The Growing Need for Community in Counselling (and everywhere else)

On Saturday I did something I don’t do nearly often enough: I walked to my local high street to run a few errands and sat in my local park on the way back. It’s a very ‘local’ high street (on the outskirts of Oxford) so beset by parking issues and banks being closed down, but it is staying alive the best it can.

A sense of community?

I was pleased to see that this high street, London Road in Headington, was hustling and bustling. It was market day and people were out enjoying the sunshine and many were running errands like I was. Market stall holders bantered and for a few minutes everyone seemed to know each other. I began to feel a bit funny. ‘Is this what community is like?’ I asked myself.

I can be forgiven for being confused or unfamiliar around the concept of community. Building and maintaining communities (apart from online ones) has become increasingly difficult over the years. COVID didn’t help, of course, and I don’t think that it is a reach to say that many people might feel less able to reach out to their community since COVID. It’s so easy to lose confidence in our social skills and when everyone else seems to be happy in their bubble (but are they?) it’s so much easier to leave them there.

We’ve turned some positive corners, as my experience of Headington High Streets suggests. Many of the markets and other local amenities that took a while to reopen after COVID have now done so and many of us have been offering face-to-face counselling again now for some time.

Gabor Mate’s view on community

However, as Gabor Mate states, the barriers to building community and connection started a long time ago, probably as long ago as mid-twentieth century:

‘As a speaker on stress and trauma I’m often asked what lessons we may derive from the COVID-19 pandemic. Chief among them, surely, is the indispensability of connection – a quality globalised materialism has drained from modern culture, long before the isolation imposed by the virus reminded us of life’s spiritual impoverishment without it. The health impacts are immeasurable.’

Living in isolated nuclear families isn’t what we were built for and creating the communities we want, and need becomes increasingly difficult in an age where both members of a couple need to work to stay afloat financially. The demands of work and the need to earn more money increase exponentially. Add this to the crumbling care system which means that many of us are caring for vulnerable relatives and the needs of offspring in a demanding post-COVID educational setting, we see that available time to build communities is limited or non-existent. The loss of community within and lack of accessibility of our smaller town centres that I alluded to at the beginning of the blog makes it even more difficult to connect as much as we would like.

Community for counsellors

 The sense of community for the counselling profession, not surprisingly, reflects what is happening in the wider world. Finding community as a counsellor, particularly when you are in private practice, has always been a challenge, but for many reasons it seems even more complicated now. This is a hard truth because community and connection in our profession is so important due to both the nature of, and the constraints of confidentiality on our work.

There are some wonderful online communities for the counselling profession, and I will make it clear that there is a place for online communities for us in general (I’m sure many would agree, and, in any case, there is no going back now!). As we know, social media is a double-edged sword: it brings productive, supportive communities, as well as comparison and abuse in equal measure.

I am a member of some of the online communities for counsellors and see a lot of very supportive, practical, and friendly interactions, and sometimes it is invaluable. What I question is how much actual connection we have with another living, breathing counsellor. I’m not convinced that posting and commenting have the same impact as a coffee face-to-face or even a Zoom call or (old school, I know) a telephone conversation.

There are people contributing some fantastic material and opportunities: there are podcasts and online workshops for instance, and I personally do find it very validating and / or helpful to listen to a podcast and find that another counsellor feels a similar way to me, or to hear ideas on how to attract clients, or suggestions for interventions in sessions. I think there are many who need to be congratulated for the material and solidarity that can be found online for counsellors and therapists. However, perhaps what we’re missing are things like being able to reflect how you feel after a difficult session or being able to share worries over finances, after all counsellors are experiencing the cost-of-living-crisis too.

Wounded healer tendencies

 Perhaps one of the difficulties that we have is that we believe (or society does) that as counsellors we should be able to cope with anything and everything, even on our own. This may even feed into the wounded healer patterns that many counsellors have. I, for one, have always found it difficult to truly belong. There are many reasons for this, and they include having needed to mask my true feelings and true self for so much of my life as well as having been conditioned to think that reaching out to others is a bad or dangerous thing.

 As counsellors or therapists, we’ve done a lot of work on ourselves, but old habits die hard, and it took me over two years after COVID hit (and I started to work from home) to realise how isolated I was. Fortunately for me, I was able to meet up with an old friend (Niamh, the co-founder of CTP!) who had just qualified as a counsellor. I am more active online than I was, and I also have a small in-person peer-supervision group. I am feeling less isolated, but in my experience, at least, there are no quick fixes, it takes a while to build meaningful community.

I’m hoping that setting up CTP will increase my own sense of belonging and community as well as that of our members. What we offer is different from other membership hubs because we offer affordable counselling for counsellors. Having mentioned earlier that the cost-of-living-crisis is happening to counsellors and therapists as well as everyone else, we’ve felt it has been essential to offer this service because, otherwise, who are those counsellors who can’t afford therapy talking to?

Hope for community building

I do have hope and I see it in the innovative membership groups that are available (Counsellors Side Hustle Hub on Facebook, Creative Counsellors Community and Good Enough Counsellors on Facebook to name but a few). I hope counsellors are building meaningful friendships and connections within these initiatives. I have hope that they are.

I want to believe that there are solutions for our community and connection gap in both the counselling profession and society as a whole. I’m sorry for the cliché but I can’t help thinking of the phrase: ‘be the change you would like to see in the world.’ That’s what I’m going to try and do.