The Connection Between Counseling and Self-Remembering

Although there's no obvious connection between counseling and self-remembering, in practice each facilitates the other. I'm talking here from the point of view of the counselor, not the client, although much that is said here also applies if a Work student enters into therapy.

Obviously, you have to be in the Work to understand the meaning of self-remembering, and to have practiced with an experienced and authorized Work teacher so that you recognize when it takes place.

And, equally obviously, you also have to be a trained and experienced counselor who's familiar with Freudian, Jungian and Rogerian therapy, at the very least, in order to see how counseling links with self-remembering. Here it's important to distinguish between the psychoanalytic, emotion-based counseling systems and the purely cognitive and behavioural therapies. The latter have no necessary connection to self-remembering, whereas the former certainly do.

Assuming both these requirements are met, and that the therapist is in the Work while also being an experienced, fully competent counselor, let's look at how the connection works.

First, we need to recall that there are many degrees of self-remembering, from the blissful "epiphany" states that are sometimes granted to us, and which could be compared to the Sufi and Buddhist concept of "enlightenment", to those more common moments when we are suddenly more than usually aware of ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, our surroundings, and the company we're with.

Sometimes such moments are granted early in our Work life, to give us the impetus to carry on. Sometimes they are the culmination of years of effort in our struggle against sleep. We don't know when they will come, and we can't control them, but we can work to increase the likelihood and the number of such experiences.

How can these states possibly be related to counseling?

A well-trained and experienced therapist or counselor will be used to monitoring her own reactions to whatever the client is presenting (I'm using the feminine pronoun to include both men and women counselors here, of course, and shall refer to the client as "he", also inclusively),

In observing the client, the therapist will be aware of his posture, his facial expressions, the words he uses and the feelings he is conveying - which may well be very different from, even at odds with, one another. She is actually observing all three centres in the client. And the expert therapist goes further: as well as observing the client, she also observes her own reactions to the client, also in all centres. This must be carried out simultaneously, as the reactions the client evokes may be quite different from the material which he intends to convey.

As an example, any experienced counselor will sometimes be aware of feeling fear or anger as a client speaks - and that these feelings have absolutely nothing to do with what the client is saying, or the client's posture. Observing her own reactions, the counselor needs to see whether these feelings are evoked by something within her own psychology, or whether they are arriving out of the blue, as it were.

A skilled counselor may find that a particular client reminds her of her own strict father, and this unconscious memory - evoked during the counseling process - is causing her to feel a counter-transference towards the client. If this happens, it's necessary for the counselor to detach from it - to disidentify with those I's the client is bringing out, in Work language - and return to the present moment.

On the other hand, if the therapist has checked her own thoughts and emotions and knows that the sudden feeling she is experiencing does not come from within her own psyche, it gives a valuable key to the client's true feelings. She is actually experiencing the client's own feelings, of which the client may be completely unaware. These feelings can then be verbalized, to give the client extra feedback, and can be very helpful indeed to the client's therapy.

Clearly, if a counselor has been in the Work for a number of years and is familiar with many of her own I's, she will find detachment easier and faster. This is where the experience of self-remembering, in one of its forms, will step in to help her understand what is happening.

And it can, of course, work the other way round. If someone is beginning to study herself in the Work, under a teacher, she may well find it an advantage to have taken counseling training so that she is used to acknowledging her own feelings and separating them from those of the client.

Anyone who chooses counseling as a career is obviously interested in her own psychological world and in the thoughts and feelings of other people. A thorough and rigorous training will help her to distinguish the two, and to see when feelings of counter-transference are occurring. In addition, she will have learned about transference - the feelings projected on to her by the client - and will able to pick up such feelings when they are taking place.

Of course, the client's feelings in therapy sessions may have nothing to do with either transference or counter-transference. In that case, they arise from the memories and associations taking place in the client during the present moment, the actual session. And these memories may be completely unconscious, so the therapist provides an invaluable service when she makes the client aware of what is actually happening.

We can now understand the complexity of these layers of emotion that may be revealed during therapy. Transference and counter-transference refer to the relationship between the counselor and the client, and the counselor's duty is to monitor and include these processes in the therapy, to work with the transference, as it's sometimes expressed. Beyond and distinct from these processes, however, there are also the feelings evoked in the counselor when the client accesses hidden memories and takes up unconscious attitudes to what is evoked by the session. Such feelings seemingly emerge from nowhere, and are very significant.

The skilled counselor must be aware of all these processes at once, calling for an enhanced state of consciousness. It can take many years of counseling experience before one is fully conscious of all that is taking place in a therapy session. Counseling skills can only be partially taught; the acquisition of advanced skills is down to the counselor's own ability to be honest about her own thoughts and feelings, and to be willing to face the pain of the client, even, at times, to the point of  experiencing this pain.

To be able to understand the multi-layered process of therapy therefore demands serious and consistent self-observation, although it is not called such in counseling training. And I think this fact accounts for the larger-than-normal numbers of counselors who become drawn to the Work.

Perhaps the counselor's previous professional training was a preparation for her studies in the Work. And vice-versa: if, like me, you become a therapist after many years' experience in the Work, the practice of self-observation, leading to self-remembering, makes for a much easier time during training, and a more enhanced awareness during actual therapy with a client.

And, at their highest potential, counseling and therapy may become an experience of self-remembering for both client and therapist, and a form of external considering on the part of the therapist.