It’s that time when you begin to see very faint signs of spring. The weather’s a little warmer, even if the rain continues. Under the big trees on Barclay Street, at the Heritage Square, white snowdrops are just pricking their way out of green buds. Now that my course has finished, and I’m hesitating about entering practice as a counsellor, I find myself living very much in the moment. I still structure my week so that I have blocked off research time, and time to prepare my guided autobiography group I facilitate on Friday nights via zoom, pulling together alumni who now live scattered across three continents. It’s good to have down time, too – to read, to meet friends, to go for long walks, snowshoeing, to the library or the gym, or to settle down to watch K-drama in the evenings. Above all, to spend time with my partner. Part of me still wants to move a little faster: somewhere, a friend who also grew up Catholic remarked to me, there’s that notion of service, of being useful. And there’s also a sense, having just turned 61, that I’ve perhaps arrived at this moment of serenity a little too soon. If I slow down now, will I ever quite start up again? 

Why I am I hesitant about making counselling a new career? Partly, it’s simply the luxury of the absence of need. I and my partner live simply, and after a lifetime spent in professional jobs, we have enough saved to no longer have to work so hard. I’ve many friends who are now going through different forms of retirement transition, and very few follow the conventional movement from full-time work to complete leisure. Most talk about how other activities very quickly fill up their lives. Many also feel uneasy about what seems to be a lack of productivity, and some say that they feel guilty, or simply tired. But others also talk about positive transitions. You slow down, and begin to live more in the moment. And often the affective elements of relationships deepen: you have more time to care and to manifest care. Paradoxically, then, rather than rushing into a professionalized career concerned with care, it seems to make sense to think about how to care more in the context of the everyday.

            My second reason is the one I tend to go to first when explaining to friends why I’m not starting a counselling practice or moving into formal employment. It’s simply that for the next few years I’ll be splitting my time between Vancouver and Singapore, spending much more time in Singapore. It’s difficult to be in counselling conversations with people continuously, to meet regularly, as you move across continents. Zoom solves a basic logistic problem, but not others. There are issues to do with undertaking supervision, with a safety plan if a client is in crisis, and even mundane issues such as liability insurance. But above all there’s something that I’ve become more sensitive to since I took an ethics class at the very beginning of my graduate studies: my own gut feeling that such work wouldn’t be quite right. I’m not quite sure how to articulate it, but when I serve as a counsellor, when I attempt to enter that empathic – or perhaps compassionate, since empathy’s a word with its own history – relationship with another person, I need a sense of being grounded in a shared social space. This problem isn’t insoluble, and indeed most ethical models would suggest that I take this feeling and explore it, use it as a prompt to think through these issues more rigorously. I haven’t done so.

            There’s a third reason, too: my own discomfort with many of the theoretical models used in psychotherapy, and their attendant theories of self. I’ve documented this previously in this blog in the years covering my studies. And of course, in practice, I have often found that an intervention or a particular method worked, and I’ve used it. Something in me, however, feels uncertain about this process: is it right to make use of something which you know works in the short term, for an individual, but which also, on a social level, you have serious doubts about? I can certainly find therapeutic modalities, such as narrative therapy, which are non-pathologizing, and much closer in philosophical foundation to the way in which I am in the world. And yet, I still have doubts about the increasing psychologization or psychiatrization of society, in which we almost seem to have a religion or arms race of the self, and in which counselling and in particular psychotherapy participate. And the growing professionalization of care and its elaborate hierarchy of carers, with new immigrant women in Canada and foreign domestic workers in Singapore often occupying the lowest rung. None of these questions are insurmountable, and indeed I worked through similar questions in my previous career as an academic. So perhaps it’s more like being on the edge of a swimming pool, and having to jump in, but also having the possibility to walk off somewhere else. It’s always possible to practice and have reflective learning emerge through practice; full learning does not, I know, simply come from contemplation.

What’s missing, then, and why am I hesitating? Perhaps above all because of the fact that I haven’t yet managed to find that community of practice. This may be partly age: you grow older, it becomes less easy to find people whose experiences are similar to yours, and there are few people my age entering into counselling as a profession. But I think it’s also life experience, my own complex life history lived in the in-between spaces of port cities: Newcastle, London, Singapore, Vancouver, and that growing experience of being out of space and out of time. In Singapore, I do have friends whose life experience has flowed along with mine for long enough for commonalities to form. Here, apart from my partner, not so much. And of course communities of practice don’t have to be of people who are the same as you: you learn most from those who have had different experiences. But here there’s always that Canadian niceness that somehow smothers engagement, that constant performance of affirmation that is both kind and empathic and stifling. Yes, I want to say. I hear you. I understand. And yet….