I often begin my posts with a reflection on the natural world. Even after three years, the passing of the seasons is still new to me: it’s something that I associate with childhood and young adulthood, but which faded from my life in Florida and in the south of Taiwan and then vanished during those twenty-five years in Singapore. This cycle always seems to return as a ready metaphor for other processes of change, whether social or personal. May and early June is the time of year when things seem to move most quickly. We are now, by most measures, in Summer. The trees are in full leaf, and those little fluffy goslings are now the size of chickens, and beginning to moult, as awkward as teenagers. When they were small, the adults would guard them, hissing at passing dogs, stretching out their necks and baring red tongues. Now the goslings have started hissing for themselves: at dogs, and at the heels of passers-by. The days are growing long now: it’s light at five in the morning, and the sun sets after nine at night. Walk in the woods and everything growing from the forest floor is still a fresh, unearthly green. The blossoms on the horse chestnuts have already fallen, and there are white flowers on the blackberries, but there isn’t yet even a hint of ripening, of that slow, inevitable progress towards Fall, the spiky bright green seed cases among the horse chestnut leaves, or the tiny green nubs that will swell into blackberries.

The third wave of the pandemic in Canada is now ebbing, and vaccinations are rising: news websites proudly announce that vaccination rates are moving to the front of an international pack.  In the three months before my practicum, we’ll likely be able to travel within the province for at least a couple of weeks. I’ve been taking a course in creative non-fiction at Simon Fraser University, to try to get wheels of the writing process turning again. Last calendar year I kept a diary every day, but I did little creative work, only producing a couple of invited pieces of microfiction. This was part of a conscious decision to take a few steps back, to think about writing as some form of practice of the self, to focus more on process than product. I still struggle to find a voice here, in Canada, and the process of having to revise and workshop my writing has been helpful in at least trying out different possibilities, to listen to myself, and be curious, even if I am unsure where they’ll lead. 

In my break from formal classes in counselling, I’ve also explored practice-based training. In the last month, I’ve been taking an externship in Emotionally Focused Therapy. Zoom produces strange possibilities: instead of doing the program locally, I would normally do, I’ve joined a class in San Francisco offered by SFCEFT. As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, I’ve been curious about EFT for some time. Two of the leading lights of the therapeutic approach, Les Greenberg and Sue Johnson, have close connections to British Columbia, and several of my classmates at UBC are enthusiastic about EFT. There’s much to admire about it: it is non-pathologizing, and it sees selfhood not as individualized but relational – we grow not in isolation, but through relationships with others. EFT aims for an egalitarian relationship between counsellor and the person in counselling, and many elements of it are compatible with feminist approaches. In more pragmatic terms, I think that my own experience of living almost all of my life in cultural contexts where emotion is heavily circumscribed means that I tend to find working with the raw emotions that emerge in sessions more challenging. It’s useful to learn an approach to counselling in which emotion is central, and in which emotion is understood holistically not simply as feelings but as a process that begins with unconscious reactions, and moves through sensations in the body that are rationalized, and then primes the subject for action.

EFT as popularized by Sue Johnson is primarily used in couples’ therapy. It draws on attachment theory, which suggests that the “style” of our relationship to significant others is often formed in childhood. Couples often find that they become stuck in such styles, and enter a cycle in which each partner’s style reinforces the other’s, and tension builds. In EFT terms, one partner is often the pursuer and the other the withdrawer. The pursuer feels unloved and unappreciated: they nag, pick fault, and become angry. The withdrawer, faced with this, withdrawers further, becoming colder and more remote. EFT begins with the reactive emotions that are on the surface: anger, or frustration with the other partner. Through entering the emotional experience more deeply, each partner comes to locate more fundamental emotions that drive their behaviour, and that are concerned with the self: feelings of loneliness, for example, or fear of rejection. They are encouraged to show vulnerability, and to express these emotions to each other, and then to begin to form and enact new ways of relating to each other. The process is, in theory, quite simple, and yet it needs skills in listening and in pacing that only emerge through long practice. The two facilitators of our training were two experienced and skilful therapists, and it was a joy to watch them: I particularly appreciated one of them pointing out, after playing a recording of a session, exactly what he hadn’t got right, and what he could, after twenty years of practice, have still improved.

What’s not to like? At the beginning of the first day of the workshop, the facilitator made remark to all of us. We’d get a gift, he said, a pair of lenses called attachment lenses through which to see the world. Later, we might decide to keep them, but for now we should commit to keeping them on. This was fair enough: there isn’t time in a workshop to engage in discussion of the epistemology or the historical context of EFT. Yet in the profession I am entering as a whole, there seems to be very little space for such discussion or critique: at times psychotherapists remind me of Christian denominations, or those tiny Marxist groups I encountered in student politics as an undergraduate, each aiming for a pure revelation or a pure revolutionary method. Once the framework is accepted, those who use it tend to defend it, without subjecting its assumptions to critique.

What questions would I like to ask? I’d like to begin with the origins of attachment theory, with the English psychiatrist John Bowlby and his neglected female co-researcher, another Canadian, gatecrashing history’s party, Mary Ainsworth. Ainsworth’s early work on attachment, which established the categories of secure and insecure attachment that are used for adults, involved work with infants and their caregiver, almost always the mother: it’s thus unclear how many of the assumptions about the importance of a single attachment figure can be transferred to social contexts in which children grow up in extended or blended families. The reference to couples’ therapy above raises another question. EFT’s keen to demonstrate that it is LGB-affirmative, and many demonstrations I’ve seen have involved gay or lesbian couples, although these couples are pretty homonormative. Dig a little deeper (I only went as far as the readings provided for the seminar) and you’ll find references to “promiscuous” people as insecurely attached, compared to those who commit to monogamy as showing ideal secure attachment. What about polyamory, open relationships, and other forms of sexual and romantic relationships that have existed historically in most societies? To be fair, our facilitator raised this problem, only to note that there’s currently “no data”: the best that could be said is “We’re working on it.” Finally, there’s the question of process: EFT stresses process above content. A couple may quarrel about who is doing the cleaning of an apartment they share, but, in EFT terms, it’s not really about the cleaning: the cleaning is a trigger that starts the cycle again. And yet in a deep way it may be about the cleaning: with a heterosexual couple, for example, this is bound up with normalized gender roles in society. EFT now very consciously stresses a commitment to diversity: one of our trainers, Sam Jinich, works in both English and Spanish and the second, Paul Guillory, has a forthcoming book on EFT and working with African American couples. We had some great discussions in the final day of the workshop about how culture is present, always, in session, and how to work with it, by counsellors who are far more reflective and skilful than I think I will ever be. And yet I do find that the focus on process often pulls us away from systemic content that’s important: we don’t talk as much as we should about power. 

As you can see, I have a lot to explore and learn, but I’m still searching for a particular space of learning beyond private conversations with classmates where we can think about both practice and the social, therapy and critique, in a larger picture. Or perhaps to balance the roles of student and anthropological observer. The news in the last two weeks in Canada has been dominated by the discovery of children’s bodies buried at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School on Tk’emlups te Secwépemc First Nation. It’s sobering to remember that the crimes the bodies bear witness too, and the residential school system in general, were for so long normalized and simply not seen as crimes by the majority of Canadian society. I’m still searching for a practice which isn’t normalizing, that doesn’t do harm: that provides a process that carries within it immanent critique. Note to self: I’ll keep you posted.