I didn’t mean to become a counsellor

How I became a therapist, and the barriers that can come up in therapy training when you are different

I wrote this piece for the keynote speech at BACP’s AGM, November 2nd 2023. I was asked to talk about barriers I encountered training as an autistic counsellor, though I also speak more broadly about the experiences of trainees of other minority groups, and what this means for counselling more generally. I also connect these themes with the various concerns and criticisms raised over recent times around BACP’s own governance and consultation processes towards the end – see the BACP subheading.

I didn’t mean to become a counsellor.

If a few years ago someone had told me I’d be a counsellor now working in private practice, I’d have probably laughed in their face.

So for this talk I’m going to tell you the story of how I accidentally became a counsellor, what training was like for me, and what I take away from all of that.

Some Backstory

So first some backstory: I realised that I’m autistic in my late 20s, around the same time that I started realising I am queer, and eventually trans. Like many people who come to this realisation late, I’d always struggled with a feeling of being different, and with significant difficulties associated with that.

As soon as I was old enough to, I started running away – I’d start my life afresh in new countries, crash through jobs and relationships, have meltdowns and not understand what was happening to me, find the whole business of being a person, and being around other people, painfully difficult and confusing.

When I realised I was autistic, I finally had a language for starting to understand my experiences, which I’d previously thought of mostly as ways in which I was uniquely and shamefully getting it wrong, or failing at being a person. More important than that, I met a community of others with similar experiences to me, who I could connect with and resonate with, who could, through their differences, help me understand my own differences better, and help me start to shed the normative ideas around me that I’d internalised – that I was too weird, or getting it wrong, or too much, or not enough.

What realising I’m autistic also did for me is that I stopped running. If it was a difference that was innate to me, where would I run to? What was the point of trying to get away from myself? I was also so burnt out, and desperately wanted to settle in one place, finally see all the seasons in one landscape, and call it home. Of course some of you might know that one of the things that can happen when you stop running from your demons, is that they catch up with you. Along with making Edinburgh my home, being in a supportive and loving relationship with another autistic person, and learning more about myself, came the turmoil of that catching up.

Autistic people are disproportionately more likely to experience significant mental health difficulties, probably in large part due to the ongoing trauma of being autistic in a neurotypically-dominated world, the internalised invalidation that can come with growing up being told and feeling like we’re failing at being neurotypical – and potentially for many of us also the intergenerational trauma, because being autistic often runs in families, of generations of us experiencing these types of invalidation and oppression. When I stopped running, I experienced some really frightening mental health crises, but I also really struggled to find help. Mental health services turned me away, saying that they didn’t cater to autistic people, or were inaccessible, like requiring phone contact or requiring me to fill in assessment forms the ‘right’ way.

Around this time, along with a few other autistic folks, we’d also set up a local Autistic People’s Organisation, called AMASE (The Autistic Mutual Aid Society Edinburgh). Through AMASE, and through connecting with more and more autistic communities, I started hearing many more stories like mine: people being turned away by mental health services because they are autistic, of not being able to access services, or of the services or individuals that they do access not believing their degree of distress, or breakdowns in communication or understanding, sometimes causing massive harm.

When we approached GPs and mental health teams about this issue, they didn’t believe us. “That must be an unfortunate one-off issue,” they’d say. I wanted to find out if it was a series of horrible coincidences, or systemic, so with AMASE we did some community based research, which led to a report – the ‘Too Complicated to Treat’ report, which you can read on AMASE’s website. Our research found that there is a systemic problem – autistic people are routinely turned away from mental health services purely because we’re autistic, services are inaccessible, and even when we do manage to get some counselling, for example, problems arise with us not being understood, or taken seriously – multiple times respondents to our survey talked about being told that they are ‘too complicated to treat’.

This report got a fair bit of attention when it was published; it was featured in the Scotsman and discussed in the Scottish Parliament, though I don’t think nearly enough has changed. Perhaps it helped to start a conversation or push it along a little. What most interested me though, compiling the report while going through my own mental health crisis and therapy, was the accounts of what was happening in therapy – there seemed to be real disconnects in understanding and communication occurring repeatedly, to so many people.

To explore that further, I worked with a counsellor on a second piece of research and report – Autistic People’s Experiences of Talk Therapies (you can find that at autisticmentalhealth.uk, along with a bunch of other resources). Through that piece of research, we found both examples of really good practice, which by that point I was also lucky enough to have experienced, and from which we drew recommendations, and also far too many examples of therapists failing to connect with, understand, or adapt to the needs and ways of being of their autistic clients.

One of the common features of being autistic is being able to be very intensely focused when we get into something. For me that focus had become autism, mental health, and therapy, and I had another question: “What’s happening in counselling training, that’s leading to so many autistic people having such terrible experiences of therapy?”

The only way to find that out, I figured, was to go on some counselling training myself.

First Experiences of Training

So, I found a local certificate course, which at the time was also eligible for some Scottish student funding, and signed up. I wasn’t sure I’d stay for all four modules, or that the course wouldn’t be a nightmare for me… I definitely had some misgivings. But instead I was very lucky, the course transformed things for me in ways that I couldn’t have imagined, and while it also started to answer a bit of my question about what was going wrong, it also got a lot of things right, to the point that by the end of the first module I was pretty sure, to my surprise, that I wanted to do my diploma, and become a counsellor.

So what did that first training experience do for me that was so transformative?

Well, I came onto the course worried about a few things. There’s a persistent and very damaging myth that autistic people don’t have empathy or have impaired empathy, and I was worried that others on the course might hold that misconception towards me or treat me differently. I was worried that, while I’d gotten a lot more confident around others, it was almost exclusively with autistic people, and that I wouldn’t know how to be around non-autistic people. And while my own positive therapy experiences had helped me a lot in feeling more comfortable being myself, and reconnecting with my own more congruent and authentic ways of being without shame, I was worried that I wouldn’t be deemed okay around others – that I’d emote oddly or have an off-putting listening face or upset someone by responding weirdly.

I was also very aware of having very different motivations to many of my course mates, even after I started realising that I wanted to become a counsellor – others talked about wanting to help people, to be a sympathetic ear, to make changes in others’ lives. It’s not that I didn’t hope to be helpful – and I did want to try make positive change, especially for people in my communities, but besides wanting to find out what was going wrong in counselling training, and more generally what counselling training is all about, I had to admit that my overriding motivation was becoming a fascination with connections and relationships. I wanted to make connections with people, to experience and share in meaningful connections and relationships, through which we could both, maybe, change and understand ourselves and others better. Perhaps in part, meaningful connections have been such a rarity for me throughout my life, and something that happened passively, largely by luck, that I was amazed I could do things to make them happen – they seem so precious.

That that fascination had space to grow is a big part of why I felt my certificate training was so important. Rather than being the one awkward person trailing behind and getting all the social stuff wrong, I realised that we are all getting it wrong, all the time – that every time one doesn’t check in, assumes that the other person feels the same, jumps ahead to a conclusion, misses a subtle shift in the connection and communication, there is potential for disconnect, of the speaker feeling missed.

That the Core Conditions are not things we can just embody and sit in, but ideals to constantly work towards and also continually both succeed and fail at – and that all that empathy, prizing, congruence, must be received by the other person to mean anything at all within each moment of each relationship. All this checking, this sensitivity to subtle shifts, this lack of expectation around what the other person might feel – these all felt like things I used to see as a part of my deficit in being around other humans. I used to think I was just supposed to know, and get it right. Suddenly it was a good thing to check what an expression or turn of phrase is about, how something feels. It wasn’t bad to be sensitised to disconnect, incongruence, and changes in feeling, because they were important things to notice, even if I didn’t know what the changes necessarily meant; it wasn’t bad to be confused about humans and their feelings – because I could just ask, and often, people were relieved that someone finally asked!

On top of all this, I discovered that I could be myself around others, more than I thought I was safe to be before – and people even liked me! My tendency towards intense focus and lack of normative expectations seemed to be helpful when listening to others and not being surprised very easily (when everyone is baffling, no-one is baffling!); my weird reflective analogies were often received as evocative and helpful; I was used to crises so I could be pretty calm and solid around others’ big feelings. I never used to know what I was ‘supposed’ to do or feel when others were upset (or excited, or any big feeling really), but it turns out that there is too often a huge gulf between the things that we are socially expected to do, and feel, and what is actually wanted by each individual; what is helpful and connecting.

Halfway through my certificate course I found myself talking with strangers in cafes, listening to my friends, making conversation with shop assistants. Sometimes it was actually quite overwhelming – it was like I’d opened a floodgate, and didn’t always know at that point how to close it. At school and at university people sometimes confided in me in the spirit of ‘they don’t gossip and don’t understand any of this stuff anyway, so are safe to talk to’, but now I could also respond and invite more. It was a mindblowing amount of connection that I didn’t realise I could possibly access, and also sometimes I came home from getting a coffee in tears because the person working at the cafe wouldn’t stop telling me about their mother and I was so sensorily and emotionally overwhelmed I felt like I might burst.

Something Missing

Along with all of this exciting growth, I also had a growing sense of something that was missing, a slight unequal-ness in the training that was pointing towards my initial question of what might be going wrong. Amidst all this connection, I realised that I was finding it quite hard to be known and be seen.

The first inkling I had of this was actually on the first day of my certificate. We opened with an icebreaker activity: go around the circle and tell the story of your name to the group. So we moved around the group, “I’m Alan because my folks called me Alan,” “I’m Jenny because I didn’t like my given name Jennifer,” that kind of thing. I had a dilemma. I could say, “uh, I’m Sonny, that’s basically my name I guess,” or I could be more honest, and say, “I’m Sonny, it’s not my given name, but I chose it as part of my transition to have a name that feels more congruent with my gender identity”.

I had to decide whether I wanted to out myself as trans in the first few minutes of my course. Ultimately I did, because I didn’t want to start the course with holding back, but it felt vulnerable, and I sensed a tangible shift in the atmosphere of the room, a shift that I was familiar with when people out themselves as disabled or trans or queer in a normatively-dominated space. I was the only trans person in that space, and suddenly I was pointing big flashing billboard arrows at that fact.

Similarly later in the day we did a pair work exercise where we kind of did small talk – asking about each others’ weeks and day to day lives. At that point the biggest thing taking up my time was publicising the AMASE mental health report, and chairing AMASE. I was also regularly attending my local autism support service to meet with my support worker. In this small talk moment, I needed to decide either to be super vague about my life, or be really vulnerable – for many of us who are part of minority groups, sharing our day to day mundane lives can feel for those from more dominant groups like a big disclosure, and it’s treated as such.

“I’m autistic,” I would say, and people often wouldn’t know where to look, whether they should commiserate, apologise, call for assistance. I was fully aware that at the point I was starting my training, which was only a few years ago, other autistic people were being turned away from other training courses because it was believed that we couldn’t be therapists. Autistic people are being turned away from therapy because it’s still believed by too many that we can’t engage with therapy.

I’m deeply thankful that the combination of individuals in my certificate group, and my tutor, made for a really holding and warm experience for me on that course. My tutor modelled an unconditional warmth, celebration and love towards our diverse ways of being that I feel opened up something in me that had been dormant for many years – an ability to be open and generous with my love, appreciation, and curiosity towards other humans.

‘If only other people like me could have access to more spaces like this’, I thought. It felt like an antidote or challenge to the ‘social skills’ training often thrust at autistic people – ‘you must respond like this or emote like that, shake hands, make eye contact, smile…’. Instead there was no ‘must’ or ‘should’, if anything the folks who came onto the course believing that they were already good listeners or excellent empaths encountered more (mostly gentle) challenges to that self-perception, while I was still pleasantly surprised every time I made a meaningful connection – a different and I think mostly less difficult challenge to my self-concept.

The warmth and gentleness of that group, along with my own wide-eyed amazement at my newfound unexpected abilities, I think made the challenging parts of the course much easier for me, and perhaps for all of us. I think the group as a whole felt safe enough, by and large, to explore and delve quite deeply internally, which I now realise is sadly increasingly unusual in counselling training spaces. I reckon it also helped that it was not a diploma course, that mostly none of us were invested yet in appearing to be professional listeners, or passing a test for fitness to practise.

Nonetheless, it still felt jarring to do a day on gender and sexuality, for example, where the weight fell on the two openly queer members of our group to speak out more on diversity – it felt isolating and vulnerable; we felt set-apart. It reminded me of when I was in school, and every time China or Chinese was mentioned for any reason, everyone’s head in the class would swivel in my direction – except gender and sexuality applies to all of us, we are all impacted by cisnormativity, heteronormativity and amatonormativity, for example. I have to be vague on the details, but it will always stick with me how one cis, heterosexual person was brave enough to speak up after listening to some reflections on queerness, reflecting very honestly and vulnerably on their own relationship with gender, I think maybe for the first time, and connecting that with a deeply touching realisation of the context that gender nonconforming people must exist in.

I think this is what counselling training needs to do, constantly, and consistently, and it’s a big part of the answer to my question on what is going wrong. This is the kind of deep reflective work that training should be trying to make possible, as a priority. It breaks my heart that I can’t think of a single time on my diploma training when this happened – which is not to say that it didn’t happen at all, but I know that there was also far too much fear, resistance, and conditionality to provide a safe enough space for more of that kind of growth.

When those who are part of dominant groups aren’t challenged and encouraged to reflect, or don’t feel safe enough to and are able to retreat into silence, the labour often falls on those of us in minority groups to justify or explain our existence, or be erased – and that can be painful, thankless, othering, sometimes even traumatising work. The default assumptions become deeply and increasingly normative – whether that’s around neurodiversity, disability, gender, sexuality, race, class… No wonder counsellors are coming out of training courses unaware of neurodivergent ways of being, no wonder counsellors come out of training afraid of touching on gender identity, or shut-down on race.

Finding a Diploma

Leaving the warmth of my certificate, I already knew that it was a much less friendly world out there. I didn’t know a single queer or neurodivergent therapy trainee who hadn’t struggled significantly with their counselling training, too often to the point of breakdown and burnout, and sometimes dropping out. I knew that I needed to find a course that I could survive.

Finding a diploma course came with its own barriers. I needed to find a course that would not be weird about taking on an autistic person, one where the tutors might be accommodating enough, and ideally not openly transphobic. I wanted the course to be person centred but also understand the importance of learning about diversity and difference. I needed a course that I could afford, within a timeframe before my disability benefit might be arbitrarily cut off. I had to consider, if I had to challenge any discrimination (which is rife), whether that would be easier through a big academic institution or a small private provider. I had to think about whether I could handle the overwhelm of big tutorial groups, or risk the more intensely dangerous dynamics that can form in small ones, with a smaller chance of finding an ally, when they aren’t safely enough held. I needed to find a course that hopefully wasn’t going to burn me out.

I should say that I now hold a lot of affection towards many of the people I trained with, but ultimately, I believe that my course choice was the best of a bad bunch, and really, we all suffered. The good bits: I survived it. I learnt a lot about group processes and group dynamics. I didn’t completely fall apart (and I eventually managed to kick the smoking addiction I briefly took up as a result of my training). I found a wonderful supervisor and a fabulous therapist from both of whom I’ve learnt more about the person centred approach than I did in any part of my core training, and who helped me survive my course.

Far Choppier Waters

I guess you might be wondering: what was so bad? Counselling training is meant to be hard, it’s meant to challenge the innermost parts of us. Why am I going on about survival? Why am I so angry?

Despite my awareness of the likely challenges on diplomas, my certificate experience meant that I went in hopeful. I really wanted to bring the love, connection and holding I felt on my certificate to this new space. But all of the small moments of silence, of being set-apart, of the othering of minority experiences and domination of normative ones that I did experience on the certificate – they were magnified enormously on my diploma.

There can be such a pressure on trainees to appear open, non-judgemental, empathetic, be good listeners, in order to make a passing grade, that there can be very little space to explore those times when we aren’t those things, and explore our struggles and limitations. When I run neurodiversity training, attendees often ask me about the correct language to use with neurodivergent people, and while I’m happy to provide a glossary of terms and some guidance, I’m increasingly reluctant to take up space in my trainings to do this. I think it’s far more important to build genuine understanding through reading, listening, and internal work, after which using the right words, or respectful language, should naturally follow, rather than jumping to this almost performative competency.

So you know to use autistic person rather than person with autism – but if you only just learnt that from a glossary sheet, how do I know that you’re actually safe enough to connect with me?

None of this is to say, of course, that one shouldn’t work to be familiar and fluent in the respectful language. I believe that that is part of our work, but by no means all of it.

Like with many trainings, my diploma and certificate both contained modules on ‘working with difference’. Surely pretty much all of counselling is about working with experiences and feelings that feel different, non-normative, unexpected, to the individual. When difference was talked about in my training, it felt like this special weird thing, even though people from minority groups disproportionately deal with mental health difficulties. It also felt like there was a strong implication that the ‘difference’, the ‘other’ was something therapists worked with – like I was undercover, or on the wrong side of the room. People like me, these trainings tended to imply, are never the therapists, always the (often very challenging) clients.

I work a lot now with supporting other neurodivergent and queer counsellors, especially trainees, and I also connect a lot with this community socially. It is heartbreaking and makes me so angry how many of us have experienced the same things in training. How many have had to drop out or fight their institutions on discrimination. How many have been so traumatised or burnt out by their training experiences that they won’t consider further supervision training or similar sustained group work. This impacts our profession’s diversity.

At nearly my lowest point in my training, I called a crisis line for trans people. The person who picked up turned out to also be a trans counselling trainee. They’d had to change courses because of the discrimination and abuse they faced in their training. It felt for the duration of the call that we were holding onto each other on a life raft, tossed about on a rough, cold, and inhospitable ocean.

The Silence

Something that comes up a lot in training is the silence I touched on earlier. The fact that a disclosure or perspective that comes from a person with a minority experience is almost always a much more vulnerable and risky undertaking – the mundane facts about our lives are seen as A Big Deal, and the response is far too often a silence that I think comes from fear, confusion, uncertainty, the need to appear non-judgemental and say the right thing. For the speaker, it can be a painful and terrifying silence, not knowing what feelings and thoughts are being held back, while for other group members, it can be a further disincentive to share anything remotely different from their own experiences.

I was told on my course at one point, unchallenged by the tutor, that people were sick of hearing about my gender identity and autism, that I was ‘manipulating the class’ with those identities. I can’t help noticing that no one was told that folks were sick of hearing about their heterosexual marriage or manipulating others with their lack of disability.

People who are different challenge normative assumptions just by existing, and through existing we are labelled trouble makers – just look at the gay panic of the 80s, or the trans panic now. Repeatedly on my training, and I hear this experience echoed by many others on their trainings, I resolved to just be silent, hide, protect myself, just put my head down and get through the next year, the way others on my course feeling the pressure were doing through their silence. But it was always impossible. It can feel so wrong not to challenge injustice, or point out when others have been missed, when we know what that can be like, and how that can perpetuate the silence and fear in the group.

I think a lot of us in minority groups feel a great responsibility for showing up for our communities, others who are different, our found families, because we know how much misinformation, invalidation, and ignorance already hurts us, and it can feel so deeply wrong to stand aside and let a new generation of counsellors perpetuate damaging myths and stereotypes, or just fail to expand their imaginations enough to take into account diverse ways of being.

I believe that a lot of autistic people also hold great value in congruence. We struggle so much with our congruent ways of being being labelled as wrong, too much, not enough, and I think a lot of us challenge ourselves to be true to our feelings in counselling training either out of a sense of making sure we’re doing okay, or a desire to be true to ourselves, honest, and authentic – something that we know could be important modelling for future clients.

Also, incongruence is costly to us – society’s pressure on many of us to mask and pretend to be neurotypical is a massive source of the emotional distress many of us end up going to counselling for. For me, discovering the focus on congruence in the person centred approach felt like a moment of welcoming and validation – it’s okay to be the person I am.

But when we share our weird ways of being, our big feelings, our care for our clients or the ways in which the work can deeply change us, too often in training and in peer groups the reaction is silence and fear. Why would we care so deeply? Why do we insist on working within our communities (isn’t that going to cause a lot of boundary issues?)? Why are our feelings so big and why must we share them?

Space to be Different and Diverge

On my training, I’d gotten a first placement with a support service catering almost exclusively to autistic people. My tutor was concerned about the potential for over-identification. I don’t think any of my neurotypical or cis coursemates were asked about the possibility of them over-identifying with neurotypical or cis clients, and I think there’s an important point here: Over-identification is something to be aware of and alert to; our own similar experiences can create expectations or barriers that reduce the space for our clients’ exploration.

In my experience however, those of us who share minority identities and are part of minority groups are often, of course not always, already very aware that we are a diverse bunch. We see the context of our oppression and difference causing these similarities, rather than some mystical kismet or startling coincidence. When I meet a neurodivergent client who has experienced very similar workplace discrimination to me, for example, I might place that in the context of the workplace in our society often being a very neuro-normative space, which can be very difficult for neurodivergent people to access and navigate.

Sometimes, like all of us I think, I will come across a moment of shocking similarity – maybe something from my own experience that I’d never heard another person verbalise before. How wonderful to meet another person with this experience, and no longer be alone – but also how important it is to be able to let go of that similarity enough, so that there is space for difference. In autistic communities, we can often hold onto each other very very tightly when we meet others with similar experiences to our own for the first time, but inevitably it’s being able to still hold onto each other when we notice our differences that allows us to continue to grow, and form healthy and meaningful relationships and communities.

I find that it’s almost always when I fail to find the bigger context which shapes our similarity that I find it harder to make space for the differences that will ultimately start to pull that similarity apart, revealing that we are separate people. I think this happens a lot in counselling, because actually, we are a pretty weird bunch to have chosen such a, it must be said, really deeply weird profession, and there is a lot of unacknowledged or unrecognised neurodivergence and other types of difference within our ranks. Really, we have no business pretending to be ‘normal’!

When a counsellor identifies with the introversion of their client, for example, or their sensitivity to noise, but doesn’t realise the context of neuronormativity that impacts both of them in these experiences, they are more likely to minimise or change the experience to be closer to their own, or not fully be with their client in their own unique experience. We all have to learn about diversity, and intersectionality, we all have to do the reading and listening and then look deeply at our own contexts.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if training asked more questions like, “how have you been impacted by neuro-normativity?” “At what point did you realise you are the gender you are?” “What’s it like being not currently disabled?” Alongside representation of diverse experiences throughout the whole curriculum, led by tutors who aren’t overwhelmingly white, cis, straight, non-disabled… Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our profession could better reflect the demographics of our most needy and misunderstood clients.

What is Therapy Anyway?

Something I really wished my training and other trainings did more of was to challenge the norms that exist around counselling itself – what is a therapist like, what is a counselling room or a session like? On my training there was an ongoing sense that there are rules, boundaries, and ways of working that we all agree on – but I also know that to be patently untrue, and often really unhelpful for clients whose needs don’t match the therapy hour, or working indoors, or face to face, or talking about feelings.

There’s normativity in the language we use and expect from our clients, for example – which many autistic and otherwise different people can really struggle with – to be able to talk about our feelings rather than about, say, sensations or interests. To stay ‘on track’ rather than explore in different directions. To talk at all. Many autistic people I’ve worked with and know talk about having to do a lot of educating, and of having to translate and edit their way of communicating for their therapists to keep them connected, thus losing a lot of the content of what they were hoping to explore.

At one point in my training we had to present a hypothetical ethical dilemma to the group. I made up one about my partner unknowingly befriending a client in a shared autistic community space that we are all a part of, and explored how I might handle that. To a lot of my coursemates, this seemed to be a confusing scenario – “why is that likely?” “why would you share community spaces with your clients?”

For a lot of us in neurodivergent, disabled, and queer communities, the choice is to isolate ourselves from our communities, or figure out how to negotiate, co-exist and share these spaces with the people we work with. I have been in shared spaces by this point where clients have at times seen me exhausted, overwhelmed, socialising… It felt like a missed opportunity on my training to not explore the importance and dynamics of these small communities and how to navigate them, and in my experience this is another norm of therapy – to just avoid: go to a different group, gym, supermarket, that is only available as an option to those with the privilege to do so – but it’s treated as how we are all expected to work and be.

Similarly in my training I realised quite quickly that it often wasn’t safe to talk about my own experiences as a client, in part because I was one of those ‘difficult clients’ who had meltdowns, and needed longer sessions sometimes, and did therapy outdoors, and wrote emails to my therapist outside of sessions. My degree of need and attachment at times, my need for flexible or unusual ways of working and communicating, was seen as dangerous and suspect, like I was going to lead good therapists astray – I was reminded of the respondents to my research who talked about being told that they are too dependent, too much, not engaging properly, too complicated to treat.

Since when did the boundaries each of us as therapists need to think about, figure out, and hold for ourselves to keep our working relationships safe and helpful turn into punitive rules with which to shame clients who need something different from perhaps what we ourselves are able to offer, or a way to shame colleagues who are able to offer something more flexible, responsive, or different?

This is a Safe Space

We are repeatedly told, on training, and as clients in therapy, that ‘this is a safe space’, that ‘there are no wrong answers’, that ‘you can’t say the wrong thing’, and repeatedly we manage to step across that invisible line and figure out that there are ‘wrong things’, or that the space isn’t actually safe.

On my training, I shared at one point that the space didn’t feel safe enough. The response from the tutor was that others felt the space was safe. When I run neurodiversity training for employers and educators, I often describe neurodivergent and disabled people as being like the ‘canaries in the coalmine’ – when we are struggling to access a workplace, or be okay in a group or organisation, others are almost certainly also suffering silently.

I see normativity as being like a constraining box – the more different you are, the less easily you can fit in that box. For some existing within the box is just impossible, for others it’s incredibly painful and exhausting, for others it might be mildly unpleasant or inconvenient. For a likely small minority maybe it’s lovely.

When an autistic person points out that the light in your counselling room is strobing painfully or distractingly, and you turn it off, it’s possible that the change won’t just benefit your autistic clients, but you might also notice yourself letting go of a tension that had been barely perceptibly building.

Those of us who are different will feel the bumps and sharp edges that are actually hurting most of us, to some degree, and we should all care about that even if we don’t care about minority communities.

Preparing to be Transformed

Carl Rogers talked about therapists being changed by their clients, through the process of stepping as much as possible into another person’s frame of reference. What I experienced and still see now in training, instead, is a fear of these kinds of change – as if they inevitably imply too much identification, caring, connection. In training is when we should be starting the work of supporting trainees to becoming open to these potentially seismic shifts, to realising that this kind of deep internal change isn’t just survivable but deeply valuable, and I think vital to the work of being a therapist. How can we do this messy, weird, wobbly work when we are so invested and pressured before the training even begins in appearing professional, tidy, correct?

I like this meme that’s been doing the rounds about different types of education: the maths test where if you get a question wrong, you might lose a grade, and that’s the grade you get, versus say a welding apprenticeship where if you welded a joint wrong, you take it apart and do it again until you get it right, and your mistake, ideally, is embraced as part of the learning process. I think that therapy training needs to be more like the latter, but right now, I think training is looking more and more like the former.

So what do I think should change?

I think that we need to start by listening to those in minority communities who are saying that our trainings, the direction our profession as a whole is taking, doesn’t feel safe, or accessible. In training we need to stop working with difference as an other, and instead embrace the diversity trying desperately to grow within our profession.

We also need to be supporting trainees and each other to do the deep work of looking at the experiences of difference and normativity within ourselves, and understanding where we are in the broader context of populations with different experiences to our own.

We need to stop trying to appear ever more professional, and instead focus on being human, and real. The continuing moves towards professionalisation, grades, levels, only lead to greater normativity, a cookie cutter ‘good therapist’, which shuts out people who are different through economics, discrimination, and just the pressure of appearing a certain way. We will never have a diverse profession unless we can embrace our own diversity and weirdness, and allow our trainings and organisations to reflect that – and unless that happens, the neurodivergent and queer clients and trainees who are already suffering, will suffer even more.

As I come to the end of this talk, I’m aware of the big feelings I’ve shared, my divergent experiences, and I can feel my body anticipating that silence. That’s okay, this is a scary space, and there’s no Q&A anyway, but I do want to invite all of you to let some of these feelings and ideas in, let them touch and maybe even change the deeper parts of you, help to expand your thinking and sensitivities.

Recently I did a talk at an event where I talked a bit about my gender identity, and the experience of being misgendered (it’s they/them by the way). The after event feedback was overwhelmingly positive, but I was also misgendered in every single feedback comment. It’s moments like this that illustrate to me the way in which I think people who are different can often be treated as tokens at events like this, as consumable nuggets of inspiration – without allowing those experiences to move through and change you, how you work, speak, relate.

BACP

I’m not currently a member of BACP. I’m not a member because I don’t feel that it is currently an organisation that is safe enough for myself or the marginalised people I work with. I wrote this before the recent open letter to BACP signed by a number of high profile names in therapy that was released on Monday – and I encourage you to look it up if you’re unfamiliar. I feel that it should never take ‘big names’ for concerns to be listened to and taken seriously – just like with the NHS boards who didn’t listen to autistic folks’ concerns about systemic inequality in mental health care until it was covered in the papers.

I fear that through lack of proper consultation, moves towards greater standardisation and professionalisation, without taking into account structural inequalities, through the lack of coherent EDI policy, and concerning issues with leadership, the BACP is shutting out minority groups, and potentially making things much much worse for minority clients, as well as for psychotherapy more generally. A lot of people have already voiced their concerns – many with minority experiences such as my own – they are also canaries in the coalmine. I know that their concerns have not been adequately heard, which also is why the BACP is not at this point a safe enough organisation for me to feel heard or represented, as much as I might want it to be. I’m waiting for the BACP to prove to me that it can listen better, be different, and be safe enough

I’m glad to have the opportunity to do this talk, and I love the work I do, my clients, and the colleagues around me, but being asked to speak here isn’t close to enough to demonstrating that an organisation or a profession is doing the right things or enough things to embrace diversity. That takes work, and a massive shift in culture and approach. If there’s one thing I hope you take away from this talk, it’s that you might try to do more to support your minority colleagues, trainees, supervisees, and clients in their worries, sense of unsafety, and their concerns.

I hope you will listen, and speak up with them into the silence.

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