counselors as social activists

COUNSELORSAS SOCIAL ACTIVISTS

Adriana Tanese NogueiraAtnhumanize.com

Issues of Mental Health Counseling 2013FAU

What Activism Is?

Politics? Social matters? How psychology is related to social matters?

Activism consists of efforts to promote, impede, or direct social, political, economic, or environmental change. Activism can take a wide range of forms from writing letters to newspapers or politicians, political campaigning, economic activism such as boycotts or preferentially patronizing businesses, rallies, street marches, strikes, sit-ins, and hunger strikes. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activism)

Acting On the World

Some activists try to persuade people to change their behavior directly, rather than to persuade governments to change or not to change laws.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activism)

In the political sciences, activism can also be synonym of militancy, particularly for a cause. Usually, it can be understood as militancy or continuous action towards a social or a political change. (http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ativismo)

Activism in Counseling

You can be an activist in you practice by two means:

1. Advocacy2. Theoretical and Clinical Approach to the client

Ex.: Psychologist for Social Justice

http://www.psysr.org/

Issues they care for:

Asylum Children at Risk Climate Change Conflict Resolution Disability Issues Disarmament Environment Global Violence Human Rights Humanitarian Aid Human Trafficking Inequality

Peace Education Peacebuilding Poverty Racial Inequities Reconciliation Restorative Circles Sexual Orientation Status of Women Terrorism Torture Trauma

American Counseling Association

Courtland C. Lee, Ed. (2007). Counseling for Social Justice. Second Edition, American Counseling Association.

Lee, Courtland C., Ed.; Walz, Garry R., Ed. (1998). Social Action: A Mandate for Counselors. American Counseling Association.

According to the ACA:

In the counseling context, social justice encompasses the professional, ethical, and moral responsibility that counselors have to address the significant social, cultural, and economic inequalities that may negatively affect the psychosocial development of various groups of people.

Responsibility

Social justice relates to counselors’ sense of social responsibility. It involves counselors taking stands on social issues and working to eradicate systems and ideologies that perpetuate discrimination and disregard human rights.

Advocate

Journal of the American Mental Health Counselors Association

http://www.amhca.org/news/advocate.aspx

Theoretical and Clinical Framework

What is mental health counseling?

Clinical mental health counseling is a distinct profession with national standards for education, training and clinical practice. Clinical mental health counselors are highly-skilled professionals who provide flexible, consumer-oriented therapy. They combine traditional psychotherapy with a practical, problem-solving approach that creates a dynamic and efficient path for change and problem resolution. (http://www.amhca.org/about/facts.aspx )

Counseling

Traditional psychotherapy+

Practical solving-problem approach

Practical Solving-Problem Approach

Traditional Behavioral Therapy Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Emotionally Focused Therapy …and many more

Common assumption:

The individual has a problem and goes to a therapist. They work follow this line:

They focus on the problem (each from a different perspective

Solve it And move on

What If the Problem Is

Complex? Interrelated? Multidimensional?

Fixing Vs Healing

Techniques are supposed to fix a problem, a defined, specific, objective problem.

You learn how to use the technique, to focus on the issue and to fix it. And move on.

Healing Vs Fixing

You see the whole and its implications,

How everything is connected and how we belong to a web of relations, none of us being an island.

Individual and Social

Psychological issues relating to social and cultural reality are present in the first conception of psychotherapy.

Freud. Civilization and Its Discontents1929 We all seek pleasure and avoid displeasure Reality doesn’t allow us to reach full

happiness Civilization is necessary to survival Civilization is the source of unhappiness

Individual Vs. Social

To Freud, the first psychotherapist in history (if we don’t count Socrates, IVbC), the source of pathology is society.

Civilization creates discontent and mental pathology within its members

through repression of instinct.

How could we then fix anyone who lives within society and cannot leave it?

Freud’s Cure

To solve the social malaise, Freud proposed the concept of SUBLIMATION.

Informal translation: To be able to keep living in the box you need outlets.

Ex. of outlets:Distraction, drugs, affairs, trips, art, parties, facebook, fights, gossips, soap operas, music, hyperactivity, etc.

Individual & Social

Jung disagrees with Freud. We don’t have only instincts in the unconscious, but a drive to blossom, to become ourselves. This drive pushes outwards and it’s called INDIVIDUATION.

“One cannot individuate without dealing with the world, that is, changing the world; as the world can only be changed by individuated people.”

Individuationis

…a process of psychological integration, having for its goal the development of the individual personality. In general, it is the process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated [from other human beings]; in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a being distinct from the general, collective psychology.

Blocked individuation = mental problems

Natural TendenciesWe are social beings (Aristotle) in relation to a world that we create and we are able to change it only when we fully express our own uniqueness. Then we make a real contribution.

Individuation--being a naturaltendency observable in nature andprominent in us, human beings--when blocked engenders pathology, that is, all kind of psychological malaise.

We Are the World

James HillmanWe've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy--And the World's Getting Worse. (1993).

To Think:…let’s consider the idea that psychology makes people mediocre and that the world is in extremis, that it is suffering from a acute disturb, maybe fatal, to the limits of extinction. (Hillman)In this case, I would say that what the world needs is an extreme intensity of thought and feeling, something radical and original, in order to overcome a crisis as intense as this one.

Mediocrity

Psychotherapy conceived as support and tolerance is not up to the challenge; on the contrary, it produces counterphobic inclinations to chaos, marginality, and extremes. Therapy as sedation: numbness, an-esthesia, in order to calm down, to relief from stress, to relax, in order to find acceptance, balance, support, empathy. The middle term position. Mediocrity.(Hillman)

What Psychotherapy Is For

…to me the task of psychotherapy is to open the mind, take care of it; no, not take care but encourage, even put fire to the rich and crazy mind, that wonderful bird-place (the image is Plato’s) of thoughts that flight unleashed… (Hillman)

Nothing of the psychic material that comes in therapy with the patient is mediocre, maybe just the first level that is peeled right away and easily…” (Hillman, p. 174)

Be the Change You Want to See

The Italian psychoanalyst, Silvia Montefoschi summarizes Jung’s idea of the therapist’s role.

The therapist must be aware of the contrast individual-collective, which belongs to each person’s internal dialectic. (Both tendencies being natural: the one to be like the others and the one to unique).

Health and Illness

To Jung, mental illness is the result of the blockage of the individuation process and healing is the recovering of the lost path, therefore the recovery of the meaning of our being in the world. (Montefoschi, p. 113)

Therapist’s Profile

The therapist succeeds in a treatment precisely up to the point he or she has arrived in their own moral development. (Jung, p. 83)

>> You don’t give (to a patient) more than what you are (have achieved in your own individuation process).

Who Is the Therapist?

The therapist is the one able to turn any relation into the place and the moment of that creative knowledge that transforms the world. (Montefoschi, p. 115)

As each individual is not an island, so is each therapeutic setting. The therapist being aware of the long term influence that he or she exercises on their patients will need to question themselves about their stand in the world, of whom both patient and therapist are representative.

Relation Vs Technique

Therefore, the one who wants to move in the field of psychotherapy “cannot hide themselves beyond techniques, but need to be completely themselves in the dialectical human exchange, that is, the relation with the Other.”(Montefoschi, 1985, p. 111)

So, what world do you want?

Each time you as a therapist are working with a

patient/client,you are co-creating the world.

Be aware of the world you make happen.

References

Courtland C. Lee, Ed. (2007). Counseling for Social Justice. Second Edition, American Counseling Association.

Freud, S. (1985). Il disagio della civiltà. Torino: Einaudi. Hillman. J. (1993) 100 anni di psicoterapia ed il mondo

va sempre peggio. Milano: Garzanti. Jung, C. G. (1981) I problemi della psicoterapia

moderna. Milano: Garzanti. Lee, Courtland C., Ed.; Walz, Garry R., Ed. (1998).

Social Action: A Mandate for Counselors. American Counseling Association.

Montefoschi, S. (1985). Jung, un pensiero in divenire. Milano: Garzanti.