UNIVERSITY of NOR-I HEHN
BRITISH COLUMBIA
LIBRARY
Prince George, B.C.

ME, YOU, GOD, AND THE CLOCK:
MY EXPERIENCE IN SPIRITUAL SOCIAL WORK
AND COUNSELLING

by
Christopher M. Vogelsang

B.A., Carleton University, 2003
M.A., Carleton University, 2007

PRACTICUM REPORT SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF SOCIAL WORK

UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA
March, 2014

© Christopher M. Vogelsang

Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

ABSTRACT

This report describes the activities of one student completing the final practicum course
towards a Master's of Social Work from the University of Northern British Columbia. The
report takes an experiential hermeneutics approach to examine the student's process of
change from a content-focus to a process-focus in his interactions with clients. The
theoretical bases of social work and counselling in outreach care, spiritual care, and
counselling practice are discussed. The similarities and differences the author found between
these modes are discussed.

Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract
Table of Contents

1
11

...

Acknowledgement

lll

Chapter 1: Introduction

1

Chapter 2: Location Descriptions

14

Chapter 3: Work experience and Literature Review

17

3(a): Spiritual Health

17

3(b): Counselling

42

Chapter 4: Praxis

62

Chapter 5: Conclusions and Recommendations

81

References

85

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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

Acknowledgements
One of the things I have learned
is that it would be impossible to thank
all of those who have been a part of this
wonderful and rewarding practicum experience.
You know who you are, anyhow.
Thank-you.

"Anyone who ever had a heart,
wouldn't turn around and break it.
And anyone who ever played a part,
couldn't turn around and hate it. "
-Lou Reed (1942-2013)

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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

Chapter 1: Introduction

This paper describes my final course ofpracticum experience, being the final
requirement before completing a Master's of Social Work degree at the University of
Northern British Columbia. The practical course described here was my second during the
course of the degree. The first was situated at a Prince George program agency, where I
worked principally in the field of police public interaction. Before this, I served as Justice
Coordinator for a small reserve community in Northern BC. I mention this only because one
theme running through each of the three is my experience of uncertainty in each of these
roles. It is important to note this here because my experience and navigation of the
uncertainty encountered during this most recent practicum course has been its most valuable
aspect. While the learning experiences and practical exposures have been vast and rich,
through all of them there was a lack of definitive direction. It was the absence of this specific
direction which lay at the heart ofthis practicum's strong element of personal uncertainty,
and which, it seems likely now, was a designed component of the course.
To be clear, the forgoing isn't a complaint, accusation, or lament. On the contrary, and as
this report intends to describe, it was the immersion in and navigation of these places of
uncertainty where I learned that social work practice is steeped in uncertainty. Furthermore, it
has also been helpful in demonstrating that the greatest of uncertainty in social work is not
the situation, the client, or the task, but often comes from the social worker him- or herself.
This report is in many ways a recording of these uncertainties, and the ways in which I
undertook to navigate them. Beyond description, then, of the places, the tasks, or the people
with whom I worked, I am attempting here to describe professional and (related) personal

Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

uncertainty in social work practice. Inasmuch as this uncertainty was a necessary element of
the practicum course, this report must also attempt to describe the changes I undertook in
response to these professional and personal uncertainties as they appeared in my practical
work. The experiential learning, supervisory, and academic exposure elements ofthe
placement were all excellent and valuable in terms of responding to social work client issues.
However, these did not all directly engage with my personal uncertainties as they related to
the actual work of responding. I feel it is important to discuss this aspect, as once the student
social worker accepts that the working will involve the worker's personal uncertainties, it
becomes clearer that the goal of the practicum experience is to expose the student to them.
This forces the student to be immersed, and to find (in this case) his own way through them.
Within this, the student is provided with academic, supervisory, peer, and spiritual support,
but it is ultimately the student who must traverse the path. Again, this is quite appropriate, for
when working in a social work field, the worker may not have access to supervisory or
spiritual support. So, the question becomes one of how the student social worker will respond
to the professional uncertainties he or she will encounter in the future.
It is impossible to predict the future, and so we must try to draw clues from what has

occurred before. In order to glean anything from the past, it is necessary to, first, find some
lens, some perspective, some internally uniform context from which to draw individual bits
of information together into some whole. However, because the organizing principles we use
will go a long way towards determining what conclusions we make, it is necessary to discuss
the method of organization.
Who was the person who wrote the proposal? What did he think about social work
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

practice? What did he think that social work would require ofhim? Answers to these
questions, compared to their present-tense correlates, can provide some clue as to how the
student has changed over the course of the practicum. However, while this method of
examination holds rich data, and carries with it an air of test-retest respectability, it is only
capable of responding in part. That is, in the same way that the proposal can only describe
this student as he was, this report can only describe this student as he is now, and cannot
actually speak to who he will be in the future.
Having said this, and recalling that what has gone before is our only real information
regarding what might happen, it is possible to track the changes as they occurred as the
learner was actually undergoing the practicum experiences themselves. Analysis of the
changes in how the student perceived and responded-to social work problems, and perceived
and responded to his own personal responses to working with those problems, can provide at
least a line of inference by which patterns of future development may unfold.
Once a method of analysis has been determined, it still remains to decide what it is that
will be analyzed. The obstacle here, I have found, isn't philosophical as much as it is
mechanical. Very often, and like my first practicum placement upon entering the social work
program, a placement is spent in one place, doing one general form of work. Of course,
within each of these general forms there are numerous individual tasks, all drawing from
different social work skills. However, each placement location has an outlook, range of
responsibilities, methods, and goals underlying the work done there. It is this outlook which
provides the grounding for the practicum student to integrate into the role, and the
professional responsibilities within the placement location. Furthermore, during times of
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

professional uncertainty, the practicum student can, as a first step, consider the agency goals
as a grounding for examination of how to proceed. Another, perhaps more subtle, benefit to
this grounding is that in times of personal uncertainty or conflict around how to do the work,
the student can reflect on what he understands about how the agency views its goals and its
means to achieve them. This provides the student some grounding from which to approach
how to resolve the uncertainty.
Because of the nature of this placement, this student was exposed to numerous agency
environments, each with differing procedures, areas of social work focus, and underlying
agency goals. While there was a far greater breadth of exposure for me, and thus a richer
experience overall, these mechanical realities did make it more difficult, at times, to find a
true sense of how I was to be a social worker in the immediate moment.
It was these aspects of my practicum experience which provided the most significant

learning and growth opportunities, as it was these aspects which forced me to move ahead
through uncertainty into actual interface with actual clients experiencing actual social work
problems. From this experience, I have begun to realize that much of social work practice
occurs in times of personal or professional uncertainty.
Thus, I had thought, I would be describing differences between "then" and "now" in
terms of where I thought I was, where I thought I was heading, and what I thought I knew
about the specific tasks and environments I had encountered up to that point. I had thought I
would be describing the process of change. I had thought I would go out into the community,
and everything I had learned would come together with a clearly perceived correlate in the
world.
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

This isn't exactly what happened. In many ways, not even close. This is by no means a
failure, but evidence of something deeper and more expansive. I realize now that the very
conceptual root of this idea was an attempt to wrest certainty out of the very uncertainty of
the practicum to come. I had perceived my location as complete, and I had expected to chart
changes in that understanding by finding differences in where I thought I was, then and now.
While a test-retest lens makes this comparison theoretically possible, it is ultimately an
exercise in guessing at a process through an examination of content. In the same way, I had
conceived of my journey through the practicum as something which would steadily unfold in
front of me. While this was a nice an idea, it presumes that the horizon will always be
defined, and that the distance will always be the same. The fact that it is not was the first of
my lessons.
So, how am I to document my experiences in a practicum, as the subject of the
examination is the person doing the examining, and as that subject exists in a fluid
environment? How can I connect the person who began, who no longer exists, with the
person who's writing this report, who will tum and go and be a professional?
In reviewing a journal entry of a conversation I had had with one of my field supervisors,
I was reminded of her mention of her background in education, and the stress put in the move
from "content oriented thinking" to "process-oriented thinking" in that field. It was at this
moment that the difficulties I had been having with examining the practicum experience for
the purposes ofthe report were a function of my examining the wrong things, in the wrong
ways. What I saw was that my attempts to feel grounded were, at heart, an attempt to feel
competent. Likewise, I had defined knowledge as "things I can do", and thus constructed my
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

path in terms of capabilities and circumstances I knew how to work within.
In each case, I had been looking for content, when content itself isn't enough to make

predictions into the future. Content describes only what has been, and is very much locked
into the environment wherein it occurs. So, while I had moved beyond the problems of
providing "before and after" snapshots to demonstrate professional readiness, I had only
replaced these with a set of very short video clips, without enough information about the
connections between the clips for an observer to draw any conclusions about the whole
senes.
Content seen in these terms provides only "was then" and "is now". I was trying to make
statements about what "will be" on the basis of conclusions I had contrived to control, I
suppose, from the very beginning.
The discussion of content and process made me rethink about how I was defining and
searching for these ephemeral things, and also forced me to confront that I was trying to
control the definitions to lessen my own anxieties around my poorly understood environment.
However, it also showed that the discussion of content and process can still be used to
accurately assess the success of the practicum. If the content of the practicum is seen as the
move from "content-orientation" to "process-orientation" within my thinking about the
lessons and competencies supposed to be acquired during a practicum field placement, a
deeper level of analysis is achieved by giving a description of the actor, not only the actions.
Again, it occurs to me that this insight was expected to occur by my supervisors.
Presumably, they knew I needed to see for myself that uncertainty and the necessity of
response accompany each other all of the time in social work practice. I needed to move
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

beyond the anxious response to uncertainty, and the frantic efforts to find grounding in
academic knowledge. I needed to be placed in the middle of undefined circumstances, and
made to respond in the moment.
These moments, then, become the data in an analysis of the successful or an unsuccessful
practicum. Way beyond even true belief in competence, or the means to achieve it, is where a
person stops being a "social worker" and begins to become a "person being a social worker",
and this trajectory is the only real clue available as to what kind of social worker a student
may become in the future.
What becomes relevant, from this perspective, is how this student responded to these
times of uncertainty and anxiety regarding how to proceed, and how these response patterns
changed over the course of the practicum. In short, what is intended here is to illuminate
instances in the practicum where I was uncertain, but had to provide a professional response
to a real client, having an actual problem in "real life".
At the start, I responded to these issues through a lens of anxiety, flailing around in
academics and "Counselling and Therapy in Video" to find a clue about how to proceed,
what to say, what to do. Put another way, I was asking myself what content to provide.
Academic understanding was insufficient. Still, I sit in a room with clients and they have
problems and they need help from me. Now what?
This report intends to describe how the uncertainty was encountered, it is the second
level of analysis which can perhaps draw some (faint) conclusions around projections from
the present into the future. If it is the goal of practical education to prepare students for future
professional work, then it may well be that this last element of analysis is the only one of any
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

real significance. In essence, the act of proceeding in the midst of uncertainty is seen here as
the content itself. What becomes significant, then, is the process of proceeding and the
foundation on which it is based.
The practicum described herein was the third practicum which had been developed. An
accident, and then a union problem, had played roles in my having yet to formalize a
practicum, more than a few weeks into my practicum course. Of course, accidents do happen,
and unions have to follow their procedures. While I rationally understood these things, I still
remained without a practicum placement. I felt as though time was 'ticking away', and I felt
tension and anxiety which made the continued search for a practicum more difficult. I was
beginning to feel desperate. I had happened to become acquainted with Lauren Aldred
through a mutual friend. I had met Lauren briefly the year before, where I learned she was
Hospital Chaplain at University Hospital of Northern British Columbia (UHNBC). What I
remember most of that first meeting is a comment she made around the distinction between
auditory hallucinations and the genuine voice of God. Lauren stated her perspective, that
"God will always give you a choice". To me, this represented (and still does) a functional
approach to a very difficult practical issue. If, in practice, a social worker is presented with a
client who believes he or she is hearing the voice of God, what do you do? Lauren' s
comments remain with me today because they illustrate that the social worker can never
know for certain that the client isn't hearing the voice of God. Furthermore, the outlook that
God provides choice incorporates client perspective, and gives a chance for client
connection, perhaps around a discussion of choices and their basis.
At our second meeting, my difficulties with a practicum placement came up in
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

conversation. Lauren, out of goodness, and a desire for me to have a rewarding student
experience, began to develop an idea about incorporating a focus on spirituality within my
desired practicum work in counselling and trauma. I had developed a spiritual side, but really
wasn't looking at my life and my future practice as a social worker through that lens. I had
only rarely felt I had the luxury of spiritual reflection, and I was uncertain as to what spiritual
reflection was in the first place.
Indeed, I had blinders on at that time regarding my objectives around my practicum. I
think now that I was so intent on a counselling practicum that I had failed to look outside the
very obvious of the definitions of what 'counselling' was. When I considered doing practicum
in a hospital chaplaincy setting, I was unsettled at first because I was striving for an
opportunity to build on what I'd learned, and I felt unprepared for such a placement. I
recognized from my previous professional experience that spirituality is an important part of
the whole person, and during my MSW studies I saw that spirituality was an important part
of service delivery. However, it wasn't until I considered the possibility of working in a
"spiritual" setting that I began to more deeply consider my own, and how that spiritual
grounding might impact my work in this setting and beyond. How would I remain true to the
spiritual aspects of my work, when my understanding of my own spirituality and the spiritual
aspects of counselling and social work was so incomplete?
First, I felt I needed a deeper grounding in spirituality in order to understand my own,
and in order to understand how my own impacts my philosophical approach to social work
and the work that I do.
In addition to an untutored view of what spirituality was, I was uncertain as to how to
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

apply spirituality in the context of social work service. I was feeling tremendous pressure to
work from a basis of understanding in an environment where I understood little. At the same
time, I was in a practicum placement, I was working, and I was being evaluated. I had no
choice but to move forward, allowing my understanding to develop at the same time as my
approach. What this meant was that my understanding of spirituality-based social work
practice developed apace with my understanding of what spirituality is more generally, and
to me personally. As this development occurred, I moved from a content-focus to a processfocus in my spiritual social work work. Much of this movement from content to process is
based on academic exposure to spiritual thought, but more importantly (for the purposes of
the present report and my future development as a social worker) it is based on my
reflections of myself as a spiritual being, and how this shows-up in the work I have done,
what I have thought and felt about this work, and the directions it suggests for the future.
How is this academically relevant? In the experiential perception theory of Epstein
(1973), perception of the world is the result of a constantly updated hermeneutic cycle of
examination, where experience informs perception, which, in tum, informs experience.
"When applied to human understanding in general, the hermeneutic
circle means that we do not simply acquire knowledge, but rather that
knowledge is always a process oflooking at concrete details in light of
larger ideas, and then recontextualizing those larger ideas based on an
understanding of those details. In other words, knowledge is never
complete: It is a constant process of reinterpretation" (Hansen, 2011 ,
p. 44).
What we respond to in the world, then, is not a perception of something we encounter
outside of ourselves, but the meaning we ascribe to that thing on the basis of our past
experience. Therefore, my initial foray into including spiritual concerns in social work
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

practice was necessarily immature: I was looking at "spirituality" as meaning, as a discreet
concept. I thought I might come to an understanding of "spirituality" and find connections
between "spirituality" and "social work". However, during the practicum experience itself, it
became clear that this method was missing an important step. This step related to the element
of myself as a "spiritual" practitioner in the world of social work concerns. That is, while I
was attempting this integration, I was not considering the role of the social worker in that
integration. I was looking to the two areas as content, hoping to combine them into 'greater'
content. What I had not considered is the process of that integration, and how that process
influences the content created between spirituality and social work practice. This process of
integration, for Chan, Chan, and Ng (2008), began with development within an environment
where mind, body, and spirit unity has a long cultural precedent. These adults developed into
adults (and into social workers) in an environment where spiritual concerns and realities are
far more deeply imbued in daily life (p. 36).
By contrast, I am a western-raised person, who saw spiritual concerns as something more
disconnected from his life. From my preparatory work for this course:
"I believe in the historical Jesus. I am not convinced that Jesus was
both fully God and fully human. I accept this possibility .. .! do believe
that Jesus, like Mohammad (SAW) ascended directly to heaven. I
believe that God exists, but oscillate between God as an intentional
force, and God as the sum total of the physical laws of the universe,
and God as some combination ofthe two" (Vogelsang, 2012, p. 8).
I look back on this statement now with a sense of satisfaction. This satisfaction doesn't
relate so much to what I wrote, but for how the ideas underlying what I wrote have changed.
It is this change that lay at the heart of my learning in this practicum, and which provides
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

what indication is possible regarding my development as a social worker in the future.
Therefore, the responses to changes in the practicum environment, brought about by changes
in tasks, in academic exposures, or in my perception of my uncertainties about this work
reflect changes in me as a spiritual being.
These changes were the result of reflection, study, and experience occurring over time.
As such, they are the result of a number of disparate influences combining, decoupling, and
interacting with the "I" experiencing itself as Christopher Vogelsang. These interactions
change that "I" as it moves through time. Most usually, these sorts of interactions are small
scale, in that new information is added to a broad base of contiguous information. So, the
meaning of a formal academic paper can be traced smoothly backwards to the ideas
preceding it.
The present work, by contrast, was the result of a broad set of influences coming from, it
seemed sometimes, all directions at once. I was in a position of having to incorporate these
far-flung influences in "real time", while actually within the practicum experience. So, while
the descriptions of experience flow more-or-less chronologically, my coming to understand
the meaning of those experiences wasn't chronological at all. Rather, ideas seemed to form
constellations, and constellations seemed to form connections to each other, and these
connections built what I came to perceive as understanding of the role of the worker, the
person being the worker, and the role spirituality can play in social work delivery of services.
Because of this, it is necessary that this report be written so as to combine the
discussions of the literature review and the work experience in order to more accurately
reflect this author's journey through the practicum course. The author understands that this is
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

not the most usual manner in which a practicum report is constructed and written. However,
the more usual manner, with the literature review and work experience sections separated,
would not be able to describe this author's experience in contending with all of the
simultaneous influences comprising the work and the learning of the practicum, and would
not be able to describe how the author came to ascribe the meanings those influences
combined to create.
It is in these terms above that a practicum site description is most relevant. Of course,

one can find geographic coordinates, read statements of mission, or know the colour of the
walls. This does not describe the person doing the work within those walls, advancing the
stated mission, responding to the dichotomies between what he feels he is being asked to do,
and the uncertainty he feels around how to do it. It is these processes of finding, advancing,
and responding to social work (and social worker) issues within the placements which
describe the development of the learner in those placements.

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Chapter 2: Location Descriptions.

At an 11 October, 2012 meeting between Brent Goerz, Lauren, and I, the general
structure of the practicum experience was discussed. In physical terms, my practicum
placement occurred primarily in two places. First, I spent mid-October to early-February at
the UHNBC Spiritual Health department. This department consists of Lauren as Hospital
Chaplain, and Sister Maria. In addition, Lauren takes primary responsibility to organize and
administer a large body of volunteers, including a full 'Junior Volunteer' program of High
School students. Lauren's work relates significantly to experiences of grief and ofloss for
patients or their families, and is also available for members of the hospital staff. Lauren also
runs services for patients and staff from the Chapel located in the UHNBC grounds. Lauren
sits on the hospital's ethics board, and attends ethics consults when hospital staff face
questions of medical ethics.
Second, from early-January until late-June was spent at UNBC's Downtown Community
Care Centre ("CCC") under Brent Goerz, MSW. Brent is a social worker on UHNBC's staff,
who operates under contract with the CCC. This was a more structured and formal
counselling environment, operating very much like a storefront services agency, where
services are delivered at low or no cost to clients. The CCC is staffed by Master's level
counselling students in Education and Social Work, who are supervised and mentored by
UNBC teaching staff and community professionals. My principal supervisor at this site was
Brent, but I also benefited from peer supervision, clinical supervision, and direct supervision
from agency supervisors.
As can be noticed, there was some overlap between my placement at the Spiritual Health
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

department, and that at the CCC. For the earliest part of2013, I was effectively located in
both departments, as I was still seeing clients from the hospital environment.
My role within the Spiritual Health department was not limited to work at the hospital
location. In addition to spending some days at the hospital, I also attended a "Coffee Hour"
run jointly between the Spiritual Health department and St. Michael's and All Angels
Anglican Church ("St. Mike's") at 5th and Victoria Streets in Prince George. The purposes of
this section of my placement were twofold. The Church operates a lunch-bag program
designed to aid Prince George community members lacking the funds for adequate nutrition,
UHNBC's Spiritual Health department funds the expenses associated with coffee, and
volunteers (or practicum students) work to set-up the coffee urn, tables, and chairs. The
volunteer sits with those who choose to stay for coffee- people can just pick up a bag and
leave if they want- for company or conversation. To be clear, these were not counselling
sessions, as that isn't the purpose of the program, and as confidentiality cannot be assured.
The goal was basic human connection for a population that is often marginalized both outside
in the community and within themselves (Pope & Arthur, 2009, pp. 56, 57). I continued this
work until late-May.
I had been resolute throughout that I was most interested in practical counselling
experience. This was incorporated into the practicum structure such that my practice areas
within UHNBC's Spiritual Health department would focus on relationship and joining skills,
and something Lauren kept referring to as "presence". From my journal entry of the meeting:

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"Lauren keeps talking about being 'present' with clients; how
important presence is and how it can be harder in a hospital. I can see
about pain, and I can see about dying. Do you have to be present
then? What do you say for pain?"
It was with these questions that my learning began.

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Chapter 3: Work Experience and Literature Review
3(a): Spiritual Health

The start of my work with Spiritual Health was a time of dislocation for me. I was
approaching this form of social work as, I suppose, I had approached the whole of the MSW
degree. In my mind, I had thought I was learning to do something. This is important to note,
because it implied that my learning was related to physical actions; what actions were
needed, when, and with what result intended. This is understandable, perhaps, as I had
always been rewarded for learning to do. I had succeeded in the formal academic
environment for my ability to learn to do papers and presentations. Likewise, I had succeeded
in my previous employment for my ability to effectively perform (another doing) certain
tasks within a complicated legal and social environment. I suppose I should note that even as
a much younger person I was rewarded for my ability to do for myself, remaining
inconspicuous within some difficult family dynamics.
While this had been useful enough in the past, I believe that my practicum work with
Spiritual Health was perhaps my first professional encounter with an environment I felt I
didn't understand.
I felt a good deal of anxiety around my lack ofunderstanding ofmy environment, and
the increasingly shaky ground of my self-definition as "successful". As a result, I made a
concerted effort to create an understanding of the environment I was in. While this makes
sense broadly, my historically reinforced habits oflearning to do as a bulwark against anxiety
were slowly nudging me towards a categorical view of my role in my environment, as can be
seen from my journal in the earliest weeks of the practicum placement.
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October 23: *did coffee hour at St. Mike's- I'm having some regulars
returning to chat with me- this is part of the joining piece- likely will be
fewer tomorrow (SA day -people go shopping) *chatted with Lauren until
about 5:30- at spiritual health office- spirituality- God- how
God/religion/spirituality can become implicated in addressing trauma other counselling issues.
Even in this brief example, the record emphasizes doing. I, for example, "did coffee
hour" at St. Mikes. I noted my success, now having "regulars". I noted understanding of the
environment with the mention of "SA day" and its impact on service use. As I write these
very lines, I wonder who I was talking to.
In this search for bounded order in a generally chaotic mental environment, I had created
a mental environment dominated by content-oriented concerns. I was concerned with what
order I perceived, and was defining "order" in terms of my self-perceived expertise. Parts of
my journal entries from the time are regularly devoted to what seem like recitations of
practical knowledge.
November 06: *another client did show for coffee and a chat; he spoke of his
medication regimen -he described the first stages of tardive diskynesia -I
asked him to let his health team know of his feeling of "tightness and
energy ".
Here again we see the emphasis on doing. I knew and understood and saw something.
And, on the basis of that knowledge, made an informed suggestion. This was content, and
content was doing, and doing was the path to success, and success was the guard against the
uncertainty of the environment.
The uncertainty inherent in the Spiritual Health aspect of the practicum course is best
represented by my experiences in co-facilitating a "Grief Group". I was, to be sure, quite

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uncertain in many areas of the social work concerns of the people I encountered at St. Mike's,
but the Church location wasn't specifically intended to address any particular issues beyond
hunger and cold. In that environment, clients could choose to mention an issue, say nothing
at all, or obtain a bagged lunch and go directly on with their day.
With Grief Group, concrete help - specific content - wasn't as well defined. As the date
of the group's first meeting approached, I remember a more-or-less constant tug-of-war
related to whether I was prepared to be part of the leadership of the group. While both Lauren
and Brent had listened to my concerns, and had both responded that I was able to facilitate
the group, I still felt unprepared. Looking back on my journaling from this time, I see that I
may have responded to this by moving further into the known boundaries of content. I was
doubling-down on information, hoping I would find enough ideas to allow me to do;
perform; succeed. With Grief Group only a short time away, I felt full of tiny bits of
information, but without an overall perspective.
October 29: *there seems to be more to keep straight in my day- while I've
been used to this responsibility in the past- in these circumstances, I was
the one with the general idea of how it all worked- so the normal variances
required when working with humans was easier to context into the overall
plan.

Most of the journaling from this period is even more content-focused than even this
example. Indeed, the last four days' entries before the start of the group are a mash oflists
and check marks; a moment-by-moment review of all of the content of my work. I
anticipated failure on something for which I was being evaluated. I was providing a defense
for the incident review I feared would be coming.

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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

I had experienced this sense of incompetence acutely, and blamed myself, and (to a
lesser extent) my environment for my feelings of being unprepared.
November 07: *today is the day of the first grief group meeting- I'm a little
bit anxious, but mostly I'm more upset and angry at myself and the situation
generally- I can't shake the feeling that I should have done more, should
have prepared more.

I go on in this entry to rail against a simple (but time consuming) mistake, the lack of a
template to proceed from, and even my personal counsellor, who had canceled an
appointment earlier in the week because she was ill.
In the proposal for this practicum, I discussed the implications of traumatic experience in
terms of events shaking our most necessary beliefs regarding the operation of the world. I
stated that "[ w]ithout these structures maintaining a solidity in the mind, the individual must
constantly work to reaffirm that solidity, or work to reduce the discomfort caused by that lack
of solidity (Vogelsang, 2012, p. 25). It is perhaps fitting, then, that this should so neatly
describe my mental environment right up to the very first meeting. In an attempt to lower my
discomfort, I had done what I always had: I had worked, and I had attempted to produce.
This response was so ingrained that I was responding thus, even in the presence of the belief
that the lack ofsolidity in how to "do" Grief Group was intentional and necessary.
October 29:*Lauren's trying hard not to stress me out, but the lack of
concreteness in a stressor, though I know it's necessary.
October 31: *I let [Brent] know about the stress regarding Grief Group horrid, uncertain, anxious, under-prepared- Brent reminded me that it's a
peer group so I didn't have to worry about doing therapy - it helps
sometimes to think in these terms -I have to remember that I am a student,
and that nobody needs me to be an expert- later, Lauren sent an email
which mentioned she wouldn't set me up to fail- read a little more about
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

grief
As above, I had dived into study on grief and grief therapy. I had found that my
overarching idea regarding the operation of self-in-place fit into the prevailing discussions on
the topic. In Spaten's (2012) discussion of the grief experience in men he reports that "[the
author's] clients would continually ask questions about the loss, themselves, and the world shifting paradoxically between meaning and meaninglessness" (p. 3). It seemed clear that the
men's losses held meanings beyond the concerns of the present, real as those concerns were.
Indeed, grief can be seen as a radical change in an individual's view of self and the
world. Adler and McAdams' (2007) comments on narrative and time are interesting here.
According to these authors, we connect our past to our present, and our present to our future
by combining all of these into stories of ourselves, or "personal narratives" (p. 97). These
narratives allow us to make sense of our lives; the experiences we have had, how these
impact the here and now, and what these mean about the future (p. 98). Seen in this way,
grieving can represent a profound break in one's life, represented by the narrative itself. This
fits with the more empirical work of Collier (2011), who noted (p. E265) that the
bereavement process for families is affected by family function (as operationalized by levels
of conflict and communication). Relating this to Adler and McAdams' personal narrative, a
rich and healthy dynamic of openness and communication supports the development of a
personal narrative better able to withstand a significant loss without losing functional
cohesion. If, as Bronfenbrenner (1979, as cited in Clinton, 2008) supposed, "human
individuals are living systems, continually interacting with the contexts in which their lives

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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

are unfolding, including family, peer groups, school, and larger systems" (p. 215), then the
loss of even a very significant relationship has a lower net impact on the whole of the
survivor's personal narrative if what remains is based on openness and communication. This
is echoed in Rutter's (2007) observations around resiliency; that "it is evident that the
overcoming of stress or adversity may depend on experiences following the risk exposure"
(p. 205). Applied to thinking on grief (Rutter's comments were more directly related to
childhood sexual trauma), it may be that how one responds to grief is related to what Rutter
calls "social role satisfaction, and a positive sense of community" (p. 207). That is, griefs
impact on the personal narratives of the bereaved is related not entirely to the fact of the loss,
but also the impact that loss has on the personal narrative's clarity around the future.
With specific reference to parental bereavement, Riley, LaMontagne, Hepworth, and
Murphey (2007) note, that whether grief leads to complicated grief ("intense grief that
negatively impacts psychological well being over time", p. 277-278) for surviving parents
depends on "individual responsibilities or circumstances" (p. 278) of those parents. It is this
concept of individualized risk which places Riley's articulation in line with Adler and
McAdams' personal narrative, as they both suggest that it is the individual's private, personal
self-in-place which is the font of the experience of grief. Further, it is the principle ground on
which rests the dichotomy between the 'wholeness' suggested by the personal narrative, and
the 'hole' suggested by the personal loss. This may explain why Spaten's subjects found
themselves mired in questions of personal meaning when faced with the death of a loved one,
in addition to explaining Riley's findings that 'optimism' acted as a bulwark against "intrusive
images, yearning and searching behaviours, disbelief and numbness" (p. 289).
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

This may also go a significant distance towards explaining why complicated grief (as
defined by Riley, above) is more likely in cases where the loss is "traumatic- premature,
sudden, violent, or unexpected" (Harvard Mental Health Letter, 2006). In the cases where
death occurs at the end of a protracted illness, or at the end of a long and happy life, those
surviving have had the time to experience and respond to the changes to the personal
narrative that the loss entails. However, in cases where the death is unexpected, the survivors'
personal narratives linking present and future are just as unexpectedly thrown into a turmoil
of radical change in expected future possibilities.
While all of this research was productive, and certainly interesting, it didn't make me feel
any better about the fact that I was soon to encounter clients' real grief in the form of Grief
Group. While I'd been able to come to an understanding of what I thought might be going on
in the existential level for the members of the group, I still felt unprepared regarding how to
respond to that grief. I wrestled with this in the days preceding the first group.

On November 6th, one day before the first session, I was in the Spiritual Health office for
a regular Tuesday morning meeting with Lauren. As the first Grief Group meeting was the
next evening, Lauren asked about how I felt. I responded by saying that I felt "functionally
useful", meaning I felt I knew what to expect. At the same meeting, I mentioned a particular
concern I was having regarding one of the regular visitors at St. Mike's. The issue seemed an
intractable problem to which I, in my role at St. Mike's, was completely unable to respond.
In response, Lauren suggested I pray for the client.
To be completely honest, that was the first time this had ever been suggested to me. I'm
not certain that I did pray for the client. However, I did think about prayer as being
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

something one can do when feeling that there is nothing that can be done. I cannot pinpoint
when or precisely how the connection came about, but a few of the disparate and ephemeral
points of exposure in the placement up to that point seemed to come together around this idea
in the time after this meeting. The idea that prayer represents action in a time when no action
will suffice made prayer something I could do when I realized there was nothing I could do
for the St. Mike's visitor whose troubles were troubling me so.
In the way that thoughts do, the connection between this situation, and my troubles
around co-facilitating a client group was made. My concerns about Grief Group were related
to my feelings about being able to respond in the face of the client's expression of grief. After
all of the reading and the thinking, I feared insufficiency.
However, I remembered Lauren's suggestion regarding my St. Mike's client, and I saw
that Lauren's suggestion of prayer did not represent a concession to inevitability at all, but a
recognition of human limitation, and a willing placement of agency with something beyond
those limitations.
If there was only one "aha" moment in the whole of this part of the practicum
placement, this was it. In fact, there were many of these moments, but all of these can be
traced in some way or another to this one. Indeed, this realization had a profound impact on
my work in other locations in this practicum, as will be discussed below. I was incorrect (or
only partly correct) to describe spirituality as a division between "agency" and "surrender" as
I had in the practicum proposal (Vogelsang, 2012, p. 33). If surrender is thought of as
"leaving the field", allowing what is inevitable to occur, then surrender is a loss of agency, of
involvement with the personal narrative of experience. But, if surrender is thought of as more
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

than an abdication, as when one places a situation in the hands of God, that placement
becomes agency. Thus, the grieving, sick, dying, or lonely person can still act in the face of
inevitability, and can still take a part in writing their personal narrative. It is not a question of
handing over responsibility. Rather, a recognition of the reality of the situation, and a
commitment to act within it, to the limit of possibility. I have come to believe that this
bringing something beyond individual humanity into consideration and action in reference to
social work problems is the center-point of spiritual social work.
Pergarnent, Smith, Koenig, and Perez (1999) state that "it isn't enough to believe or be
spiritual in a general sense. One's spiritual life must be made a part of one's lifestyle" (p. 34).
During this timefrarne of the practicum placement itself, the meaning of this statement in
terms of spiritual social work practice began to become a little more clear. I had come across
and used the Medicine Wheel idea in my previous work and accepted that spirituality was a
foundational aspect of the person. While I believed the words, perhaps I had yet to grasp their
meanmg.
The thought of surrender being a form of action opened the possibility that spiritual
social work was, at heart, the act of connection to that something unrevealed to humans,
bringing that connection "into the room" when the social worker and client interact. This
'bringing-in' is an action allowing "the spiritual social work client" (as in the Grief Group
participants) to take a more active role in writing the remainder of their personal narrative.
The idea that an important part of spiritual life and spiritual social work was giving over
to something beyond our direct influence and understanding is a large one. However, the fact
existed that the practicum was ongoing and I was still operating within it. Therefore, while I
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

was wrestling with these ideas and their personal and professional obligations, I was still
being pulled to perform in this mode in my work in the Spiritual Health department. While
my perspective had opened, I really didn't understand the new one well enough to base
practice. In response, I jumped into a reading review of spirituality and social work and
counselling, but I also tried to keep this perspective in mind while making service decisions.
While the first response went well, the second was somewhat of a climb.
November 14: *Okay ... last night's Grief Group- I think it went wellhowever, I felt at times I was talking to avoid silences - one member lost a
spouse [time reference removed] and is still devastated- I wasn't sure how
to help, so I think I may have been going for the shotgun approach (throw
out a bunch ofstuff and hope something hits).

As can be seen from this entry, I was still working very much from a cathartic model;
where a problem is encountered, treated, and the problem becomes "better".
While I was in the midst of shedding, in the intellectual sense, the idea of the social
worker as knowledgeable expert, this process hadn't yet made available any practice
approaches towards Grief Group clients, St. Mike's clients, or any others. At a deeper level, I
was still looking at practice issues with a 'doing' lens.
November 15: *I did a quick grounding/self-grounding exercise I adopted
from a Tl'azt'en workshop- I liked it then because it brings you back into
the regular world slowly and carefully- recognizes the feelings, but places
them in a context of a whole lived experience -I wasn 't really intending on
doing that exercise, but [client] was so upset, I felt the need to do something
-maybe slow the heart rate a little- !find I have to keep reminding myself
that the fact they're leaving upset is not a failure on my part.

I really like this entry because it illustrates the strange borderland within which I found
myself. First, it shows rather clearly that I was still very much mentally situated in an active
and positive mode of practice, where I am to do something in order to "help". I had used a
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

grounding exercise I hadn't intended because it was something that I knew how to do.
However, there are also present some early indications of what I would eventually realize
more fully.
If grief is a process, then anything ("any thing") done at one instant in that process is
only a part of a whole, and that whole will become resolved in one way or another. The
social worker role, then, isn't to make a whole, but to facilitate a process where the whole is
resolved such that the client feels empowered to write a new narrative incorporating, but not
defined by, the loss.
The idea ofbecoming, used in this way, opposes a cathartic mindset in social work
practice. The spiritual perspective creates the social worker as a witness to a process which is
beyond the worker's control. Grief isn't something to be "treated", but something which is
experienced. The idea of pain as something to be experienced, understood, and learned from,
is a little disconcerting. It was the idea that we should dive into the fundamentally lifealtering episodes in our lives, and resolve to move on with (as opposed to from) it, that
focused my reading in spirituality, as it seemed to move the source of the social work issue of
pain into a larger context.
But what is this context? I had only a basic grounding in spiritual matters, and I did have
some trouble determining where to start. So, I started with myself. I wanted to observe
myself in the context of my spirituality in order to understand the role which that spirituality
plays in my life and my practice as a social worker.
In "The Psychodynamics of Self-Observation", Falkenstrom (2007) notes that the
perspective aims for client self-knowledge, which the client then extends forward into the
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

remainder of life (p. 553). One way this is done is with a triangular perspective, so that the
individual watches both the self (being) and the ego (wanting). Falkenstrom prefers this over
a dyadic model, as it allows the individual to see the interactions between them (p. 561).
Falkenstrom's paper is organized nicely, in that once the difficulties with this thirdperson self-observation stance are revealed, a resolution is proposed.
Clearly, it is difficult for someone to observe the interactions between themselves and
their responses to the world of the external experience. Because experience occurs in "real
time", it cannot be both experienced and dispassionately observed for conclusions to be
drawn. Falkenstrom relieves this tension by removing conclusions, and any intent at meaning
such conclusions may represent. Falkenstrom points out that in Eastern-based mindfulness
practices there is no split between observer and observed. The goal is more for depth of
experience and being than for depth of reflection and the generation of meaning (pp. 563-4).
So, while I started by looking for a way to observe the interactions of myself and my
spirituality, I came to rest at the need to experience those interactions. Falkenstrom
references Buddhist thinking, and mentions "the ways in which the mind withdraws from
experiencing fully the present moment, and they can all be reduced to variations of seeking
pleasure and avoiding unpleasure"(p. 565).
The principle of seeking the pleasurable and avoiding the unpleasurable is the very heart
of how people form their knowledge of themselves. Ultimately, we provide our own evidence
to support the thoughts of self we like, and discount, ignore, or outright silence the evidence
for those we don't. The implications of this insight were profound for me. If I was practicing
in a spiritual mode, I had assumed that I had to have qualities of spirituality, and understand
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

those qualities in the context of my work. However, if I could understand my spirituality by
being aware of its influence on my experiences, and use that awareness as the grounding for
my spiritual understanding, I was relieved of needing to know what was doing this
understanding, only that what it was experiencing was important. This was another point on
my journey from a content-focus to a process-focus, as I was no longer bound to a distinction
between what I knew and did not know about spiritually informed work. On the contrary, this
perspective allowed me to concentrate on experience: Mine when exploring my spirituality,
and my clients when receiving spiritual care.
I think the first big practice change this refocusing created was related to Grief Group. I
have mentioned above that some of my concern around co-facilitating this group was related
to the literature's lack of specific direction around what to do and how to do it. I began to
realize that one of the most important parts of the successful resolution of grief is the
experience of the grief itself. I had been looking for clues as to what to do, but what needed
to be done was happening anyway, right in front of me. My role was to be with the client in
the midst of that grief.
It was on this basis I took another look at Worden's highly-referenced (1991) discussion

of grief'stages'. Worden noted that these descriptions have been misconstrued in the popular
mind to existing in discreet stages, when in fact an individual experiences all of these
elements at one time (p. 58). While my earlier search for clarity and procedure came up short,
my second look at this literature was very different. I had not found what I was looking for
because I was looking for the wrong things. I had been looking for ways to work against
grief. Being content-oriented, I wanted to understand and to combat what was happening in
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

the moment-by-moment existence of the group's members. Looking again, this time from a
perspective of client grief, and the role of the worker to be supportive in that experience, I
came to a better understanding of what these texts had been trying to tell me. As a result, my
understanding of what I was to do became more clear.
I became much more concerned with what my clients were feeling in the moment during
their grief. Using the Buddhist standpoint of non-judgemental acceptance (from
Falkenstrom), I saw that I had been rejecting the experience of grief, and was doing so to
avoid my own discomfort with the feelings of grief. I was combative towards grief because I
did not want to experience my reactions to my clients' grief. As a result, I had to confront my
own discomfort, recognize its presence, and avoid responding to in while in session with the
group members.
This perspective is reflected in the academic scholarship. Cacciatore and Flint (2012)
note that the therapeutic use of mindfulness practice involves both the patient and the
provider. As I had seen the poverty of an oppositional approach to grief, this idea of the
worker and the client being in something together seemed a promising alternative. In
addition, the idea of the provider and the client working from a space of immediate
experience, together, suited my general empowerment-based philosophy. The goal here is to
truly be with the client, as much as a separate consciousness can. Because grief is a verb, to
treat it like something bounded within its own inherent nature (like one does a noun), is to
miss the point entirely.
As it happened, it was around this same time that Lauren began seeing an individual
client, who was kind enough to allow me to 'sit-in' on their sessions. This client had recently
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

experienced a significant loss, and had come to see Lauren for help in making sense of the
loss, and help in moving forward from it. As I sat in the sessions, I saw descriptions of the
client's life and came to notice strong patterns in the client's life, related to the client's early
history. In the same way that I was looking for something bounded called "grief' to combat
in Grief Group; here, I was looking for definable sources ofthose patterns. The involvement
of early childhood experiences immediately pointed me towards attachment theories
(Harvard Mental Health Letter, 2009). I discussed my observations with Lauren during a
clinical meeting. I noted in supervision the client's lifetime of environmental instability as an
element of these patterns.
Eventually, Lauren responded by saying that the most important element is that the client
come to the realization on the client's own. Lauren described this as a guard against "client
resistance". Like my presumed role in Grief Group, I had initially been most concerned with
the 'reality' that was happening for those I worked with. In essence, my understanding of my
clients' issues in this loss weren't really as important as my clients' understandings, and this is
what Lauren was trying to articulate with her focus on "presence".
I think I was beginning to understand. As a result, my ongoing re-reading of the
literature on grief therapy took on a more complex focus. Cacciatore and Flint's comments
that "effective psychosocial care that is mindful, humble, and nuanced has the capacity to
abate human suffering" (p. 63) seemed to take on deeper meanings.
Mindful. Humble. Nuanced. For me, the image is one of a dance: Two people moving
around each other, each being mindful of the placement of feet, but moving to a beat
overarching, defining the fundamentals of movement and pattern; each dancer humbly
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

willing to move as the other directs; and able to adapt to slight variations from the other. I
also noted that the statement said nothing about eliminating human suffering. If suffering is
something that's going to happen anyhow, if it is a normal element of human experience, then
the therapeutic interaction need not be cathartic.
The goal for the counsellor, then, has less to do with cathartic intervention, and more to
do with getting into the client's mind, heart, and soul. So, mindfulness was important to the
therapeutic process, but perhaps the more important element is a nuanced responsiveness to
the client's current place, and a humble willingness to be there, in that place, with them.
In short, presence.
In this, I am promising to ignore my own sense of self within the therapeutic
environment. I am putting away my expectations. I am being aware of my reactions and my
thoughts about "What's really going on", and trying to fully understand and be with the client
in the client's moment. In this light all of the reading I'd done while looking for things to do
started to make sense.
Earlier in the semester, I had read Running and Girard's (2008) comments about ritual in
the expression of grief. At the time, I'd been looking for concrete examples of practice I
could emulate or incorporate into my grief group work. I'd been disappointed. I'd been
looking, first, for Running's description of ritual. I'd found:
"Ritual can be seen as any activity, sacred or secular, public or private,
formal or informal, traditional or newly created, scripted or improvised,
communal or solitary, prescribed or self-designed, repeated, or one-time
only- that includes the symbolic expression of a combination of emotions,
thoughts, and/or spiritual beliefs of the participant(s) that has special
meaning for the participants" (p. 305).

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At the time, I hadn't found this description to be particularly helpful. However, with the
addition of the insight that doing is less primarily defined in concrete terms, and more so in
terms of presence and being, the idea emerges that presence is doing. Being mindful and nonjudgemental of self-experience, in an effort to be aware and responsive to a client's
experience in the moment becomes doing.
So, if grief was happening anyway, and the only thing is to be with grief. In this sense,
all that mattered was the moment. Now, Running's remarks about ritual showed that it didn't
matter what the ritual is, only that it is. What matters is that the ritual provides a place for
grief to be experienced. The idea of place is most important for its ability to be entered and
exited, not for any element of the structure or content of place.
In much the same way, the rereading of O'Rourke's (2008) comments around presence
became more meaningful. I had referenced Banks' (2006) Ethic of Care model in the proposal
(p. 36) because I saw in her conception the opportunity for the client to be truly free to
express and experience and grow in the absence of the constraint of the outside world. My
second reading of O'Rourke, though, seemed to describe what was actually required to create
this sort of environment.
"To welcome without judgement stories of having endured- or inflictedhorrible suffering powerfully conveys to our clients that just as we can hear
these stories and not tum away, so too, (sic) can they now face their
histories of pain, and know that these histories cannot destroy them" (p.
454).
As someone who located himself in his practicum proposal as "theory-minded and
analytical by temperament and training" (p. 8), this way of thinking was something I had to
make myself practice. The tension between my older and newer perspectives was the source
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

of an emotional process for me, where I had to shed some tried-and-true methods of
understanding and interacting with the world (and, by extension, with clients), replacing
these with other methods and understandings.
A poem I wrote by way of a journal entry during this time reflects the internal tensions I
felt between what I had perceived as the order of action-as-being, and the chaos of being-asaction.
And with a tear, the snow falls.
Captured, frozen, made blind to the Earth that
pulled it. A dream of waking- nothing beyond but
intention and rage and sweat.
And reminders of looking at now
As something terrible - the point is
The embrace, the peace is the embrace.
One moment with another - A smile. A Smile.
The picture is the moment where the snow falls,
And it lives forever.
I believe that this poem sums-up where my feelings of dislocation were taking me. In
making a tear into a snowflake, I am creating it as individual, but losing that individuality
when placing it in the context of a snowfall. The 'dream ofwaking', wherein the dreamer
cannot distinguish between the two until they are revealed in their own time, is the anxious
moment before something terrible. However, by the end peace is embraced by looking at the
moments in their totality (not the individual flakes) , and by trying to connect to my emotional
self to connect with clients ('A smile. A smile'). As a result, the picture creates the snow as a
single moment, and nothing more. While that moment will always exist, it is only one
moment among many, many others. I interpret this as indicative of what I was thinking and

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feeling. Though I felt exposed and without some foundation of knowledge under me, I was
becoming more comfortable with finding foundation within myself and within the
relationship with the person in front of me (the client).
However, a close look at the poem does show that the writer is essentially disembodied.
All indicators of physicality have been removed from the voice of the writer: He is defined
by intentionality, rage, and sweat. These things (like tears and smiles) are markers of
personhood, not a description of the person himself.
Who, then, was doing this work?
Perhaps ironically, the appearance of these answers and questions could have been
expected under the terms I had defined in the practicum proposal. In referencing Epstein
(1973), and Ortner (1996, 2006), I was trying to articulate the interactive nature of self and
place. My objective at the time had been to discuss trauma theories, and the intersections of
self and place as the points at which trauma creates the fault lines so difficult for an
individual. What I hadn't foreseen was that exposure to these deep changes in perspective
might create some fault lines of their own for me.
I did interpret my current state as a question of personal meaning, where many of my
ideas about social work, counselling, and myself were undergoing a fast and radical revision.
This situation is spoken of in Victor Frankl-inspired logotherapies, and I sought some
direction from this area.
Frankl grounded his discussion of meaning in the three core tenets that human life has
meaning, that humans long to know this meaning, and that all people have the potential to
experience this meaning (Schulenberg, Hertzel, Nassif, and Regina, 2008). At the time, the
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

most salient parts of this exploration for me was logotherapy's insistence on meaning and on
the dignity involved in seeking it out. The authors note that logotherapy "affords clients the
dignity of expecting them to be capable as human beings in spite of the limitations of their
current situation or problem" (p. 451 ).
I realized that, as a student, it was perhaps a good time to be in at least some turmoil, but
that it was actually an opportunity for me to move away from a theory-based, bounded
understanding of my clients' problems and how to respond. This loss placed the responsibility
on me to respond from something beyond theory. In this, I was moving further away from
content, and closer towards process.
But the idea of 'process' was still nebulous and undefined for me. While Epstein, Ortner,
and now Frankl all did fine jobs in describing their views of the overall process in the
formulation of "the self' in the context of "the world", the breadth of explanatory power
comes at the sacrifice of directive power. None of these authors give clear indications of how
to fill the spaces created by a jolt to systems of being in the world.
At a broader, more purely existentialist level, this is contemplating, I think, a loss of an
ability to integrate "the I" into the world, as the individual won't have the resources to
incorporate the reciprocal demands of the world. In specific reference to counselling,
however, the danger this illustrated to me was the potential for this contact to go off-kilter,
and because of its inherent self-referential qualities, just keep going. Because meaning in the
world exists as a function of contact with the world, poorly ascribed meanings influence
contact to be had in the future. I needed to come to understand my meanings in my life
before I could apply these meanings to my work as a social worker, spiritually-informed or
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no. I went back to basics.
I went to church.
One of Lauren's responsibilities is the weekly Anglican service at the hospital chapel.
Lauren was away one week, and a community member ran the service. This community
member noted the Newton, Connecticut school shootings only a few weeks prior, making
connections between the personal and social chaos endemic for many in modem life ..
December 27: *the service linked chaos of the personal and social types
more closely than I had expected- but, then much of the stuffLauren
mentions does the same thing- there's an important spiritual element to this
that's on the tip of my tongue -for human services this is meaningful; I just
don't know how to describe it
*I guess it starts with the presupposition that there is, in fact something
beyond us. Once you begin from there, certain realities must pertain - the
first of which is there is meaning to life. This creates two possibilities.
**life has meaning inasmuch as life has meaning for me. ~definite power
in this position ~once a person's life has meaning in itself there exists the
potential for agency ~ using the 'meaning' potential as the energy for
transformative change.
**life has meaning inasmuch as my life has meaning (or something beyond
me.~ this changes the locus of meaning-making ~ it requires the
individual to determine what the meaning is (knowing that meaning always
existed).
As can be seen, these experiences in this part of the practicum course motivated me to
question and examine my spiritual beliefs not only as a social worker, but as an element of
my spirituality as a person. The focus is on me, as I am trying to understand my beliefs, but
the content is very much within social work, as it is these beliefs that inform my reasons for
working as I seem to do.
Carroll (2001) has described spirituality as relationship or interconnectedness among
self, others, and God- among all that exists in the universe (p. 6). One of the themes Carroll
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

finds in concepts of spirituality is the idea of a responsive relationship to God, including a
sense of well-being and a focus on a reality beyond the temporal (ibid.). For me, both
personally and as a social worker, it is this reality beyond perception that draws my attention.
Because we have free will, we can choose to be dismissive and cause harm, or we can choose
to try to help others through engagement with them.
From a spiritual perspective, the important idea here seems to be the work itself, and not
the why of the work.
Working to be an aid to others is a good noted in numerous spiritual traditions. Meier
and Rovers (201 0) note that Islam encourages followers to help others, and goes further to
say that this should be done for reasons beyond being seen to do so. Judaism encourages
thought and action for the less fortunate, as the Torah instructs fallow crops to be left for
widows and orphans. Hinduism teaches to relieve others' misery and to share that misery with
them. Buddhist thought is that material goods and pleasures are only a distraction from
engagement with the ultimate. The authors remind the reader of Christianity's teaching that
we should help bear other's burdens (p. xii).
Meier goes on to note (p. 3) that two of the oldest ideas in counselling are that the
technique of the counsellor is insufficient by itself, and that the most important element in
therapeutic change is the relationship between counsellor and client. Examining Carl Rogers,
these authors note his insistence that counsellors require respect, acceptance, and love for
their client, in order to take them from a perspective of self as unlovable to a perspective of
self as loved, accepted, and respected (p. 4). Thus, the core element of therapeutic change is
in the creation of a space of acceptance and respect. While this may not be an uncommon
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

referencing ofRogerian thought, Meier and Rovers do note that near the end ofhis career
Rogers wrote of counsellors' need to be in touch with the unknown in themselves. Reflecting
on his career, Rogers noted that at times his connection with a client seemed to exist at a deep
level ofbeing, creating what Rogers called "a deep sense of immersion" (p. 5).
This makes a strong kind of sense to me, in terms of the experiences I have had in this
practicum placement. It was late-December and early-January when I was reviewing this
book, and I had been working for a few months at St. Mike's, and formed relationships with a
number of the people who came for coffee or lunch. It was winter, of course, and these men
and women would very often be coming to the church with improper winter clothing. The
need for something so basic, and the relative lack of resources to fill that need impacted me
quite viscerally.
Indeed, more than once the lunchbag program's daily resources limit of20 bags were
depleted in fewer minutes. While I would go and assemble a few extra bags in extreme cases,
I was conscious of the very real costs of providing food. Often, I was in the position ofbeing
able to offer coffee, but had to inform that all of the food was gone. My experience of the
emotional conflict between need and limitations was a profound one for me. Through the
stories and perspectives of those who attended the lunchbag program, I came to see that
obtaining needed social services often felt like and endless circular process. Also, I came to
understand more about how individuals often give up on that process entirely. I gained a
sense of their dislocation; ofthe chin-out/eyes-open response to the very often uncaring
world.
January 02:
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

Trundled, huddled.
Loose legs; Sunk ships
Lips. Tight shut- or like a fountain on an upswing.
Eyes, fingers, toes.
Two. Ten. Ten.
Frozen in time. Frozen in cold.
Lost & Found hats.
And boots that don't fit right.
Or just plain leak. Or just aren't boots.
I see in this shades of Rogers' immersion. Based on the relationships I had formed,
visitors told me of their lives and of their perspectives on them. Learning of these
perspectives allowed me moments of understanding a client's meaning behind the words they
spoke, or ofknowing what is being said by a gesture, or a downward glance of the eyes. I
began to understand what I had once thought were "wacky" ideas, such as 'resonance' with a
client. These stanzas articulate much of my learning in the spiritual care process.
These, however, are only shades of Rogers' immersion, and I wrestled with the reality
that though there is connection, I will not understand fully what another is experiencingthat there are elements of client suffering to which I may never have access, no matter the
quality of my skill or of the therapeutic relationship.
On January 17, there was a 'halfway point' meeting at St. Mike's; attended by Brent,
Lauren, Reverend Glenn Stone (the Reverend supervising my St. Mike's work), and myself. I
described this tension between connection and separation.
"Having moved beyond coursework and into practical education connected
to spiritual health, I have been confronted with the reality that what I [had
been trying to describe for myself] was not a "person" at all. What I had
been describing was the constructs used to describe something we cannot
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

describe to another, but only know exists for us, and which we presume is
present in that form in the "person" or "people" we talk about. While this
discussion was genuine, it's revelatory power was fundamentally blunted
because we aren't able to discuss the inner being, only the ways it is
described" (Vogelsang, 2013, p. 1).
It was this concentration on inner being, mine and my clients', only revealed in

description of outward state, which stayed with me. In this, I had perhaps come to a clearer
understanding that problems, and theoretical knowledge of how to respond to them, are all
based on ideas we carry about our and others' inner beings. While a grounding in theoretical
knowledge is important, engagement with someone's problems and engagement with their
inner being isn't the same thing. Description of the outward state can give indications of the
inner being, as themes can resolve, and general patterns of thinking can be identified. I've
come to believe that the inner state is only truly known by the individual and God. Through
the slow reveal throughout life, God allows us to come to know our inner beings. It is this
capacity of being subjectively unset, unfinished, which allows change to occur.
Lauren's emphasis on presence with clients, initially so perplexing to me in its implied
lack of content, was resolved in my mind to have been content in itself. I had been focused
on finding content, so as to please authority, get good grades, and be successful. In shedding
these, enabling myself to be with a client, my process became one of moving past content. I
saw, finally, that I would remain a learner until my inner self is fully revealed. Furthermore, I
saw that presence with a client is the most important aspect of the therapeutic relationship, as
the client's experiences in the counselling environment are one of shared humanity.
But presence with a client must be with the client only. The worker must, as I had to,

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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

learn to leave all his or her personal concerns out of the space. Paradoxically, in order to
"succeed", I had to leave my thoughts and perceptions about success. I had to forget I was
being evaluated. I had to move beyond the need to be secure by being pleasing to authority,
as it was taking me from clients. I had to involve myself fully in the moment, but make that
moment about the client.
These experiences, and the perceptions of counselling, of self, of social work, of spirit,
and of care for the spirit that they sparked in me were not yet fully developed, as other
references to this meeting will show below. However, as I began to transition into the
Community Care Centre for the second half of this practicum placement, many of these
experiences stayed with me, informing my work. This second half helped to solidify some of
what I had learned in spiritual care duties, and helped me to translate newer perceptions into
practice.
3(b ): Counselling.
Throughout the month of January, I made the transition from the Spiritual Health
department at the Hospital to the UNBC Downtown Community Care Centre ("CCC"). My
goal was to learn to function as a counsellor in an outpatient, storefront counselling facility.
In addition, I was looking forward to opportunities of direct counselling supervision, as I had
hoped I would learn "what to do" in any given counselling situation. I had come to the
realization around process and presence, and I'd seen the idea of the inner being during my
time with Lauren and at St. Mikes, but these ideas were still quite new. I was in a new
environment, and so looking for what I saw as security of understanding, and I did fall back
somewhat into the search for confirmable content.
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

I went to the literature to learn more about spiritual care in a counselling context.
Authors such as Canda have written about how spirituality can (2011) 1 and should (1998) be
a concern in social work dynamics, but I wanted more regarding the role of spirituality in
counselling specifically.
"To provide care for a human person's spirit is to open your human spirit in
that moment. The discipline, as I understand it, is to be open to that other's
spirit's needs in that other's spirit's moment. To care for the spirit of another
is to be willing to open your spirit to the pain, shock, despair, grief,
loneliness, fear, isolation, and rage of another's, and to have the personal
courage to maintain that openness with that other in that anguish in that
moment, without crowding that moment with personal spiritual needs
related to that openness" (Vogelsang, 2013 , p. 2).
Writing in 1957, Carl Rogers specified six criteria for therapeutic personality change:
1. That two persons are in psychological contact.
2. That the first person (the client) is in a state of incongruence,
being vulnerable or anxious.
3. That the second person (the therapist) is congruent or integrated
in the relationship.
4. The therapist experiences unconditional positive regard for the
client.
5. The therapist experiences empathetic understanding of the
client's internal frame of reference and endeavours to
communicate this to the client.
6. The communication to the client of the therapist's empathetic
understanding and unconditional positive regard is to a minimal
degree successful. (p. 241)
I remember excitement when I read this paper. Carl Rogers was going to tell me how to
be a counsellor. His six criteria all seemed to exist in the same mental arena as I had
described in the January 17 report: Openness to the other and the other's experience, being
willing to be present with the client and the recognition that the fullness of the client's
I

This in Furman, Benson, Perry, and Canda, 2011.
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

experience is unknowable to the therapist (ie: " ...to a minimal degree successful"). However,
a more dispassionate reading shows that there are few clear statements about what the
therapist must do, outside of the obvious ("be in psychological contact"). I felt stymied again.
I had been trying to achieve some clarity about how to be a counsellor, and even comments
from the Venerable Carl weren't helping. The counsellor was being asked to be congruent in
the relationship, experience positive regard, and experience empathetic understanding of the
client's internal frame of reference, and to communicate all of that understanding to the
client. Of these things, only the last implies action.
Indeed, towards the end of the paper, Rogers explicitly states (p. 246) that these
conditions aren't even limited to therapeutic relationships. I had left the spiritual care element
of the practicum knowing I had "learned much" and ''understood little", and I was placing a
lot of weight on coming to ''understand" during the CCC element of the placement. Rogers
comments only seemed to muddy the waters more, throwing me into a confusing world.
My intention in this part of the final report is to describe this confusion, and how my
experiences in spiritual care up to that point were involved in my further development,
moving further from a need for content and a trust in the process that Rogers was trying to
articulate in his 1957 paper.
As above, I had developed a focus on the awareness and limits of presence while
working in the UHNBC phase of the course. I had been forced to put away the solidity of
foot of knowing how to respond, adopting to try only to be with the client in the moment. I
now had to determine the nature of that being act for me. I wanted to be able to be open to
the pain, loneliness, and grief of clients; not only because they are fundamental to my aspired
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

profession, but because they represent for me a spiritual path towards whatever it is I will
become. If I have to ditch "knowing" as a marker of progress, and embrace "being" as a
fundamental skill, I have to be able to rely on myself in the therapeutic moment. Further, as
stated in the 17 January report, I have to rely on myself as an entity (an "I") prior to relying
on the aspect of that entity who is being a counsellor at that moment. Meier and Rovers
(20 10) note this with their suggestion of "immersion" with a client. This version of
immersion seems to go beyond Rogers', in that the latter authors note that "to be effective,
the therapist must see beyond the clients problems and emotional states, and recognize their
underlying needs" (p. 6).
My trouble with this idea has always been that I have to come to conclusions of what
those needs are. If so, I have to base those conclusions on me. I don't know, and can never
know, what the client's needs are. I can only know what my needs would be in the client's
circumstances, based on the client's articulation of those circumstances. Therefore, I need to
come to an idea of my conception of the self, what it is we do, so that I can move beyond
being open to problems, and the client's experience of those problems, and come to an
understanding of what those problems may mean to the client. This places the spotlight on
the counsellor again, in that the counsellor's understanding of these client meanings could be
influenced by meanings ascribed by the counsellor.
Owing to the inherent self-referential nature of (at least!) the therapy session, it is
important for the counsellor to have more than an idea of"what it is counsellors do", but also
an idea of why that counsellor does what (in this case) he does. This way, the counsellor can
be immersed with a client, trying to understand the gaps in the self the client's problems
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

would leave for anyone, while (as in Rogers) working that knowledge into the particular
client's context, or (as in Meier and Rovers) trying to understand what the client's needs are,
while recognizing the appearance ofhis own projections ofhis own context(s) and needs.
So, I needed to get clear on my meanings of self and of counselling. If Banks is correct
around her goal of a mutual space where nothing is too trivial or silly, then the content of that
space is defined by the entities within it- the two "I"'s in the session. Because I cannot know
the other "I" (the client), I am limited to trying to come to a clear understanding of that other
"I", based only on it's existence as an "I", all the time trying not to project my understandings
of myself on to the client.
This is a tall order, obviously, and benefited from exposure to previous thought on the
"I". In Islam, for example, investigations of this sort begin with acknowledgment of the
limits of human perception, and the necessary roles of human judgment and reason (J afari,
1992, p. 328). From this, Islamic scholars of the person see the human psyche as combined of
soul, heart, self, and intellect (p. 329; Weatherhead and Daiches, 2010, p. 79). Endeavours to
"be in psychological contact" with another must begin from a recognition of all of these parts
of the person. Jafari's articulation of counselling begins with the view that "faith is an
essential prerequisite for the treatment of mental, emotional, or behavioural disorders" (p.
335). While I hold a reverence for Islam's ideals of worship, scholarship, charity, and peace, I
am not a Muslim and do not hold what Jafari terms "a Muslim worldview" (ibid.).While I
cannot work therapeutically from the standpoint oflslamic worship (p. 332), the idea of faith
as a centrepoint to counselling isn't without precedent to the Western-style Christianity to
which I have been exposed directly.
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

Proverbs 19:21

"There are many devices in a
man's heart; nevertheless the
counsel of the Lord, that shall
stand." (KJB)

Osiowy (1989) notes that counselling is an important part of Christian ministry (p. 201).
This action, undertaken by people, resembles Jafari's comments in that both cases depict an
activity grounded in human concerns, but directed by principles acknowledging reality
beyond individuals' concerns. As such, Osiowy states that the counsellor is not to be an
"answer machine", a director of lives, or the taker of others' burdens or responsibilities (p.
203). Rather, Osiowy's idea is to draw the counsellor out from inside the person with the
problem (p. 204). This is done through the counsellor's concern for the person, and ensuring
full understanding is achieved before giving counsel (pp. 205, 209).
Osiowy's Christian and Jafari's Islamic perspectives share some common elements. First,
there is the admission that counselling perspective is based on a view oflife centred beyond
the individual. However, both also acknowledge that human perception is incomplete,
requiring that each of these perceptions rely to some extent on imperfect human reasoning.
Being incomplete, both of these systems must look to figures presumed perfect, else
there isn't any externally validated guide. In this vein, Osiowy notes that the life of Jesus is
the prime example in his ministry, and Keshavarzi and Haque (2013) note that for Muslims,
Mohammad's (SAW) example of life is the route to proximity to God, and thus fuller
social/psychological health (p. 235).
Keshavarzi and Haque's discussion of an Islamic psychotherapy points out that observant
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

Muslims begin from an understanding of who and what they are in relation to God, and that it
is possible for a person to realize their full potential (''jitrah") by observing proper standards
in life. This gives a specific direction and example for someone working in counselling from
a Muslim worldview. In the same way, Osiowy's counselling model sets its priority of
counselling as "to ensure that the counsel we give and the direction of the person's life will
glorify God" (Osiowy, p. 212), giving a direction and something to aim for. The binding idea
is that in the attempt to live like these examples is the dignity, the love, and the acceptance
that they are looking for.
Although I can't deliver counselling services as a Pastor or an Imam, there does exist a
deep resonance of these ideas in secular forms. Indeed, there is a deep spiritual current
running through much modem counselling thought. Sarah Banks' Ethic of Care model (2006,
p. 59) envisions two people linked in the radical safety and acceptance of the counselling
session. In this space, the attempt to determine one's inner meanings, to be vulnerable, to be
authentically yourself to a counsellor and have that vulnerability met with acceptance is a
spiritual journey.
But beyond format and bearing, Clement Vontress' comments around existential
counselling come to many of the same points around authenticity and acceptance (Epp,
1998). Vontress sees in existential work an effort to connect clients to the deeper sources of
meaning in their lives beyond the cognitive and rational (p. 4). Indeed, Vontress' comments
on these things beyond the "I" are equally directed at the counsellor as a person, and not only
when the counsellor is in session. The counsellor is required to bring aspects ofhis being into
the counselling session, and to use the knowledge of these aspects as a stage setting.
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

"When the counsellor recognizes that he or she is as mortal as the client, all
of the facades of superficiality, superiority, and inequality that may enter the
counselling relationship dissolve, and counsellor and client interact with
equality and genuineness. When the counsellor sees his or her own mortality
in the client, I contend this is empathy, not the forbidden act of
countertransference" (p. 5).
In this example, as with the more strictly religious counselling ideas mentioned above,
the goal is to make contact in session with something beyond the strictly individualized.
Vontress goes on to define 'mental health' as including balance and harmony with one's
spirituality (p. 7). Vontress seems to suggest that this sense ofbalance is only achievable in
the context of examination of one's own spiritual life, else this examination would be mere
guesswork.
Therefore, like J afari and Keshavarzi regarding Islamic counselling modalities, and like
Osiowy for Christian counselling, the goal ofVontress' existential style is geared at the
client's deeper meanings in life, and intends to help the client explore those meanings.
In discussing the applications of spiritual concerns in patient care, Seguil and Phelps
(2012) caution practitioners (these authors' comments are directed at physicians) that
providers "should consider their personal faith traditions, beliefs and practices, positive and
negative experiences, attitudes on faith and healing, and comfort and ability to participate in
another's spirituality or share their own" (p. 547). Again, then, the provision of care for the
spirit comes back to the provider as the tool. Rather than a set of procedures, spirituality in
counselling is a matter of the counsellor's ability to draw the client into spiritual examination,
and motivating the client to apply the results ofthat examination, whatever they may be. The
goal is not conversion to or from anything, but recognition of those beliefs as important to the
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

"I" of the individual client or patient (p. 548).
The Buddhist perspective of spirituality - as the connection of the self to the infinite views our spiritual nature as something deeply definitive of our individual personhood. In his
2009 book connecting modem psychodynamic theory to Buddhist thought on the self,
Franklyn Sills looks at the Buddhist conception of the "I" and the relationship of that "I" to
what Sills calls "the deeper truths" of our existences (p. 1). For Sills this is important, as the
lack of understanding of this relationship is the ultimate cause of "the suffering that we as
human beings create for ourselves and others" (p. 2).
Like Vontress' existentialism, Sills' reading of Buddhist philosophy begins with an
embrace of impermanence. Buddhist existentialism sees four "Noble Truths" in life. First,
Buddhism teaches that suffering exists; it is real and it is a part of our lives (p. 3). Second,
Buddhism teaches that suffering is caused by a failure to understand the selfs true nature (p.
4). We very often conceive of our lives on the basis of outward things, clinging to them, and
demanding that they do not change. We do this because we find security in what is known, as
we know how to achieve pleasure and avoid unpleasure within that environment. However,
because all oflife is impermanence and change, we are bound to fail in avoiding it. It is this
failure which is the origin of suffering.
In this part of Sills' articulation of the human self, I can see parallels with Epstein's
experiential hermeneutics. The drive to keep everything the way it is is similar to the attempt
to achieve a known sense of self-in-place. Also, from the perspective of Ortner's
making/made dyad, change is an unavoidable result of human existence. When we act to
conserve what already is, we set ourselves in opposition to a fundamental premise of life.
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

However, for Buddhists, there is an answer, where for Epstein and Ortner there wasn't
even a question. The third of Buddhism's Noble Truths is that freedom from suffering is
possible. Ultimately, this freedom is realized by understanding "that the self, which seems so
solid and stable, is really an ephemeral, contingent process, in which any particular form or
identity has only momentary existence" (p. 3). That is, embracing impermanence includes
embracing our moment-by-moment states of being as only those. Leading directly from this
is the fourth Noble Truth, showing that there is a way to achieve a modus vivendi with this
impermanence through ethical living and reflective enquiry about self and world (p. 4). This
is very much like Jafari's articulation of proximity to God, and in both the ultimate object of
enquiry is the nature of the relationship to the ultimate. However, while an Islamic viewpoint
sees that ultimate as something beyond human experience, Buddhist thought incorporates
that ultimate as the very core ofhuman experience. Buddhism sees what the individual
refers-to as 'self as only the third 'layer' of a person. The person exists simultaneously in
three aspects. The first of these is the form of the potential self that developed in relation to
that person's life experiences. This self-in-place is referred to as "atta". Atta exists as an
expression of the potential self, "citta". Citta is the inherent humanity of the person. All of
the advantages and limitations ofhuman form and thought are contained in citta, with atta
forming the results of the citta's engagement with the world of external experience, and of the
internal experience these external experiences engender.
Within citta, though, is that which is not touched by direct temporal-experiential
interaction. "Bodhicitta" is our individual piece of the ultimate, or as Sills describes, "the
already-enlightened ground state" (Sills, p. 4). Sills describes these levels as non-diametric
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

and "holographically enfolded", which I am perceiving as meaning that each of these three
are present in each facet of our lives from the cradle to the grave. From bodhicitta's presence
in everything, Sills articulates Buddhism's concept of "source" as the inherent connection of
humanity to the enlightened space beyond temporality- that thing within each of us that cries
out for connection to something beyond ourselves. To interrupt this connection is to offend
against our most basic humanity. "The greatest wounding any of us can experience is the
obscuration of source, and the subsequent disconnection from being" (p. 5).
This articulation resonates deeply for me. In my practicum proposal's discussion of
'trauma', it was described as an untethering of self from place by elimination of the founding
ideas of the operation of reality. Logically, a Buddhist program of awareness and
contemplation must begin with the self-conscious thing doing the contemplating (the atta).
This atta examines itself to try to determine the nature of her or his citta, the truest
expression of self. Through this examination of citta, bodhicitta is revealed. Traumatic events
would seem, then, to have the immediate impact of a radical insult to atta, throwing
knowledge of citta into disarray, and thus blocking engagement with bodhicitta (p. 7). Thus,
Sills "greatest wounding" is reflected in Epstein's hermeneutics and Ortner's personal/social
dyad.
Sills' viewpoint is useful from the standpoint of counselling, in that the relentless nature
of atta's building of itself requires relational experience with others (p. 6). Because the atta is
relational in nature, it is possible to engage with other selves (perhaps that of a counsellor) as
a means to draw experiences into the atta. These experiences engender contemplation of
citta, and maybe truer knowledge of bodhicitta. Sills notes (p. 11) that therapy can exist at
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

any of these levels, and seems to imply that work at progressively deeper levels is based on
progressively deepening therapeutic relationship.
For Sills, the ultimate goal of work at this most interior level has "the potential for truly
transcending the most painful and distorted conditions held within the self-system" (p. 12).
For Sills, the self is created by exposure to the world, and that exposure history determines
action in the world (pp. 13-15). Again, here exist tones ofEpstein and Ortner. It seems that
these two temporally-bound thinkers on humanity's nature are coming to the same
conclusions more spiritually-minded thinkers arrived-at long ago. Perhaps in defence of the
temporally-bound thinker, I believe that while Osiowy, Jaffir and Keshavarzi, Vontress, and
now Sills, are all working from a context established in the pre-existing relationship of the
self to the ultimate, Epstein and Ortner's grounding in empirical rationality seems to force
them to explain the self in terms of a fluid sculpting process carried-out over time. So, where
more secular counselling concepts see the self as something which develops, spirituallyinfluenced counselling tends to see the self as something developed but unknown. Perhaps it
is the definitive view of the nature ofbeing held by spiritual traditions which allows the ease
of articulation ofthat being, and it is the phenomenon-based constructivist position of being
which held-up its development in this mode for so long.
"In development of psychological and object-relations theory, the nature of
being and the self-sense are fundamental to understanding suffering and
personality formation. Yet, when one begins to enquire into the nature of
being, it can be like trying to grasp flowing water (Sills, p. 25).
Sills' grasp of the flowing water is grounded in his perspective of the individual. In
presuming, within the individual, a luminous connection to the ultimate, Sills can ground his

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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

therapeutic ideas in the very reality of the therapeutic moment as something sacred for the
individuals in the therapeutic space. While not arguing against my reading of Banks' Ethic of
Care, Sills' interpretation seems to provide the possibility of an even deeper connection.
Banks' articulation of Ethic of Care centres on a suspension of (most of) reality to allow the
client near-total freedom within the space. Sills' approach seems to contain a little more of a
path to tread.
Sills finds the process of counselling to be one of "unconcealment" (Sills, p. 26). Banks
seems to worry less about process, trusting in the radical suspension of reality as the catalyst
for therapeutic contact between the worker and client. In both these conceptions, though, the
central foundation is trust as opposed to technique.
This conforms to research indicating that it is the therapeutic relationship which is the
strongest predictor of therapeutic change for a client (Duff and Bedi, 201 0, p. 91 ). Duff and
Bedi found, however, that this is more than "being nice". Their findings regarding an analysis
of therapeutic behaviours predicting an alliance show that encouraging comments, smiles,
verbal prompts, and counsellor sharing of similar experiences carry little weight compared to
counsellor validation of client experience (p. 99), and a constellation of counsellor
behaviours indicating presence (p. 100).
Though presence and relationship are important, and Duff and Bedi do suggest that
"counsellors should probably be trained to emphasize validation during the early stages of
counselling" (p. 103), there isn't enough here to apply a "how-to" framework.
The content-based search did appear in my first few counselling sessions. From
counselling notes, it is clearer now that I started out by working very much from a cathartic
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

"doing" place. I was trying to solve problems. Everything I'd read and experienced to that
point notwithstanding, I was working from a need to respond to my own anxieties about what
I was doing. I hadn't yet grasped what I later came to see as the subtle art of counselling
work. Instead, I was responding to client issues with information and my perspective. When a
client had stated a wish in session around not being "broken", my immediate response was to
affirm that I didn't think the client was "broken"
What I hadn't yet fully absorbed was whether I thought the client was "broken" didn't
matter as much as what the client thought. I was still holding on to "doing" as the basis of the
work.
Thankfully, this was recognized. In supervision regarding the very session mentioned
above, Ryan James (CCC Director) and I spoke about about my having moved too far away
from counselling, and too close to "sympathy". As I was responding in session to my needs
(to do) , I had lost track ofthe client in the therapeutic space. Ryan and Brent had both
noticed this tendency, and had asked me to transcribe segments of sessions. In doing this
exercise, I was confronted very clearly with my need to fill space by talking. Also, it was
suggested I read a section of Strean and Freeman's (1988) exploration of counsellor anxiety
and wonder when working with patients. At the very beginning of the book, I found a
similarity between my experience and the authors' observation that "because young therapists
feel they have to earn their keep, they tend to talk too much. This interferes with the patient
observing himself, saying what he thinks, feels, and remembers of the past" (p. 7).
In the book, Strean recounts his work with a woman who didn't speak at all, and Strean's
emotional responses to this. Strean recounts feeling rejected by the client, and goes on to say
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that analysts may feel a whole range of emotions related to clients, emphasizing that
therapists must be aware of and monitor these emotions (p. 9).
Strean recounts how the client's silence impacted him personally, and how he had to
separate his personal responses from his work with the client. He suggests that "the analyst
should ask, "Who does this client remind me of? What emotion or wish or fantasy am I
bringing to this analysis that really does not belong but is present because it is a conflicted
part of my life?" (p. 13). On reflection, Strean saw "[he] was dealing with a second personal
problem- my own strong desire to succeed." (ibid.).
This chapter brought together a number of the individual pieces I had created and
considered thus far. I was concentrating, still, on "doing" as a means to "be successful". In
session with clients, this was translating into my need to show my understanding for the
client. Essentially, I was trying to show how present I was being by my depth of
understanding, displayed for the client. As a result, I was speaking too much, and very
probably at the wrong times.
Knowing why I was talking so much, I was able to be aware of it in the background of
my mind in future sessions. This is preferable to having it in the foreground of everything
while in session.
In addition, there was illuminated the element of connection to clients in the client's
moment. I had mentioned this necessity in the January 17 report to the field committee, but it
was after the Strean and Freeman reading I understood far better the idea of doing in the
context of being in a therapeutic setting. I saw that I was 'doing' when I followed Strean into
the trap he laid for himself in being "determined to help [the client] get involved in her
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

treatment so she could live a happier life, free from the terrifying ghosts of the past" (p. 13),
and then out again, when he saw that "when an analyst can truly see in himself conflicts
similar to the one the patient currently expresses, and when he faces the fact that patient and
therapist are similar, this is when we hit therapeutic awareness" (p. 14).
Strean was working with his own internal pushes-and-pulls when he was trying to have a
client speak, where I was working with my own when I was describing my understanding for
the client. Strean's assurances that this was all normal didn't make me feel a whole lot better,
but it did open a perceptual pathway to a deeper reading of the spiritual content in
counselling.
In his report of a pastoral encounter with a woman widowed by suicide, Richard Hughes
(2003) describes his work (totaling 4.5 hours in person and one phone conversation, pp. 44,
49) beginning with what seemed an extraordinarily thorough social and historical
genographic assay ofboth the client and the deceased. For such a short therapeutic
relationship, such detail seemed unnecessary. On a second reading of the piece (after having
read the Strean chapter) I saw in the detail the desire to truly understand the client, and the
willingness of Pastor Hughes to be silent, save only for pointed questions designed to move
the client to think about patterns and themes. On the basis of the detailed histories, Hughes
was able to "[point] out to [client] that her three husbands all displayed a homicidal intent,
either against her or against her children, and [ask] why she was attracted to them" (p. 53).
Initially, I was confused by Hughes' questions. With such a short relationship, and with
such specificity ofthe client's reasons for attending, why go down this path at all? On the
second (or third) reading, I saw that Hughes' purpose was more of co-existence of the client
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with her grief than it was about 'dealing with' or 'moving past' her feelings.
Keeping this perspective in mind, I was able to make a therapeutic connection with a
client only a few days later. This client, 34 years of age, had recently experienced the end of
a significant relationship, and had sought counselling for anger and frustration. This client
had, since the ending of this relationship, entered into other short-lived relationships, none of
which had really worked out. I spent some time with the client discussing past relationships'
chronologies, and asked the client about how long the client had been single since becoming
a teenager. Being newer than Hughes, I wasn't willing to ask a pointed question. It wasn't
until two sessions later that the topic of "single-time" came up again, allowing a discussion
of the possibility that the client may not have much knowledge of self independent of a
romantic relationship. The client confirmed that the client hadn't ever been single for a long
stretch of time, and I believe that this single piece of information had a significant impact on
the remainder of our work together.
This brings us to empathy and empathy's role in counselling. One may wonder why
empathy hasn't been discussed more fully up to this point, as Carl Rogers discussed the topic
frequently, it being the cornerstone of Rogers' person-centred practice. The reason is that I
had been seeing understanding and reflecting as empathy up to this time in the practicum.
That is, I was conceiving of empathy as something a counsellor does . It wasn't until my
encounter with Strean's client, with Hughes' widow, and my experience with my client that I
saw empathy as something more reflective of a person than of technique (Clark, 2007, p. 4).
I had been challenged around development of a sense of empathy for some months. I had
read Clark's review of Rogers' later thought on the subject, which showed that when empathy
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is reduced to a specific set of skills, the results are "appalling consequences and a complete
distortion of client-centred therapy" (Rogers, 1980, in Clark, p. 9; one can also see tones of
Duff and Bedi's cautions). In dissecting the distinction between empathy and sympathy,
Clark notes that their similarities do cause problems (p. 12), but that there exists a difference,
in that empathy is more about coming to an understanding of the whole person, where
sympathy is more geared towards the individual's well-being (p. 13). What makes sympathy
so fundamentally dangerous to the client-counsellor relationship is sympathy's desire for a
particular outcome ("well-being"). One must keep in mind that "well-being" is a subjective
quality, and that therefore the counsellor's desires for that well-being in a client may well be
shaped by the counsellor's view of what well-being is.
In this way, the distinction between ''understanding" and "knowing" becomes clearer.
The counsellor's role is to understand, and help the client to know the feeling ofbeing
understood. If the counsellor moves too far towards concern for client well-being, the client
is lost in the purposes of the counsellor's "knowledge" of the situation. This would only
disempower the client, as he or she is only being told what to do, that the problem they came
in with isn't actually the problem, and that the real problem runs backwards in time, perhaps
for decades. What becomes important in the counselling process, then, is the feeling of
loneliness, or of 'brokenness' on the part ofthe client. For it is in the supported vulnerability
of sharing those feelings that the client can more fully access them and their connections to
other aspects of the client's life. Egan and Schroeder (2009) note (p. 8) that a "good session"
requires "more effective living" on the part of the client. In my development as a counsellor,
I confronted the idea that "more effective living" did not mean a cessation of problems. If
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"more effective living" can include a client's expanded understanding of her or his problems,
then it isn't necessary for the counsellor to be concerned with "well-being", as defined by any
one outcome. My earliest attempts at empathy weren't successful because they were aimed at
improving well-being. The later attempts were more successful because they were rooted in
my understanding of the client's experience and of the meanings of that experience. My
assurances that a client isn't 'broken' amounts to little more than some guy quoting from his
own perceived reality. My asking about time spent single as an adult requires the client to
explore the client's own life experience and his or her own perceived reality.
This represents much of the core of the general trend from content-focus to processfocus I have attempted to describe and understand in this report. In my work with Grief
Group, with visitors to St. Mike's, and with individual clients at both UHNBC and CCC, I
started from the beginning - looking for things to do in an attempt to be successful and a
good student. Over time, in each of these experiences, I learned (and re-learned) that it is not
the role of counsellors to do anything, except be understanding of how clients feel. Because
there is nothing to be done for grief except to experience grief, because there's nothing I can
do to alleviate the general poverty of my St. Mike's visitors, because there's no grand gesture
to solve clients' counselling problems, the only appropriate counselling response is the
process-related concerns of relationship and trust building, ofunderstanding feelings and
meanings, and creating possibility of change in perspective.
In the next section of this report, I will be revisiting many of these circumstances,
providing examples of how process-focus changed much of the way I worked with clients.
That is, it will attempt to demonstrate how the application of practice experience and
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supervision to theoretical knowledge has deepened my understanding of social work praxis in
spirituality-informed counselling work.

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Chapter 4: Praxis

These practicum experiences have been a whirlwind of variety and depth far beyond
anything I could have hoped for as a student. The richness and my experience of having to
stretch the boundaries of my "comfort zone" more-or-less all of the time have impacted me at
the level of my personhood, and to numerous areas of my practice as a social worker and
counsellor. These personal and professional boundary changes are so varied, numerous, and
interpenetrating that I have found it difficult to separate them out in order to discuss them.
In being confronted with the anxiety of the unknown, or of the inability to know I am

"succeeding", I was forced to confront the constant presence of anxiety in my own life. In
facing this presence, I have been forced to examine the perspectives of the world which make
my anxiety-filled world rationally possible. While doing the readings (andre-readings) of
thought on the person, on the nature of counselling, on the relationship between humanity
and our imperfections, I was coming to a deeper understanding of myself, in addition to
gaining the rawer knowledge from the research.
Simply put, the more I understand about myself, the more I am forearmed against the
intrusion of my own perceptions and desires for the client. I can push these "to the back" and
focus on the client in that moment. While this is important, these readings and supervision
sessions exposed me to a whole collection of thought about what it is that connects me to the
Ultimate, and how that impacts the work I have chosen. It is this thought and perspective,
exemplified by the movement from content to process-focus, or from doing to being, that is
the core of the perspective I bring to praxis; or the lens through which I see the theory
informing actual work with clients.
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Philip Burnard's 1999 book "Practical Counselling and Helping" is a very good one, with
well laid-out chapters and an accessible style. As beneficial as the book is, Burnard's chapter
'Models of the Person' seems to look rather glibly at spiritual content regarding a person's
self-concept, as it relates to counselling practice. Burnard's view of the role of"God" in our
lives seems somewhat superficial. He notes that "[ t]his point of view is seen in a number of
world religions. It covers the idea of us being 'born into sin' and being 'redeemable' by belief
in a god or a higher power" (p. 63).
With all due respect to the author, he may be looking at the whole idea of spirituality in a
counselling paradigm without the required depth. My reading, experience, and re-reading
during this practicum shows me that a spiritual orientation, applied with care and a solid
theoretical background, is far away from the directive and prescriptive counselling Burnard
describes. Hughes' work did not appear to me to be prescriptive or directive. While Hughes
did ask pointed questions I might not have chosen to ask within the parameters of that
counselling relationship, Hughes did not tell his client what to do, how to think, or what to
believe about her problems. This distinction exemplifies for me the distance between content
and process-focus in human services work.
Burnard's view of spirituality in counselling seems to be focused on concerns about
content. A good example is Burnard's concern with the prescriptive nature of the enterprise,
and the mention of being 'born into sin' (with the prescriptions set as the means to escape
sin). Burnard quotes (at p. 63) the famous psychologist Erich Fromm, crediting Fromm with
"suggesting" that "religion offers something of a bargain" based on the acceptance of rigid
externally-derived control as a guarantee of a better afterlife.
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However, I see far more nuance in the role of spirituality in counselling work than
Burnard seems to. The idea of 'original sin', as described by Burnard, depicts a faultiness
within the human spirit. This need not be so. As Jafari's description provides, knowing that
humans are incomplete, our knowledge must be incomplete. Jafari acknowledges that human
judgement and reasoning are necessary in examinations of self and relationship to God. This
necessity of reason in an environment of incomplete knowledge gives us the permission to
risk and be willing to examine ourselves so that we can improve. After all, we have to reason
on the basis of something, and this something must ultimately relate to action within the
world (ours, or another's of which we are aware). Looked at this way, the idea of 'original sin'
becomes 'original disconnection from God'. For Jafari, this disconnection is seen more as in
invitation for self examination and awareness of self and God, and not necessarily a deficit.

As an element of practice, however, this outlook provides for more. By recognizing
human imperfections, counsellors must recognize their own imperfection. No matter how
experienced, as with Strean (1988), counsellors can fall prey to their own subtle desires. We
must be able to discover the presence and sources of those desires. Most specifically to me,
as an element of my practice in the future, this outlook will help to remind me that the slide
back into a content-focus can be an easy one for me in times when I am uncertain. However,
while I am reminded of my own imperfections, I am reminded that these are a consequence
of my fundamental humanity. I see in this the potential linking of myself to the clients'
lifeworlds, and their struggles with the imperfections of their lives. I can 'resonate' (if the
reader likes) with the client's feelings related to the disappointments, struggles for
significance, and questions of personal meaning. In addition, my private and personal sense
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ofbeing imperfect frees me from the need to 'say the right thing'. It requires only that I be
able to communicate that I can sense and acknowledge the client's feelings .
Another point of praxis is to be found related to recognition of the client's past as an
element of the present. Sills' description of the selfs development in relation to worldly
experience (p. 27) recognizes the power of the past in the formation of perception. However,
the Buddhist idea of atta, and its distinction from citta, allows for the past's impacts on the
present's self, but without Burnard's fatalism. This idea recognizes that atta is only a response
to the world, and that the citta, the true self, is something waiting to be found and explored.
In this, the individual moves beyond determinism, and becomes more than her or his
individual past. Even in cases one finds in counselling work related to corrections - where
some clients may have done terrible things- the idea of atta being only an indicator of the
client's lifeworld, and not necessarily the client's true self, provides a possible vector for
client exploration and understanding of his actions. Thus, the idea of citta is empowering for
clients, as it allows the possibility of a more personal ownership of the client's actions in the
future.
Described in this way, the principles of empathy and understanding require a significant
duality on the part of the counsellor. On the one hand, the counsellor must be present with the
client in the client's moment. On the other, the counsellor must be aware of his triggers, his
current concerns, and how they may show-up while in session with a client or a group.
I had an opportunity to witness this duality and its implications applied to spiritual
counselling practice principles during the third session of the Grief Group. This session was
to be led by Lauren, and specifically devoted to the topic of spirituality in the grief
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expenence.
During a "human sculpture" exercise, Lauren was leading an effort to help clients
display physically what might be more difficult to articulate verbally. Lauren discussed the
idea ofbeing "angry with God" for the loss of the loved one all had experienced. What had
stayed with me was the assertion that anger with God was a natural and very normal response
to grief. Beyond this wonderful bit of practice knowledge, there exists a deeper meaning for
me. Lauren's discussion brought the concept of an individual's day-to-day relationship with
God into focus as an element of an individual's lived experience. Discussing anger with God,
and the belief that God can handle our anger, allows one a fuller relationship with that
something beyond ourselves. In this sense, God (however conceived by the client) can most
certainly be "in the room" in session because it can bring the wholeness of the client into
fuller articulation- both for the counsellor, and perhaps the client, too.
The spiritual implications of this are far and away more profound for me in terms of a
lens for practice in the future. This view of a day-to-day relationship with God as a part of a
person's lived experience necessarily creates that relationship in human terms. Because each
person's relationship with God is a human relationship, Burnard's "fatalist" conjecture is
further weakened if one's relationship with her or his view of the Ultimate can become
envisioned as a partnership. If, as Jafari states, consideration of God and one's relationship
with God must be carried out in terms ofhumanjudgement and reason, then that other in the
relationship (God) will be described in terms extrapolated from human experience.
This is important for my practice in the future, as it removes a stumbling block I have
encountered in my attempts to grasp counselling as presence, and presence as being. With
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specific regard to the Grief Group participants, Lauren acted to maintain group safety by
speaking of the relationship with God as a partnership. By speaking of the relationship to
God in this way, Lauren made that relationship a human one, placing the definitive power in
that relationship in the hands of the client(s). While this is certainly an act of client
empowerment, I see it also as an inherently spiritual act as well. For me, it represents a level
of practice including a level of comfort with "letting the client go". As an element of my
journey towards process focus in counselling, I become more automatically mindful that the
clients are full and complete beings outside of their relationship with a counsellor. Just as
someone's "grief journey" is subjective and individualized, so is someone's "life journey". I
am not the sole determinant of someone's mental health, and any attempt to be so would
disempower the client as much as to confirm Burnard's fatalist spirituality. In the final view,
the individual has (in most cases) volunteered to come to counselling. Logically, then, this
individual perceived that something in their lives might function better that it is currently,
and made the decision to seek aid. All of this happened long before the client even met her or
his counsellor, and represents a major act of personal strength.
Because these helping relationships, secular or otherwise, are based in human terms, the
counsellor can work from a spiritual perspective with a client without risking overreach. Or
at least, without doing so in a manner greater than with any other perspective; existentialist,
cognitive-behavioural, what have you. Also, this means that a counsellor working from a
spiritual perspective need not necessarily be a religious expert. Anyone can acknowledge
another's anger with God, giving depth and meaning to a person's relationship with God, and
the whole of their experience. By connecting at this level with a person (or group) a
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counsellor can perhaps help move the client to think and feel about the events and
perspectives bringing him or her to counselling. While certainly no more a panacea than any
other vector to stimulate this motion, spiritually-informed practice, conducted from a
standpoint of relationship with something beyond the self, can provide a vector to access the
interiority of the client's lifeworld- that is, to be in psychological contact.
In his frequently-referenced paper on the topic of resiliency and thriving, Charles Carver
(1998) creates a useful (even if skeletal) addition to what is discussed here. Briefly, for the
moment, Carver's distinction sees the possibility of "thriving" being something more than
"resilience". Carver notes the capacity of many to experience an improvement of overall
function after a traumatic or adverse event. Lauren's idea about relationship with God,
experienced in human terms, creates a freedom in that relationship. Carver's discussion of
thriving creates a freedom for the client in defining the remainder of life. That is, a
combination of Carver's basic distinction, and the idea of a human (and therefore changeable)
relationship with God (or the universe, or physical causality, or the future, or an ideal), could
combine to form something with considerable potential therapeutic power.
Carver was examining the phenomenon of people experiencing adverse or traumatic
events, and not only recovering from these events, but actually coming to "function at a
continuing higher level" than before the event (p. 250). Carver's paper attempts to describe
possible factors in this phenomenon, ultimately arriving at a three-way interaction between
constructs like "importance", "engagement", and "confidence", arranged relative to each
other in an (x,y,z) geometry. Having said all of this, and though Carver is making a brave
attempt, for the purposes of the present report, what's important for me is more limited. I am
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interested in this paper because of Carver's attempts to describe what "thriving" really is.
Carver makes his most general attempt at page 250, where he notes that "sometimes people
who experience adversity report later that the experience resulted in greater acceptance of
themselves or others (or the world); some people report a change in personal philosophy or
orientation to life, changes in priorities, and so on".
However, all of this comes with an academic caution. Carver notes the theoretical
possibilities, mentioned by others, that these sort of internal, perspective-related results of
adversity may "hint at accommodation" or "a blunting of expectations" (p. 250). Indeed, in a
footnote to the point:
"A separate problem with this sort of outcome is that responses of this form
are harder than are behavioural responses to distinguish from rationalization
or dissonance reduction, which would not be regarded as thriving under any
reasonable definition of the term. Although a given observed positive
response to trauma may actually be rationalization or dissonance reduction,
or just a positive reframing of the experience, I will disregard this possibility
throughout this article" (p. 250).
From a spiritually-informed perspective, the necessity of objective criteria is dimmed,
because the relational focus is something beyond the individual. That is, because the
individual's focus for thought and action is the relationship to something beyond him- or
herself, and because this relationship is subjectively described, whether it is a form of
dissociation to see suffering and anger as blessings, as challenges to be overcome, as some of
those things that have made us the people we are, isn't an objective question: It is a clinical
question.
If the counsellor senses patterns of spiritual thought leading to an obviation of agency,
this is something that can be addressed in-session with the client. However, as an
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acknowledgement that the counsellor isn't able to make right/wrong determinations about a
client's state of being, the counsellor must work with what is present in the counsellor/client
relationship, and not directly with any client's individual relationship with God. By working
within the client/counsellor relationship the client can come to see her or his spiritual life's
benefits and difficulties and perhaps be moved to examine them with the counsellor, with
private study, with involvement in spiritual groups, etc. As long as the counsellor recognizes
that the client's spiritual centre and movement is something for the client, spiritual
counselling can act as a guard against fatalism in spiritual life. But it is worth emphasizing
that this guarding function is based in the strength of the counsellor/client relationship.
In another work on resilience, Bononno (2004) points out that although it is common
wisdom that an individual who experiences loss will have some sort of reaction, there is no
evidence that these sort of reactions must occur in any individual. Further, in a 2012 paper,
this same author sees reactions to adverse life events as existing along a continuum, thus
allowing for the possibility for little to no reaction being something other than a pathological
"absence of grief' (Bowlby, 1980, in Bononno, 2004, p. 23). Continuing (into 2012, at least)
is the preconception that trauma/loss work will be needed for most people experiencing
adverse events in their lives.
Going further, Bononno notes that theory has not been able to penetrate to the level of
individual differences, perhaps because our measures aren't sufficiently precise (2004, p. 80).
What this means is that academic thought on patterns of coping after adversity presumes,
without evidence, that people can't face post-adversity life without intervention, that our
methods for determining specific level of required help are specific enough, and that the
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ideas on which we're basing these determinations are more than constructs based on other
constructs (2012, p. 78).
However, a spiritual view doesn't necessarily have to rely on mass-validated diagnostic
criteria. By starting with interiority, psychological response to adversity in life can begin
with the individual and move outward, into the fundamental questions of self and existence
adversity can entail. In this way, I find practice to be enriched by working with the client to
describe the client's lifeworld, rather than presuming that specific helps will be needed.
The idea ofthe wholeness of the individual as the centre ofbeing and oftherapeutic
intervention isn't new, of course. Alfred Adler (b.l870-d.l937) is rightly considered a giant
in the field. In one of the more creative papers I've read, James Overholser (20 10) conducts a
"simulated interview" with Adler based on translations of Adler's published work throughout
Adler's career. In this paper, Overholser describes Adler's outlook to psychology and
treatment as grounded in the perspective of the self-conscious self who is the client.
"Heredity only endows him with certain abilities. Environment gives him
only certain impressions. These abilities and impressions, and the manner in
which he "experiences" them - that is to say, the interpretations he makes of
these experiences- are the bricks which he uses in his own creative way in
building up his attitude towards life .. .it is his attitude towards life that
determines his relationship to the outside world." (Adler, 1935, in
Overholser, 2010, p. 349).
I suppose that for me, as a practitioner, I am most puzzled by the idea of a "healthy level
of adjustment" in an adult therapy context. For Bonanno, and Adler, and Carver, the question
of psychological function after a life stressor is inherently individualized. One of the reasons
I dwell on this point as I do is that much thought on resilience, recovery, etc., seems to
assume that "recovery" is a unidimensional line. So, in practice, the individual is being
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"resilient" or "recovering" only to the degree that they are now precisely the same person
they were before the event.
I do not believe that this conforms to human experience. Events will change us, either
directly (as for Epstein), procedurally (as for Ortner), or perceptually (as for Adler). This
changed person is, again, a new person, whose goals, dreams, and beliefs are altered forms of
that which existed before. To admit this, however, seems akin to admission of defeat; an
admission that the event has somehow "beaten" the person. It follows that the criteria on
which "beatenness" has been adjudged is the degree to which the event has changed the
person. However, if all events change us, then to determine "recovery" through this lens is to
deny the humanity of the client. Spiritually-informed counselling practice is positively
implicated here, in that the connectivity of the new individual to the world is not placed in
reference to the adverse event (or any temporal event), but in reference to the whole of the
individual's life. Viewed this way, the individual isn't pressured through diagnostic criteria
and folk wisdom about what "should be" in terms of recovery at three days, three weeks,
three years, etc. Rather, the individual is encouraged and supported in determining the new
connectivities that exist and emerge.
Spiritual approaches in this case can relate to views of the self as unfinished and
adaptable, so as to make the client's journey of the new self a journey of discovery beyond
fear, of joy in possibility beyond loss. These ideas can help a person see illness as a chance to
show courage, see despair as an opportunity to change something needing changing, or see
suffering as a chance to grow as a person. Once again, I'd like to reiterate that none of this is
a blithe view of that suffering; the individual's potentially soul-wrenching present. Indeed, it
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is within the perception of this suffering as something which cannot be 'fixed' by the
counsellor that the counsellor and client relationship comes to the fore. This relationship
allows only that emotions and thoughts be expressed, placing no valence or hierarchy on
them, and thus allowing all possibilities to be equally valid. The counselling relationship, by
this view, becomes the format within which those possibilities are examined.
The idea of the therapeutic relationship takes on special importance once the conjectures
of directionality are removed. Directionality is useful for the purposes of providing
guideposts or touchstones, but in reference to any one individual client, the only useful guide
is the interiority of that client. The paradox here is clear: Counselling is based on the
aggregate oflessons learned by ourselves and by other counsellors, but all of these lessons
are meaningless in each separate interaction with each separate client.
The disconnect I felt around this was felt very acutely in the planning of the fourth and
fifth Grief Group sessions. I had become more comfortable with the idea of process and flow
in the grief journey, and the co-facilitator and I discussed how to address the continuum of
responses to grief. Where I had felt the need to actively treat the group members' grief, I now
better understood the goal of comfort with expression. This represented, for me, a large part
of "letting go", as my perspective had changed to a role of support, not teacher or wizard.
Working from the perspective of grief behaviours existing on a continuum between
instrumental and expressive forms of grief (Versalle & McDowell, 2005), the session's goals
reflected an emerging "feel" I had, regarding my role in the group. Instead of explaining what
was going on (as I had done in the first and second sessions), I was trying to create
opportunities for people to talk to each other (or, at least, in the presence of each other) about
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their personal grief experience. Like with my "broken" client a few months later, what I think
about the participants' grief experience isn't as relevant as the experience itself and how it is
navigated. This was the central idea behind the fifth grief group session's discussion of 'ritual'
in grief. Evidencing my movement from content to process-focus, I used the open-ended,
functional definition of ritual supplied by Running and Girard's 2008 paper- the same one
which I had thought so useless on my first reading. The main idea here was that ritualwhatever it turned out to be for the participant - was something that could be entered into and
exited by the client in the psychological sense (if not necessarily the physical one). Here, the
goal was the creation of a truly different reality where grief can be felt acutely, where
homage can be paid, and which can be exited again. This seems to me to be a true departure
from categorizations, in that the roadmap available is internal to the actor (the grieving
person). Whether with an individual or a group, spiritually-influenced counselling must focus
on the person who is experiencing, and the only window to this experience is inside the
client's mind. We may be rebuilding a roadmap almost completely, and very likely we will
only be able to travel with them a short way on the totality of their journey. It may be that the
therapeutic relationship can only begin the work of rebuilding after a grief experience. The
key, perhaps, lies in the focus on the interiority but directed outwards to the world.
Groups number four and five represented a letting go of my own desires for client
improvement. I gave tools only, around concepts like "sacred space" in ritual. Lauren's
session three acknowledgement that anger with God is something we all feel frees that anger
from many external strictures, allowing it to be faced and expressed without shame or denial.
I feel that sessions four and five became the beginning of my movement away from the
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

strictures on me, and those I had been imposing on the Grief Group participants. In the same
way that it was okay to be angry with God, it was okay to be more of a learner/experiencer
like the group members. In session five, my comfort with letting-go was more manifest, as
can be seen in the formal session notes, completed after the session.
+I think that opening the check-in with asking for "one discovery, one
difficulty" was successful, as it got people into their feelings, while creating
a sort of container for the discussion, allowing a little more consciousness of
time than [co-facilitator] and I have been able achieve thus far. The talking
stick idea was applied at the beginning, but seemed to naturally fall into
disuse.
+We began with a discussion of what rituals were. I found that during
various pieces of this discussion, I felt blank, for trying to keep up with the
discussion. More than once, I had to consult my sheet to place myself in the
discussion.
+Ultimately, the group came to discussion ofwhat sorts of rituals they
already engage in. [co-facilitator] and I were able to support the group
members in the use of these preexistent ritual forms. We didn't really go into
the hows of creating our own "sacred space", again, concentrating on the
preexistent forms. However, we were to guide some discussion of safety in
ritual, and in developing goals in ritual.
Clearly, this "letting-go" isn't always easy. Indeed, while I had created the session plan
to be very general, hoping for free discussion about creating space to grieve, I felt
ungrounded throughout the session for all of that generality. I kept looking over the session
plan during the session for some solid direction, even though I'd written the thing to avoid
these very qualities.
Even though I was having trouble with the format I'd come up with, by the end of the
session the group had settled into a discussion around what rituals for grief the members
were already engaging in. This was telling for me, for even though there wasn't much
structure laid into the session plan, the group member's interaction molded a therapeutic

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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

means by which to discuss ritual. A means I had never even considered. In terms of
experiential knowledge, I think that this session may have been the most important for me. In
many ways, I was more an observer of the group than in any other of the sessions. Although
there wasn't much in the session plan by way of structure, there were specified goals. Most of
these were replaced in-session in favour of other issues related to time when grieving is
expressed, and personal spaces to grieve. What I saw here was an example of the natural
process of grief, being experienced and encountered and worked-through by people
experiencing it. What occured amongst the participants was the beginnings of new directions
moving outward (not forward) into a future where grief is present- and, yes, may always be
-but where that grief, and any losses it represents, are only one part of a whole lived life.
The idea of grief being so contained, while being so inherently undefined, was a difficult
thing to assimilate in an intellectual sense, to say nothing about a practical application. In
looking for one, I came back to Worden's (1991) book on grief counselling. This may rightly
be called a seminal book on the topic, perhaps due to its care to articulate a number of
perspectives on grief. I was no longer trying to control therapeutic impact or "fix" grief, but I
still felt I needed some way of speaking about it with the members of the group. Further, I
needed a way of articulating the grief process without imposing any directionality, and
allowing for the oscillation of emotion experiencing grief. One of the perspectives to which
Worden calls attention is the "numbness", "yearning", "despair", "disorganization"
constellation (this from Bowlby & Parkes, 1970).
What was so attractive about this for me as someone working with those experiencing
grief is its allowance for chaos and a back-and-forth of feelings, showing that these
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

experiences are not symptoms of grief, but that they are grief itself. So, without boundary,
one can sob, yearn, feel that everything is unreal, and needs only to accept that this is what is
at this moment.
It is this focus on acceptance and mindfulness which informed the development and

delivery of the last two sessions of the group. Mindfulness ideas are a natural fit here for
their objective of removal of the rational, analytical self. Mindfulness practice is, at core, the
practice of "attending to the relevant aspects of experience in a non-judgemental manner"
(Ludwig & Kabat-Zinn, 2008, in Farb, Anderson, & Segal, 2012, p. 71). These latter authors
see in mindfulness practice two equally important aspects. First, present-moment sensations
are attended to. Second, these sensations and emotions are observed without any application
of a perspective on them as 'good' or 'bad'. The objective is stated to be that emotions and
experiences are treated as events which the individual does not seek to judge (p. 71).
Interestingly, these authors seem to go so far as to refer to it as a suspension of the need to
"manipulate emotions through evaluations, to rationally control the situation" (p. 72).
Mindfulness practice trains clients to exercise attentional control, but also uses this increased
control to "reduce habitual patterns of evaluation" (ibid.). Kostanski and Hassed (2008) note
that "above all, mindfulness meditation or practice is primarily focused on non-doing, as
distinct from doing, and in principle clashes with any formalized approach to therapy, which
aims to fix rather than heal or prevent disorder" (p. 16).
"Fix rather than heal" draws a distinction which places mindfulness practice firmly
within the logical reach of spiritually-informed practice. The key link here is non-elevation
of individuality- the person experiencing- to central focus . Mindfulness attempts to have
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

the individual's reactions to events (thoughts, feelings, sensations) detach from the
originating events themselves. In this case, the individual can come to see the event and the
reaction to the event as distinct, leading the individual away from being controlled by
emotions, defined by them, and towards a sense of control not defined or limited by the
boundaries of cognitive understanding.
This formulation allows the individual to pick and choose what avenues into the world of
experience he or she will tread. It does this by allowing a view of the world in which the
individual's true (or truer) self is engaged as an actor, as opposed to a reactor. This brings us
back to the distinction made between "fixing" and "healing". Where "fixing" implies
restoration to previous function, "healing" acknowledges damage has occured and tries to
restore function , but without necessary reference to previous function at all. It is an effort of
shedding all of those things clouding our perspectives of ourselves; those things others
wanted for us, those things we want as a means to attain something else. As these drop away,
we are left with a clearer vision of ourselves and of the world. This is the "zero point" of
J afari's articulation of the search for God through reason and judgement. Without the

baggage of the "shoulds" of our lives, our reason and judgement become more precise, more
reflective of our true selves and what we are capable of being. It is the return to the client's
cleaner view of self which allows more holisticly constructive risks to be taken (Kottler,
2010, p. 10, see also Symington & Symington, 2012).
While session five contained some content elements in ritual, that content was entirely
open-ended. Indeed, session five ended with an unplanned discussion about the rituals each
of the participants engage in on a daily basis already. Likewise, session six was planned to
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

engage with the constructs in the Bowlby and Parkes constellation only so much as to give
each piece a name. The activity in each individual's moment-by-moment experience exists
beyond names, of course, but the objective was a template by which to sort out the
individual's feelings as they occured. This was intended to allow the participants to
acknowledge these experiences as existing, though not definitive of the moment of the person
experiencing it. Content was moved to the back, favouring spontaneity and creation amongst
the participants. In fact, the end of session six came and the group still hadn't really discussed
the yearning/numbness/despair constellation in these terms. Far from a failure, I considered
this to be a success in stimulating honest dialogue between the group members. In sharing
their experiences (as it happened, of their experiences of the discomfort of others with the
participants' grief), the content oftheir own experiences became the content of the session.
We carried forward the discussion of Bowlby and Parkes' constellation to session
number seven. Here, mindfulness was specifically addressed. The group members were each
given cards with the three grief elements (numbness, yearning, despair) and another headed
"reorganization". The group discussed examples of each of these on their grief journey, and
either its impact, or their individual response. The key here was the recognition of the feeling
with knowledge that it is part of the process of grief. From a praxis standpoint, I was happy
the participants were discussing their responses for the benefit of all, and although there was
certainly present an air of these responses being "negative", there did remain at least an
element of mindfulness practice, in that the participants did become more able to sort there
feelings into categories.
Of course, this was a psychoeducational group, and not mindfulness training. Still, I had
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

the chance to see shades of the potential of the inclusion of mindfulness practice in realworld work.
In the final analysis, mindfulness practice is a spiritual practice, because it attempts to
get beyond our responses, our reactions to the world. In so doing we can shed all of the
internalized lessons of our experience and history, and connect to some aspect of the self that
is us and us alone. We can face the world and have life be more than something that happens
to us. By achieving contact with something beyond our moment-by-moment experience, we
come to see there is a world beyond our experience. While we can study and contemplate, we
acknowledge that this world will forever be beyond our full contemplation. We accept we are
engaged in a search for the ultimate within ourselves - not in reference to the external world.

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Chapter 5: Conclusions and Recommendations

Throughout this practicum course, I have had the fortune of exposure to many
perspectives, locations, and forms of practice as a counsellor and social worker. I have also
had somewhat of the misfortune to have to write about it. My work in spiritual care created
an openness in me which I think made the move from a content to a process-focus possible.
By becoming more able to think and work in an environment where concern with clients'
human problems is based in something beyond our individualities, I became better able to see
more and more of myself in this context, not only as a practitioner, but as a person. While
working with my hospital-based clients, I learned to keep more and more conscious of the
distinction between my needs as an individual, and what is expected from me as a
practitioner.
I have tried in this report to condense and to articulate a whole evolution in my practice
knowledge, ideas, and outlook. Notes of my journal entries, poetry, thoughts on client
sessions, notes on client sessions, etc., can offer perhaps an account of my activities and their
meanings. However, none of this can transmit the confusion, loss, and elation as I felt it. I
have described my transitions as a movement from a focus on content in the work I was
doing, to one of the process of the work I was doing. For reasons discussed previously, it is
impossible to predict the outcome of a social work or therapeutic interaction or relationship.
What is important is the characteristics of these relationships, and how the student encounters
the uncertainties within it. As in the introduction, this may be the only predictor of how they
will be encountered in the future.
I conclude from all of this that, first, professional-level work in this field isn't wholly
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

determined by knowing how to respond, but significantly by the qualities of that response.
While theoretical knowledge is the origins of our work, it is the willingness to be personally
open to the immediacy of our client's situation which is its living, breathing heart.
Second, in moving past "What will I do if... ", the social worker must find within himself
something to rely on. Theoretical knowledge aside, something of the social worker will
always be present in the interaction. From this, one recommendation I might make would be
to continue building an environment of support for students in practical education. If
theoretical knowledge isn't enough, and if some of the elemental premises of counselling and
human services are still debated, it remains to the dyad of the student and the student's
supervision to explore what exists for the student as the basis of his or her aspired work. In
my case, coming to an understanding ofhuman views of God and God's relationship to
humanity allowed a view of the person emphasizing the wonder of the search for the
completion of the self. However, this need not necessarily be the focus of examination for
every student.
Another recommendation would be to expand opportunity for students to be recorded in
session, and to view those recordings with a supervisor. The CCC's system for doing so is
highly valuable, and these sorts of places should be more the rule than the exception. Further,
I might suggest that these opportunities be a regular and significant aspect of all a social
worker's training, and not limited to formal practica alone.
I would recommend strongly that venues be developed for (or by) students of
counselling or social work for practical experience in spiritual care. While many recognize
the role of the spirit in our day-to-day lives, we secular Westerners often leave this area of
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

ourselves unexplored. As people who aspire to work with and accept the totality of others,
we ought to have some understanding of all of the aspects of ourselves; including our
spirituality. Spending time working in this mode can help to bring a student into touch with
these levels of self, and hopefully of others.
In this practicum experience, I have come to see that counselling thought and philosophy
isn't as bounded and defined as one might expect. Rather than proceeding from solid
knowledge, counsellors learn bearings and approaches within what seems now a nebulous
conglomeration of ideas about the self and various types of events. As this is the case, I
would recommend that practical education placements be constructed so as to include work
in more than one location and one mode. This aspect of the course was valuable, as it
expanded the fields from which I could draw in responding to social work or counselling
problems.
My interactions with clients became more about the clients than my categorizations. As
the worker's focus is shifted away from the worker's own "me", that worker is increasingly
free, as a worker, during time with a client. For this to remain focused on the client, the
worker requires a wider view of self and the client as p eople, so that this freedom can remain
grounded in client experience. I would suggest that counselling training come to include
study in philosophy and various theologies of the world. Not only might this further broaden
the base from which counsellors and social workers conceptualize their clients, but it may
add expanded skills in intercultural and interfaith practice.
Along these lines, I would recommend that workers-in-training be exposed to clients
from different socio-economic backgrounds, perhaps specifically the poor and very poor in
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Running Head: The Spirit in Counselling

our society. In addition to providing practical experience working with an underserved and
sometimes difficult-to-serve population, the student could come to absorb some of the often
profound wisdom held by street-affected people. Indeed, I have more than once asked clients
of middle-class origins questions about trust, of safety, and of the limits of friendship, drawn
from a perspective of the very poor in our society.
The overarching metaphor of this report has been change. The underlying concern has
been the lines along which change can be thought of, reified, and articulated. My route has
been one of exploration of the spiritual and philosophical sides of myself, my clients, and my
aspired profession. Paradoxically, as I moved myself away from interactions with clients,
locations, and tasks, I was better able to move closer towards them in my spirit. Once all (or
most) of what is "me" in the moment of the interaction was moved away, it became more
possible to engage with the client as an "I": Just a human thing that thinks and feels and is
aware of the presence of those thoughts and feelings . This "I" can remove the filter of its
own experience, engaging with another at the level of that other's own experience.
Once again, the importance of the support I have received from family, friends, coworkers, student colleagues, supervisors, and professors has been incalculable during my
strange and sometimes perilous journey. For all of the answers I have found, I have learned
to be more concerned with questions. Of these, the most important remains.
Now what?

84

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