On becoming a counsellor: a posthuman reconfiguring of identity formation for counsellors-in-training

ABSTRACT

Processes of identity formation have long been a consideration for the field of counselling. Undertaking counselling education can be a fraught time for student counsellors, with increased anxiety and stress, and educators and researchers need to better grasp the complexities inherent in the development of new counsellors. This paper reviews research drawing on humanistic understandings of identity for counsellors-in-training before engaging with the recent ontological turn to a posthuman framework, emergent across the social sciences. Through attention to the emergence of the tears of counsellors-in-training in counselling encounters, a posthuman reconceptualising of “becoming-counsellor” is put forward. Such an orientation produces a shift to entangled, dynamic, iterative processes of becoming, with attention to myriad forces shaping counsellor identities.

KEYWORDS:

• Counsellor identity
• counsellor-in-training
• tears
• posthumanism
• counselling

Recent commentary in the counselling and psychotherapy literature on the lived experience of counsellors-in-training has emphasised the need to learn more about the experiences and challenges counsellors encounter during their training years (Grafanaki, 2010a; Pierce, 2016). It is suggested that researchers and educators can struggle to grasp the complexities inherent in the development of new counsellors (Grafanaki, 2010b), and many counsellors-in-training continue to experience potentially negative impacts, such as a sense of incompetence, confusion, increased anxiety, stress and burnout (Auxier et al., 2003; Christopher & Maris, 2010; Folkes-Skinner et al., 2010; Grafanaki, 2010a; Kumary & Baker, 2008; Skovholt & Rønnestad, 2003; Truell, 2001).

Orlinsky et al. (2005), recognising that the study of psychotherapies has been favoured over the study of psychotherapists, suggested the paucity of research is due in part to the implicit bias in thinking about therapy “basically as a set of methods, techniques, or procedures that are efficacious, in and of themselves” so that therapists, “when properly trained, are more or less interchangeable” (p. 5). If, however, we think of counselling and therapy as a professional-personal relationship, where multiple, fluid, and complex factors interact to influence the process and outcomes for therapists and clients (Hubble et al., 2010), then reconsidering the experience and personhood of the counsellor-in-training becomes a valuable and essential area of research. We move from conceptualising the training process as a matter of developing good technicians to focus on the person, their multiple identities, histories and contexts and the interactions of these.

Just as the field has been proactive about the need for ongoing client outcome research, so too we need to ensure our theory and practice of counsellor identity keeps up to date with relevant and contemporary thinking in identity studies. “Therapeutic practice has to continually reinvent itself, and redescribe itself, in order to stay relevant and vital”, and so too our thinking around theory and practice should seek out the “most sophisticated analyses of what is happening in the world” (Winslade, 2009, p. 332) to do justice to the process of becoming-counsellor.

This paper begins with a review of predominant conceptualisations of identity and experience for counsellors-in-training in order to see what more a reconceptualisation of this process might offer for the field. This is performed in relation with the ontological turn emergent across the social sciences, variously named the “onto-ethical” (Rosiek & Gleason, 2017), the “post-human” (Braidotti, 2013) and the material turn (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008). A turn toward posthumanism incorporates a decentring of humanism’s self-contained individual, and reconfigures identity as an ongoing materialisation of the world’s iterative intra-activity (Barad, 2007). Moving beyond understandings of the discursive formation of the self and the socially constructed nature of knowing, the posthuman turn, after the cultural turn, encompasses a bringing back of the materiality of the world, bodies and all matter. The linguistic and cultural turn enabled complex and productive analyses of the “interconnections between power, knowledge, subjectivity and language” (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008, p. 1), as taken up in counselling approaches such as feminist, family, narrative and solution-focused therapies. However, this more recent thinking again opens up fundamental questions about the nature of self, identity, agency, power, and embodiment (Barad, 2007), all crucial considerations for the field of counselling and the emerging identity of a counsellor-in-training.

The humanistic individual of counsellor education

The majority of, albeit relatively limited (Pierce, 2016), research into the lived experiences of counsellors-in-training has been carried out with a humanistic conceptualisation of the person. Its aim has been to better understand the educational experience and process, recognising that training to be a counsellor is likely to be cognitively and emotionally demanding, complex and transformative (Folkes-Skinner, 2016; Furr & Carroll, 2003; Wagner & Hill, 2015). Various theories have been put forward in an attempt to explain this, including the transition from lay helper to student to novice practitioner (Folkes-Skinner et al., 2010; Skovholt & Rønnestad, 2003), going through a process of “both intra-psychic and outward practical adaption” (Howard et al., 2006, p. 98), the challenges of experiential learning, suggested to lead to disequilibrium and discomfort (Furr & Carroll, 2003), and the requirement to actively, and experientially, integrate personal and professional knowledge and selves in the development of a professional identity as a counsellor (Auxier et al., 2003; Wagner & Hill, 2015).

Counsellor identities have been theorised to differ from identities formed in many other professions, due to their development of a “therapeutic self”, a “unique personal blend of the developed professional and personal selves” (Skovholt & Rønnestad, 1992, p. 507). Pertinent research looking specifically at individuals’ experience has explored the existential experiences of counsellors-in-training (Pierce, 2016), how a trainee counsellor changes at the start of training (Folkes-Skinner, 2016; Folkes-Skinner et al., 2010), inner experience such as feelings and concerns (Hill et al., 2007), and more focused areas such as experience of impasse (de Stefano et al., 2007), self-confidence (Bischoff, 1997; Bischoff & Barton, 2002), and stress and psychological distress of the counsellor-in-training (Kumary & Baker, 2008; Skovholt & Rønnestad, 2003; Truell, 2001). Each of these pieces of research offers not only evidence of the lived experience of the counsellor-in-training, but reflections on the significance for the process of becoming a counsellor.

Connected to this research on counsellor-in-training lived experience, and the particular challenges which have been identified, is work which offers conceptualisations of this process of development, or identity formation, during this seemingly fraught period. Some of the most widely cited work is that of researchers Skovholt and Rønnestad (e.g. Rønnestad & Skovholt, 2003; Skovholt, 2012; Skovholt & Rønnestad, 1992, 1995, 2003). Outlining a phase model of development, they suggested the beginning student phase to be characterised by initial excitement, combined with insecurity, apprehension, anxiety, challenge, and lack of confidence, leading to the advanced student phase, characterised by feeling pressure to do things even more perfectly than before, being conservative, cautious and excessively thorough, maintaining an external focus still of looking to models, but moving gradually to an internal focus (Rønnestad & Skovholt, 2003).

While echoing the emotional challenges facing counsellors-in-training identified in earlier research, Rønnestad and Skovholt drew on various developmental and identity theories (e.g. Erikson, 1959, 1968; Lerner, 1986 cited in Skovholt, 2012) to conceptualise this “universality of experience” (Skovholt, 2012, p. ix). This conception of identity development was significant for explaining the process of becoming a counsellor, described by Skovholt (2012) as the internal work of the “unfolding practitioner self” (p. 67). This process of identity achievement is said to take time and to be the most important task for practitioners in education. Identity achievement is likened to shifting from an incomplete, fragile practitioner self to feeling and experiencing a solid sense of self.

This study of professional identity for the counselling profession has become a focus of numerous researchers. A professional identity can provide a frame of reference, and contribute to a sense of professional belonging and uniqueness (Pistole & Roberts, 2002), as well as being a way of conceptualising lived experience. Initially drawing on the leading work of Skovholt and Rønnestad, work in this area has also recognised the limitation of their model with its focus on whole career development, rather than being specific to the period of counsellor education. As such, an emerging body of research has attempted to explore and theorise in more depth the process of identity formation for counsellors-in-training (Auxier et al., 2003; Fragkiadaki et al., 2013; Gibson et al., 2010; Healey & Hays, 2012; Moss et al., 2014).

The findings from these studies remain generally consistent with the work of Skovholt and Rønnestad. For example, Auxier et al. (2003) suggested that students cycle through experiences of conceptual learning, experiential learning and external evaluation to eventually assume a counsellor self identity. They identified this as a growth or developmental process, albeit a difficult one at times, during which time trainees struggle to define and clarify their interpersonal and counselling identity. Trainees were seen to reflect on their experiences (conceptual, experiential) and gain self-awareness and growth through this reflection. Findings from Gibson et al. (2010) yielded a “developmental grounded theory of the transformation of counsellor professional identity … in which three developmental tasks exist that describe the work that must be accomplished to transform identity” (p. 27). The transformational process itself was described as one of individuals moving across time and experience, from external validation through coursework, experience, and commitment, to internalised responsibility or self-validation.

Humanistic conceptualisations of identity

The body of research outlined thus far, on experience, development and identity is situated within a particular humanistic, psychological and phenomenological framework or ontology of the self, identity and human development. This purports a universalised conceptualisation of personal identity, as the property of an individual, a unified, stable, and self-contained nexus, developed through internal or “intrapsychic” processes, and held consistently across time and experience. In contrast, in many other areas of social and educational research “[i]n the last 30 years, identity has become disconnected from this originary image” with researchers turning, in particular, to postmodern and poststructural conceptualisations of identity and experience (Wetherell, 2010, p. 22).

As noted above, Skovholt and Rønnestad’s conceptualisations of trainee development drew on the work of identity theorist Erik Erikson, the most prominent identity theorist of the 1950s to 1970s (Wetherell, 2010). Erikson understood identity as involving a struggle, personal identity was a developmental achievement unfolding in stages, with particular tasks and dilemmas that needed to be negotiated at these different stages. For Erikson, identity manifested “as an authentic and stable self”, and as “a sense of personal coherence” (Wetherell, 2010, p. 7). Such ideas are consistent also with the humanistic approaches to counselling (Rogers, 1957/2007), with the theorising of developmental processes of identity formation for clients who are considered to be “positive in nature … socialised, forward-moving, rational and realistic” (Rogers, 1961, p. 90).

Similarly, in the phenomenological thought that underlies much psychological thinking the singularly unique but universal, self-contained human individual (Davies, 2010) is at the centre, and, as outlined above, underpins accounts of the experiences of counsellors-in-training. Predominantly in counselling, counsellor education and research, individuals are seen as engaged in activities of developing personal awareness, of “‘recognising’, ‘understanding’, ‘processing’ and ‘coming to see’ who one is in the world” (Wetherell, 2010, p. 14). Arising from Cartesian based modernist accounts of the self, dating back to Descartes’ model of the thinking self, and the period of Enlightenment (or Age of Reason), the Western self, and identity, has come to be strongly associated with notions of rationality, independence, autonomy and self-knowledge (Alcoff, 2010). Such notions similarly underpin theorisations of counsellor-in-training identities as outlined above.

While such humanistic conceptualisations represented important philosophical shifts, particularly in the field of counselling in a turn away from Freud’s deterministic view of human nature and behaviour (Corey, 2017), they have nevertheless come to be questioned in current thinking around identity. Indeed, Wetherell (2010) has noted that “the main interest of Erikson’s work outside of this area of psychology is now historical” (p. 7), with researchers also doubtful about the existence of universally defined and experienced stages and norms in identity development.

Such universal stories or grand “metanarratives” have also begun to be seen as bulwarking reductionist, essentialist, Eurocentric, masculine accounts of the “real” leaving little room for the accounts and narratives of those defined as “Other”. Difference features only in (subordinate) relation to dominant norms of development and identity. This is obvious in accounts of experience, development and identity in humanistic perspectives in counselling education, when difference (e.g. in terms of gender, race, ethnicity) becomes invisible, and when the “particular relations of power and oppression” which establish notions of universality, are ignored (Walkerdine, 1993, p. 461). Such a recognition calls for accounts of identity and development which are historical, specific and local (Walkerdine, 1993). Indeed, in the turn to, for example, postmodernism and poststructuralism, attention in identity studies has engaged in a “shift from understanding what identity is to understanding how identity is discursively constructed” and performed (Wetherell, 2010, p. 13).

In summary, whilst the research and humanist conceptualisations explored above have been central in bringing attention to the complex personal-professional processes counsellors-in-training are engaged in, they hold significant limitations in light of contemporary theorisations of identity. Such limitations include, in particular what gets left out or made invisible when the “individualised subject”, that “singular, self-contained human individual” (Davies, 2010, p. 54) is given fundamental status, when ““ahistorical”, universalising, internal and depoliticising trends of explanation” are prioritised (Hook, 2005, p. 28). Indeed, Skovholt and Rønnestad (1995) acknowledged, but do not address, in their initial, early attempt to construct an accurate and generalisable model of counsellor development that it is impossible to include all of the critical dimensions through which people differ, including, they say, age, experience level, gender, race, work setting, cognitive style, theoretical training, and family of origin.

However, not only are these important multiple identities made invisible in the universal, so too are the dominant discourses though which individuals are subject to the conditions of possibility for their own being and becoming (Davies, 2010). With the counselling literature just beginning to consider what it means to take up the call to reconfigure the nature of identity as intersections of “social locations and cultural factors (i.e. dis/ability, affectional orientation, ethnicity, race, gender identity and expression, spirituality and religion, residency in a country or educational program, and many other identities that are not mentioned and yet are important)” (Peters, 2017, p. 178), attention to conceptualisations of the person or identity of the counsellor-in-training seems ever more urgent.

Social constructionist and poststructural perspectives on counsellor identities

Underpinning counselling approaches such as narrative, solution-focused and feminist therapies, poststructural and social constructionist theorising of professional identity in counsellor education (Crocket & Kotzé, 2011; Winslade, 2002) enables a storying of identities as socially and culturally produced. Conceptualising counsellor-in-training identity in this way in turn influences curriculum and pedagogical practices, including attention to power relations, exploration of cultural narratives and commitments to social justice (Crocket & Kotzé, 2011). With an emphasis on relational identity, and the learning communities they are a part of, students are encouraged to actively story their learning and ongoing professional identities (Crocket & Kotzé, 2011). Professional identity for counsellors-in-training can then be described as “dynamic, holistic, and continuously constructed through social interactions” rather than “defined by a list of attributes, or ‘achieved’ in a finalistic sense” (Waters et al., 2013, p. 2).

A “storied” professional identity encompasses practices which go “beyond the humanistic and structuralist understandings of personhood that tend to be taken for granted in the fields of counselling and counsellor education” (Crocket & Kotzé, 2011, p. 393). Hence, the focus is on people’s lives as shaped by a range of cultural stories or discourses, such as “professionalism, individualism, competition, gender, consumerism, race, class … ” (Crocket & Kotzé, 2011, p. 394). This discursive approach views the stories people tell about themselves as being shaped by discourses which prevail in all of the contexts in which they live, thus people are shaped by and also shape discourse. Thus, identity becomes relational, fluid (non-fixed) and multiple.

A reconfigured, posthuman identity

The recent ontological turn in the social sciences has been labelled a turn, after the cultural turn, to posthumanism (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2019). In the remainder of the paper I think with aspects of this framework to consider the possibilities it might offer in further re-imagining the process of becoming counsellor, drawing in particular on the posthuman theorising of Rosi Braidotti (2016, 2019) and Karen Barad’s (2007) agential-realism framework. The notion of the posthuman has been proposed as a response to “growing public awareness of fast-moving technological advances and also of contemporary political developments linked to the limitations of economic globalisation” (Braidotti, 2016, p. 13), requiring us to “think harder about the status of human subjectivity”, given the complexity of our times. Combined with the effects of the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19), the precarity of the planet, racist and post-truth rhetoric, are ever growing levels of exhaustion, depression and anxiety in a highly competitive and fast-paced world (Braidotti, 2019). In order to understand, let alone intervene, we need better conceptual maps to bridge the mind–body and nature-culture divides premised in current major models of human identity. Such rapid societal shifts clearly have direct impacts on counselling, clients, the complexity of the problems they bring and the processes which must be engaged in to engender more hopeful futures.

Posthuman identity, or subjectivity, involves a rethinking of fundamental questions about ontology, epistemology, ethics and politics. In this reconceptualising, identity is not an inherent characteristic of humans, nor is it solely discursively produced, rather it is conceptualised as an entanglement of matter and meaning, nature and culture, mind and body, all of which come into being through transversal, relational and affective processes. Such an intra-active ontology of identity, according to Barad (2007), is not a mere entanglement or relationship with multiple others, human and non-human, rather “[t]o be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair” (p. ix). Instead, identities, and agency, continually emerge in relation with multiple other material and discursive forces, times and spaces.

Braidotti (2019) termed posthuman subjectivity (identity) a collectively negotiated, practical project of a subject-in-process, who is embodied, embedded and embrained. She says “human subjectivity in this complex field of forces has to be re-defined as an expanded relational self”, describing this new ontology as “a re-grounding of subjects in the radical immanence of their embodied and embedded locations” (2016, p. 22). This complex vision encompasses a “special emphasis on the embedded and embodied, affective and relational structure of subjectivity” (p. 23). In this way, a becoming-counsellor identity is a relational, ethical, vital, moving embodiment of multiple affective-material-discursive forces, it is an enactment of “unfolding the self onto the world, while enfolding the world within” (Braidotti, 2016, p. 26). Identity does not begin and end at the individual, is not premised on a self-centred individualism, rather it is always emergent, multiple, fragmented and continually becoming in relation with a larger affective-material-discursive dynamic field. The becoming-counsellor is thus continually engaged in a double process, of “what we are ceasing to be, and what we are in the process of becoming” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 64, italics in original).

Ethics and social justice

A posthuman reconfiguring of identity is one which centres ethical, social, and political relations and justice. With a long history of attention to these matters, counsellors have a personal and professional responsibility to the promotion of a more just and humane world (Ratts & Pedersen, 2014). Barad (2007) speaks of this in terms of our response-ability, saying,

[t]here are no solutions; there is only the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly (p. x).

Such a response-ability, our ongoing ability to respond to injustice, is not something to be achieved once and for all, rather it entails continual “acknowledgement, recognition and loving attention” (Barad, 2007, p. x). It is this way of being responsive in and to the ordinary and everyday stories of living, in and to the relational and collective making of new worlds, to the “other” who is no longer separate from the self, which breathes life into the possibilities of living more justly, of flourishing and wellbeing for all. For Braidotti (2019), this is an affirmative ethics, which starts with acknowledgement of situated and partial perspectives. Thus, taking into account complexity and awareness of the differential impacts of power structures and systems such as patriarchy, colonialism, advanced capitalism, and racism upon different classes, categories and groups of humans and non-humans. As noted above, such considerations have been left out of many previous theories of counsellor identity formation.

Implications – a reconfiguring of counsellor-in-training identity formation

Working with this posthuman reconceptualisation of identity, the remainder of the paper re-presents research findings generated as part of the author’s PhD research (Barraclough, 2017). A shift to a posthumanist analytic focus enabled a move beyond the solely humanistic or discursive, to a mapping of multiple, entangled material, affective and discursive force relations enacting the agential possibilities for becoming-counsellor. I document how counsellor-in-training tears came to matter, in relation to the multiple forces enacting them (Barraclough, 2021). Such analysis shows not just the complex affective-material-discursive forces at work in the materialisation of tears, but through tears, the multiple forces at work also in the ongoing and iterative process of becoming-counsellor.

Method

Collective biography (Davies & Gannon, 2006) was used as a method of data generation for its capacity to generate an exploration of both individual, and collective, memories and experiences of encounters of significance to the eight participants, all current students in their final year on a Master of Counselling programme in New Zealand. Participants ranged in age from 22 years to 67 years, with an average age of 48 years. Seven of the eight participants identified as women, and one as male. One participant was New Zealand Māori (indigenous to New Zealand), one was South East Asian Chinese, one was of Pasifika ethnicity and five of the participants were of New Zealand European ethnicity. Participants took part in a total of eight three-hour workshops with the author, approximately monthly, over the period of one year. Ultimately, in this research, participants explored their own personal experiences of becoming counsellors, a process which the literature suggested was likely to be fraught with confusion, uncertainty, anxiety, self-doubt and stress.

A significant ethical consideration for the research was of the implication of my dual relationship with the student-participants. I had been a lecturer on the counselling programme for the year in which these students completed part I of the programme. In part II, and during the year I worked with them, all students-participants were undertaking a practicum, as the only remaining counselling paper. It was arranged that my counsellor education colleague had full responsibility for this paper, as such I was able to have no role in the teaching or assessment for the year of the students’ participation in my research. Although the dual nature of my relationships with these students perhaps had the potential to complicate the research, I believe such a relationship actually contributed to, and potentially enhanced, the possibilities for undertaking this kind of research. In addition, as Etherington (2007) suggests, by naming and acknowledging the participants’ power – “as well as, and alongside, my own – we [were …] able to engage in more equal negotiations concerning (their) involvement in my study” (p. 602). Pseudonyms are used for all participants to protect their identities.

Using the process of collective biography meant that participants were invited to feel and describe moments and critical incidents (Howard et al., 2006) from these experiences, as close as possible to the actual embodied affect they experienced at the time. In addition, through talking and creative art practices, participants mapped the traces of power and knowledge in embodied memories (Davies et al., 2002), and explored the ways in which discursive practices “shape selves, shape worlds, shape desire” (Davies & Dormer, 1997, p. 62). Drawing on both the data generated and the more recent writing on identity, in particular Barad’s theory of agential realism, data analysis entailed a diffractive process of thinking with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), a post-qualitative (St Pierre, 2019) analytic process through which knowledge is produced in between data and theory. Engaging in a diffractive, rather than reflexive, process of data analysis, invites a decentring of the individual subject of inquiry, and instead requires an attention to affective flows, all kinds of matter (human and non-human), discourse and the ways in which these entangle. Through this process, what came to matter, in all kinds of ways, was counsellor tears. In other work (Barraclough, 2021) I outline how tears came to be a particular object of analysis, highlighting the ways in which I was compelled to turn toward the study of counsellor-in-training tears in this research, at the exclusion of other possible objects of analysis. The following offers an example of what new knowing might be produced when tears are mapped in relation with posthuman theory, and in doing so how the process of becoming-counsellor is also reconfigured.

The affective-material-discursive phenomena of counselling practice

The analysis presented here speaks of the emergence of counsellor tears in response, not only, to clients within counselling sessions. Counselling as a material-discursive practice interacts in relation with multiple other forces in the production of counsellor tears. Barad (2007) draws on Foucault and Butler in their performative account of the discursive, both in the performative nature of discursive practices and in the rejection of discourse as a synonym for language, speech acts or conversations. “Discourse is not what is said; it is what constrains and enables what can be said. Discursive practices define what counts as meaningful statements” (Barad, 2007, p. 146, my emphasis). This is not meaning as a human-based notion, rather, in agential realism, “meaning is an ongoing performance of the world in its differential intelligibility” (p. 335), that is, discursive practices are material reconfigurings of the world through which boundaries are differentially enacted. Tears, in such a process oriented philosophy, are not fixed or static, but rather come to matter in relation with multiple other discursive and material forces in a dynamic, iterative process, and go on to matter in multiple and generative other ways in the ongoing, lively performance of the world.

Counselling, considered in these terms, becomes an ongoing reconfiguring through which various boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted. It is a material-discursive practice which both enables and constrains, includes and excludes, particular kinds of doings, actions and conversations. The intra-active force of the counselling space as a material-discursive practice becomes a “boundary making practice”; it provides the “material conditions of possibility and impossibility of mattering”, of what comes to matter, for counsellors and clients (Barad, 2007, p. 148, original italics). Possibilities for being and becoming, are enabled, constrained, and reconfigured in relation with the intra-active force of such a material-discursive space. There is no simple description of such practices which might be seen to constitute the material-discursive phenomena of counselling. The examples below highlight the matter (in both senses – material and meaning) of counsellor tears in the counselling room and some of these multiple forces at work in their materialisation, in particular professionalism, counselling theory, ethnicity and gender, forces which are often invisible but which nevertheless exert power. Participant words are re-presented in poetic form. I use the poem here as an analytic device (Barraclough, 2018), following Barad’s theory, as a material-discursive arrangement which is productive of giving meaning to certain concepts. The poem, as an analytic and performative device is a boundary-making practice, formative of matter and meaning (Barraclough, 2021). In this way, it is not created as a static and fixed representation of things in the world, but as an ongoing reconfiguring of meaning in the world.

“I wouldn’t hold myself back” – the material-discursive practice of professional tears

I feel like sometimes

when I’m about to have some tears

in my eyes

I just tell my client –

“I think I’m going to cry now”.

I grab a tissue,

dab my eyes

in front of them.

I have no hesitation in doing that,

because to me, that’s –

“I’m really listening to you”.

“I’m really resonating

with what you’re feeling”

so I don’t,

I wouldn’t,

hold myself back.

(Hannah, Poem One)

Hannah’s words in poem one depict the emergence of tears as felt in the body before they appear, suggesting that in some instances, there is a bodily material-discursive force which can act to allow or suppress them. Hannah says “when I’m about to have some tears in my eyes”. She continues with this, saying “I just tell my client – / ‘I think I’m going to cry now’”. This seems to align strongly with the person-centred practice of therapist genuineness and congruence, as facilitative of a professional counselling relationship. Congruence, as originally defined by Carl Rogers (2007), “means that within the relationship (the therapist) is freely and deeply himself, with his actual experience accurately represented by his awareness of himself. It is the opposite of presenting a façade” (p. 242). Thus, tears are enabled within the context of the counselling relationship, here due to their resonance with counselling practices of genuineness and congruence and not presenting a façade, i.e. holding back emotion which is strongly felt. Additionally, in this instance, the tears emerge in interaction with a discursive counselling practice which aligns tears with a deep listening and resonance with the feelings of the client. Such tears are consonant with a strong relational emphasis in counselling practice, aligning with another of Rogers’ core conditions for therapy, empathy.

Rogers writes that empathy, for a therapist, is about a sensing of “the client’s private world as if it were your own, but without ever losing the “as if” quality … To sense the client’s anger, fear, or confusion as if it were your own, yet without your own anger, fear, or confusion getting bound up in it” (2007, p. 243). However, he suggests that what is required of the therapist is not only a sensing, a feeling of resonance, but that the therapist communicates this empathy to the client. He says, “[w]hen the client’s world is this clear to the therapist, and he moves about in it freely, then he can both communicate his understanding of what is clearly known to the client” (p. 243). Hannah’s lack of hesitation in grabbing a tissue and dabbing her eyes, suggests just such a moving about in it freely.

Hannah’s practice of tears are constituted, in part, by person-centred or relational discursive counselling practices, in a way which facilitates and encourages tears. Hannah says “I wouldn’t hold myself back”. Tears, in this sense, enact a professional counselling material-discursive practice, a professional counsellor subjectivity, embodying a primary force of professional counselling – to listen, be genuine and communicate empathy. Although Hannah describes the tears as signifying a resonance with what the client is feeling, suggesting the tears hold something of her own experience meeting that of the client’s, primacy appears to be given to the tears as a professional, rather than personal enactment. That is, she is moved more in relation to what the client is saying, rather than overcome by the enlivening of something of her own body’s historicity. Such a pattern of tears as described here, despite her words “I wouldn’t hold myself back”, appear somewhat controlled, less messy, more minimal in their expression – she is able to tell her client the tears are coming, and “dab” at her eyes with the tissue – they are not sufficient tears to require “mopping up”. While still being genuine, such a pattern of tears maybe more easily embodies a professional (self-controlled) discursive practice. This, despite perhaps being always haunted by the personal.

Such material-discursive practices constituting the discipline of counselling can be seen then as a force acting to both enable and constrain the flow of counsellor tears. It seems inevitable that, at some point, counsellors will “feel” in relation to the feelings of their clients, and that this may emerge as a tearful display. I say inevitable given counselling’s invitation and legitimation of emotion, a counsellor’s imperative toward empathic sensing of the client’s world, or as Barad describes it with her notion of inseparability, of embodied alterity, a “having-the-other-in-one’s-skin” (Barad, 2007, p. 392). While all of these conditions act to enable and perhaps legitimate the possibility of counsellor “tears”, there are disciplining conditions which act to constrain, evident in codes of ethics which offer a clear directive that a counsellor does not become emotionally involved, or enter into their own perspectives and values (New Zealand Association of Counsellors Code of Ethics, 2016). Hannah appears to exemplify this “personal-professional” balance, of empathic sensing and personal constraint in her display of restrained tears. Such tears, as material-discursive practice, can be said to constitute her becoming counsellor subjectivity, not in a fixed sense, but rather as an ongoing reconfiguring. As Barad says “intra-actions iteratively reconfigure what is possible and what is impossible – possibilities do not sit still” (2007, p. 235).

“It’s a cultural thing”

It’s a cultural thing as well,

because with us

it’s okay.

It’s more like you say to that person –

“I’m hearing you”,

“I can relate

to what you’re saying”

so in a situation like that

I would cry, I mean,

I’d be in tears

(Kai, Poem two)

In talking of the emergence of tears in the counselling encounter, Kai, of Pacific Island ethnicity, says “it’s a cultural thing”. She speaks of the tears as embodying, similar to Hannah in poem one, a practice of empathy, of “hearing” and relating to the client’s words. However, she describes this as a “cultural thing”, whereas above I have suggested Hannah’s tears enacting a force of empathy as professionalism. Kai goes on to suggest, that, in a counselling setting with a Pasifika counsellor and client, if she sits without tears – being professional, her client “will not think I relate to her”.

I’ll have a problem

trying to control

my tears.

I know it depends

on the client I have

in front of me. My client –

it was really one of those

hard cases where

it was so emotional.

I think I was so caught up

with the emotions

and I think there was a shift

of me putting on a different hat –

I look at the girl,

more like my daughter.

I’m trying to process

what she’s talking about, but

at the same time,

trying to figure out my emotions here,

what to do

and trying to control, because

I know, by theory

you’re not supposed to,

I’m aware of, the culture –

this is a non-Pacific

so it’s not okay to have tears.

I was so uncomfortable,

(ii)

she was directly facing me –

I’m looking around for a tissue

and just pretending, you know,

but I do have tears,

just to hide the tears,

and I’m looking for tissues.

But if this is a setting –

a counsellor setting

with the Pacific, it’s okay.

she’s not a Pacific person but,

if this is a setting with a Pacific person

and I sit like this –

trying to be professional,

that person opposite me

will not think I relate to her.

It happened that the girl –

I found out that she’s Māori,

and I said to (my supervisor), “she’s Māori

and I think she was okay”

because I get some sort of good rapport

with the girl, so when she sees me

it’s okay.

and she was relaxing –

it was a moment where she was emotional

and I was as well

it was okay.

(iii)

And I think we have to go –

you know it depends on your client,

your relationship with your clients

and this is what I thought.

I kind of reflect on these things

about tears, emotions, because,

I think for us it’s different.

(Kai, Poem three)

We can see whilst the tears in both the words of Hannah and Kai appear to embody a practice of listening, hearing and relating, this is not the whole story. The forces of culture, professionalism, and emotion interact in different ways, to enact different possibilities for counsellor and client subjectivities. This becomes apparent where Kai says “it depends / on the client I have / in front of me”, “I’m aware of, the culture – / this is a non-Pacific / so it’s not okay to have tears”. In contrast to the “okay-ness” of her tears produced between counsellor and client both of Pacific Island ethnicity, and which then enact listening/hearing/relating, she talks of being “so uncomfortable”, “looking around for a tissue” and “just pretending” not to have tears, when the emergence of her tears interacts with a non-Pacific client. In this instance of her tears, they also interact with “theory”, with the gaze of her white, academic supervisor, and with “trying to be professional ” – all of which she reads as cautioning against crying, and with her mother subjectivity – “I look at the girl, / more like my daughter”, to produce tears which require “control” and hiding. Tears which become personal (triggered by her mother subjectivity) and non-professional (against theoretical, academic, and cultural (white, Western) conventions). At this point, her counsellor subjectivity becomes conflicted, she experiences these tears as performing an unacceptable counsellor subjectivity and seeks to “control” and “hide” them. And then things change again. The tears move in a different direction. Kai finds out her client is Māori, she recognises the rapport she already has with this client, that “she was relaxing”, and the tears become “okay ” – “a moment where she was emotional / and I was as well / it was okay”. Suddenly her counsellor subjectivity, as enacted through tears, becomes acceptable again, desirable even, when performed interactively with a Māori client, and with the flow of rapport.

Male tears as brave and strong

As a male counsellor

I see quite a few guys who –

well young men, who

are on the verge

of tears

or are in tears, because

their dad’s died

or something.

I cry along with them.

I try and tell them that

it’s brave and strong,

actually

to express your emotions,

and healthy.

(Basil, Poem four)

Turning to Basil’s words in poem four, the relation between tears/emotion and masculinity is brought to the foreground. Tears here interact with male bodies. Basil says, in working with young male clients “I cry along with them”. Here, the phenomena of his counsellor tears is interactively produced with a male subjectivity, with male client and counsellor subjectivities, with the discursive-materiality of young-male-client tears, with the affective-material-discursive space of the counselling room and its privileging of emotional lives. Multiple forces interact to enable and legitimate the flow of tears, while Basil’s tears can also be read as a fault line – an “opportunity to disrupt essentialism [that] comes from pointing out the contrast between the widespread belief that ‘real’ men are inexpressive and the coexisting numerous everyday life examples of ‘real’ men expressing many different types and intensities of emotion” (Shields, 2013, p. 430). Basil’s tears are enacted partly in a counter-cultural way, seemingly in resistance to the normativity of male tears as weakness.

Male counsellor tears are enacted as brave and strong, as a healthy emotional practice, cut apart from female tears as an emotionally weak, vulnerable, and unhealthy/unwell (neurotic) discursive practice. Male emotion/tears in this context, are made acceptable, legitimated, through normalised male discourses of “brave” and “strong”, embodied within a body marked as male. What seems to remain absent, a haunting, still, is tears as vulnerable, male as vulnerable, yet somehow still made acceptable. Tears, it seems, still enact a weak/strong binary equated with the female/male binary and to be made acceptable, so as not to be constituted as a failure, male tears must be constituted by discursive practices of male strength.

Conclusion and implications

A central aim of this article has been to explore what might be produced in thinking beyond the limits of humanist and constructionist conceptualisations of the lived experience of the emergent process of becoming counsellor. This body of literature holds significant limitations in light of contemporary theorisations of identity formation. Instead of identity as belonging to that rational, self-contained, individual, I have proposed counsellor identity formation as a contingent, ongoing, material-discursive, intra-active reconfiguring, through the mapping of some of the multiple forces entangled in the production of counsellor tears. The tear patterns outlined reinforce tears as an embodied relationality, here of culture, gender, professionalism, multiple subjectivities, times and spaces. It is only through this kind of mapping that we can begin to perceive the ways in which such forces, often invisible, move and flow and entangle in their intra-actions to produce lived experience for the becoming counsellor, and have particular, and ongoing, effects in counselling practice. That we can see experience and identity not as that of a self-contained, autonomous individual but that rather, “individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating”, not “once and for all” but iteratively, dynamically, in an ongoing reconfiguration (Barad, 2007, p. ix). Such a process oriented exploration tries not to reduce, but to complexify, “to become more and more adequate to the ongoing complexity of life” (Massumi, 2015). In this way, becoming-counsellor can be imagined to reach no end point, but rather is always under transformation in relation with all kinds of matter, discourses, other times, spaces and subjectivities.

The task of those engaged in such processes becomes not to seek finality and certainty, but rather to remain open. It is by placing our attention on the entangled events we are a part of, as counsellors, in processes of collaborative and collective experimentation, that inventive potentialities and transformative capacities to act open up. By attending to the material and the discursive, to meaning and matter, and to the multiplicities of which we are a part, new knowing can emerge. Similar to processes of counselling, this identity work demands commitment, presence and sustained practices of care and attention. Through attending to the matter and meaning of tears, multiple, and entangled, ways of being and becoming-counsellor emerged, in relation here with culture, gender, and counselling practices. As counsellors, through such a posthuman attention, we can pursue a shared aim of participating in, ethically and responsibly, the reconfiguring of the “material-social relations of the world” (Barad, 2007, p. 35), of unsettling and remaking boundaries and of opening up possibilities for multiple, different, ways of knowing, being and becoming-counsellor.

Declarations

Ethical approval for this study was obtained through the Human Ethics Committee of the author’s institution and written informed consent given by all research participants. No potential competing interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

Due to the nature of this research, participants of this study did not agree for their data to be shared publicly, so supporting data are not available.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shanee Barraclough

Dr Shanee Barraclough is Senior Lecturer and Programme Co-ordinator for the Master of Counselling programme at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. Her PhD explored identity formation with student counsellors and counsellor education pedagogies. Shanee’s work draws on a post-human and feminist new materialist theoretical orientation, in particular the work of Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway. She uses feminist, qualitative, arts-based and critical posthumanist research methodologies to explore the entangled relationships between material, affective and cultural realities and identity and agency. Prior to working at the University of Canterbury, she worked as a Psychologist and Counsellor in New Zealand and the United Kingdom, with women, children and families experiencing domestic violence, trauma, and the effects of the 2010–2012 Canterbury earthquake sequence.