'We all act better than we know how': A dramaturgical treatment of beginning counsellors' performances of self

Abstract

Counselling invites participants into a safely controlled and closed environment, in which personal realities may be not only communicated reflectively but also challenged. This chapter suggests that the counselling space can be viewed as a socio-professional stage upon which beginning counsellors make and rehearse performance works with their client/audiences. Prompted by an idealised model of the counselling persona, and armed with theory and therapeutic interventions, these performances tentatively present the new counsellor’s self, a self initially dissonant and unfamiliar. It is a performance that, to be professionally effective, relies upon an appropriate presentation of self, a clearly communicated script, and collaborative engagement in a setting that simultaneously meets client needs and expectations, and grows trust and understanding between the counsellor/actor and the client/audience. In addition, it argues that counselling relationships, although founded upon truly fundamental human values, conditions, and aspirations, are only mutually believable performances in a defined temporal and relational space. Indeed, for student counsellors, their early therapeutic encounters may seem just that. Constrained by the need to maintain harmonious relations that enhance client disclosure and therapeutic change, beginning counsellors may feel that to present their actual selves, a self incongruent with counsellor identity and the needs of the client, might be counter-productive. Consequently, to address this service relational they may withhold self in favour of a more acceptable, personally safer, yet less effective counsellor persona. Reframing sociologist Erving Goffman’s dramaturgy of self presentation and Carl Rogers’s theory of self, this chapter considers the inner conflict and development of beginning counsellors as they wrestle to reveal acceptable professional personas. Within the ‘We all act better than we know how,’ hypothesis the literal tension between playing and becoming suggests a normative phase in counsellor development, and invites further comment upon the humanistic counsellor’s struggle toward authenticity in the therapeutic relational.