. What is happening “out there” is also a part of me, which I need to resolve within me. Above and beyond that is a Self that observes what happens with benign and compassionate detachment, unattached to the drama.

To thine own Self be true.

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