Counseling in a Complex World: Advancing Relational Well-Being

Abstract

In a globalized world, people's attempts at living a good life interfere with one another in complex ways. In particular, tension and conflict are inevitable. This confronts counselors/therapists with the ethical question of how to take into account (global) interdependence and relational complexity. In this article, I explore what moral visions—assumptions of what a person is and should be—help counselors shift their focus from individual to relational well-being. First, I examine the moral vision of narrative therapy, as an alternative to more traditional, individualistic moral visions. Then, I construct a moral vision of relational being, based on the relational being perspective of Kenneth Gergen. This vision represents an ethical stance that may, using work by philosopher Judith Butler, be understood as an ethic of recognition and nonviolence. Finally, implications of the moral vision of relational being for counseling/therapeutic practice are explored.

Notes

¹In this article I will also use the term “(psycho)therapy” instead of “counseling,” especially when referring to certain therapeutic approaches. I regard counseling and therapy as different labels that are used for a certain domain of approaches and practices instead of as separate domains. It depends largely on the context which label is used in a specific setting (McLeod, 2003).

²In narrative therapy, the idea that therapists should support the personal development and growth of people is rejected and considered to be contributing to the subjugation of persons to psychological expert discourses (Besley, 2002; Payne, 2006). If, however, we understand growth or self-development in terms of expanding one's narrative resources and one's options for acting in the world, these concepts seem to make sense as elements of narrative therapy's moral vision.

³The concepts of power and power relationships do not figure in the vocabulary of relational being. Probably, Gergen (2009) would rather speak in terms of “failure of coordination” than in terms of power.

⁴This points to the ethical importance of including the “nonnarratable” in our understanding of “repertoires of being.” In narrative and dialogical perspectives on the self, modes of being often are equated to stories or voices. What may be lost here is the unspeakable—modes of being that are not reducible to a story or a full-fledged voice (Adams, 2010).

⁵The narrative mode seems an important pathway to productive coordination as it also operates in the border area of familiarity–alterity. Narratives explain departures from the ordinary (Bruner, 1990). At the same time, “Stories of literary merit, to be sure, are about events in a 'real' world, but they render that world newly strange” (Bruner, 1986, p. 24).

⁶Here, practices of restorative justice spring to mind as an example of practices in which people actively engage with perspectives of others whose lives they have negatively affected (e.g. Lovell, Helfgott, & Lawrence, 2002).