Beginning counsellors’ performances of self to client audiences

Abstract

This chapter suggests the counselling environment could be viewed as a professional and social stage upon which counsellors make performance works that communicate and model experiences of their authentic selves. Counselling provides unusually safe and controlled environments in which personal realities are commonly communicated, assessed, and challenged. Its processes also rely upon clear communication, mutual understanding, and the successful co-construction of narratives that recognise client needs, goals, and outcomes. It is arguable that the act of counselling, founded upon truly fundamental values, conditions, and aspirations of human relationships, may at best be described as a mutually believable performance in a defined yet temporary relational moment. However, for the beginning counsellor the therapeutic encounter may be just that. Constrained by the need to maintain harmonious relations that enhance client disclosure and therapeutic change, new counsellors may feel that to present their actual selves, a self that they perceive incongruent with the counsellor identity and expectations of the client, could be counter-productive. Consequently, for the purposes of the service relationship they may withhold self in favour of a more acceptable, personally safer, yet less effective counsellor persona. Carl Rogers’s person-centred counselling foregrounds a discussion in which Erving Goffman’s common-sense notion of the self contextualises the inner conflict that results from beginning counsellors’ struggles to present both their professional personas and their authentic selves.1 It suggests that performing the role and becoming the role is a natural step in counsellor development, and invites comment on the humanistic counsellor’s struggle toward authenticity in the therapeutic relationship. Whilst the exercise of counselling seems to contradict the seeming artifice of a performance, this chapter suggests that personal truths may be influenced moment-to-moment by the emergent self in both personally and professionally congruent and relationally authentic performances.