Spelling it out.

As a passionate believer in the power of being heeded, heard, accepted and understood, I’m extremely grateful for all the validation I’ve been receiving from people who have taken the time and trouble to visit this blogsite and to respond to its contents so positively.

And I’m equally thankful to the reader who recently replied with not a comment but a question. Or rather a series of questions that alerted me to the fact that I’ve been less than explicit in what I’m offering prospective clients in my practice of ‘writing therapy’, and thus should spell this out more specifically.

Here are the queries she kindly emailed me:

“Are you offering face to face counselling interspersed with written material, or are you offering counselling based entirely upon the written material of the person wanting assistance?  Are you offering an electronic service, or a mix of face to face and electronic?”

To respond to these questions in order, the answer to the first is, yes, I am offering face-to-face counselling sessions interspersed with or enhanced by the client’s writing if he or she wishes.

In other words, my clients and I meet in private, face-to-face sessions to create the ‘therapeutic alliance’ characteristic of most of the so-called ‘talking therapies’, and in between these meetings clients are encouraged to reflect on our conversations, or on any other issues they may choose, by writing.

It is vital to note here, however, that the client’s writing is entirely voluntary. He or she is entirely free to write or not write, and to share or choose not to share his or her written words in our face-to-face sessions.

As I have written in one of the other blogs on this site, the point of therapeutic writing is not the product, but the process. The very act of writing, or thinking about writing, or even of thinking about it and not actually doing any, in the weekly or other intervals between talking, is what adds such a vital extra dimension to the therapeutic process.

Michael White, the Australian co-founder of narrative therapy, once claimed that the incorporation of writing into therapy increases its benefit four-fold.

How he arrived at this precise figure I have no idea, but I do believe that there can be a marked increase in effectiveness, or a considerable decrease in the number of face-to-face sessions required, or both.

This somewhat lengthy and discursive reply to my correspondent’s first question has by implication answered the second: no I am not offering therapy based entirely on the written material of the client. But as I have mentioned in several of my other blogs on this site, I do consider writing to be potentially valuable self-therapy for people who prefer going it alone to the extra effort and expense of seeking out and seeing a professional.

The only downside I can see to what I guess you could call DIY writing therapy is that the person who pursues this course doesn’t enjoy the comparative safety that a trained counsellor can provide if extremely troubling issues or emotions become triggered. And for many people, especially those at risk of self-harm, this lack of another’s calming presence and informed support can be extremely risky.

This caveat applies also, it seems to me, to electronic or “e-counselling”. So, to answer my correspondent’s two-part third question, I personally don’t offer this, either alone or in combination with face-to-face sessions.

This preference of mine is by no means intended to deny the possibility that counselling by email – or perhaps better still a web-based combination of ‘live’ voice and vision like Skype – can be effective, just as the telephone has long proven invaluable for crisis intervention.

It is just that I happen to prefer real, live human contact and interaction to the virtual variety, however ‘realistic’ it may seem to be. In fact, perhaps because I’m not a child of the e-era, I find SMSing, emailing, Twittering and such to be too superficial and impersonal to be of use or interest for anything but telegraphic contact.

As John Freeman  (2009) writes in this regard in his book Shrinking the world, “we have all the [virtual communication] tools in the world, yet we’ve never felt more alone. By depriving ourselves of facial expressions and the tangible frisson of physical contact, we are facing a terrible loss of meaning in individual life.”

Similarly, far from seeing a future in the practice of cyber-therapy, whether writing-enhanced or otherwise, I perceive the digital revolution as more potentially productive of cyber-problems like loneliness, isolation and alienation than promising as a medium for delivering cyber-counselling or therapy.

Possibly time and future technology will prove me wrong. But meanwhile, I’m sticking to the version of ‘writing therapy’ that I have spelled-out above in response to my reader’s questions: good, old-fashioned face-to-face conversations, interspersed with, and richly informed and inspired by, the client’s own self-examination, self-reflection and self-discovery through writing.

Write.Mind Therapy deanjohns@hotmail.com  0412 035 183.