Tag: Service delivery

Reaching Across The Divide

Here is a sort of précis / romp through this piece I wrote a year ago for Thresholds – a BACP quarterly that addresses spiritual issues in counselling and psychotherapy. The article sprang from our efforts, early in the Coronavirus pandemic, to manage therapeutic contact across video-conferencing platforms. I was struck by my and others’ experience of finding the process particularly effortful and was led to reflect on the difference between this medium and the “real life” analogue situation, and to explore how it might shed light on what goes on in the latter (hitherto much commoner) setting.

I contend that the digital medium favours content over process whilst psychotherapy relies on content in the process which may therefore be lost, or at least harder to apprehend. The issue of timing, in particular, is important in communication; minute hesitations can say so much in the real world, but may be put down to latency when on-line. The platform algorithm, selecting which video of moving mouth parts to patch onto which bit of compressed speech, and often arbitrarily promoting one speaker over another, I liken to an enthusiastic and naïve co-worker in the therapy room.

This technological solution to the problem of being together during a pandemic brings obstacles to communication which I liken to the concrete obstacles that had to be overcome by adherents of non-conformist churches meeting together in Britain in the 17th century. This comparison, in turn, leads me to reflect on the common ground between psychotherapy and religion; a conviction of reality and benefit on the inside, struggling with an external demand for sufficient “evidence” to satisfy a sceptical audience.

I conclude (via yet another analogy drawn this time from marine biology) that when humans communicate, factual content has to be accompanied by some animating essence that I decide to call animus.

Bit of a stretch? Nah! But sorry; if this has whetted your appetite, you will have to get through the paywall.

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Compass Bearings

Compass Bearings

A compass needle will point towards magnetic north, as long as there is not too much metal around, but typically when travelling we want to get to a geographic location, so it is geographic north that is the more useful reference in deciding our direction.

We often use the compass as a metaphor to evoke those bearings we use (or ignore) to varying degrees when deciding our values and actions. Individual politicians or business-people, for example, are occasionally criticised for their lack of “moral compass”.

Retiring from a post I have worked in for seventeen years has given me a new perspective on what I was doing and some of my strengths and weaknesses. This reflection is in its very early stages. I am two weeks retired and still disorientated by my sudden de-institutionalisation. I have decided to dig out that old compass.

And so it was, in conversation with a friend, that I found myself owning up to a relative lack of attention to what he and I came to call the “pragmatic compass”.

I have spent a fair bit of my time kicking against the pricks (a brilliant phrase that offers in its archaic imagery scope for serious irreverence). This has not achieved as much as I always hoped at the time. Early on, my optimism could have been put down to naivete but later, with greyer hair, one has to wonder at my lack of pragmatism. If I had a pragmatic compass I was not following it very closely.

Needless to say, I had some colleagues who were following theirs and, whilst they were doing so, I accumulated accolades for “standing up for people”. I am proud of that, of course, but I have wondered if I had the balance right and if I might have been able to achieve more if I had adjusted things a little.

My friend and I agreed that in the world – and perhaps especially in the workplace – we need to set our course somewhere between two bearings; those of the moral compass, on the one hand, and those of the pragmatic compass, on the other. If they coincide, then we are truly lucky. If on the other hand they point in opposite directions which, sometimes, they do – we have a particularly thorny problem to resolve. Sometimes, the pragmatic action is in the opposite direction to the moral one.

Anyway, this has got me musing on various situations in which “pragmatic north” and “moral north” diverge by differing angles and, in each case, which course I have chosen – or might in the future choose. I am not a great one for regret, but I think it is worth learning from experience.

The Sins of the Pathway

Systems change. A word that may be exactly right in one situation may not be appropriate in its new context. If this is not pointed out, then unhelpful associations may be imported and alter expectations or practice. This may not be in the interests of the proper running of the system.

The use of the word “pathway” is a good example. Some CAMH services have introduced “pathways” and these have replaced “teams” as the service unit in which treatment takes place. It should immediately be obvious that this might cause problems because the functions of a pathway and those of a team are very different. They are in different semantic categories, for a start.

During a Twitter discussion on outcomes in CAMHS a twitter-user asked a perfectly reasonable question. She wanted to gauge the level of agreement with the idea of specific “therapy pathways” for those who have suffered “childhood adversity”. I expanded on my disagreement in five tweets. The five-part argument, which focuses in turn on notions of Adversity, Therapy, Pathway, Control, and Development has a direct bearing on Therapeutic Attitude, so here it is.

Why do I argue AGAINST “specific ‘therapy’ pathways for those who have suffered childhood adversity”?

1) Adversity  

Life traumatises, so all clinical services need to attend to trauma. All should be “therapeutic”.

Some adversities eclipse others and adversity is subjective, but no childhood is without adversity. I am not a Rebirther or a Primal Therapist, but I suspect that birth is itself profoundly traumatic. I have often thought that a number of things children experience around birth, and in the normal process of growing up, are likely to feel cruel and intrusive – nappy-changing, for example, or the denial of something important for what feels like an indefinite period of time. The context of these things can define them as abusive or not, abuse being socially defined. But the context can also undo (or compound) the inherent trauma. Negative experiences are explained, positively connoted and reframed, assuaged, and atoned for, through the miracle of “good enough” parenting. These parenting behaviours are the therapy that the fortunate child receives for their early childhood adversity. If the adversity is sufficiently ghastly, if the parents are not able to provide this normal level of lay therapy, or if the parents are themselves the source of the adversity, then professional intervention is likely to be necessary – possibly to remove the child from an ongoing trauma, or support the parents, educate or alter the environment, or, indeed, provide some form of circumscribed psychotherapy.

Clinical services, represent a deviation from health and can themselves be traumatic. Take, for example, the extraction of teeth. All of these clinically imposed traumas should come with a pre-packaged antidote to trauma. All clinical interventions need to be handled therapeutically. This does not only mean through the use of skill and aseptic technique to minimise the physical harm done, and anaesthesia to remove pain and memory, but also by contextualising the event and giving it a positive narrative significance. In Being With and Saying Goodbye I refer to this sort of thing as “between the lines”. What we do explicitly (on the lines, as it were) is important, but what we do to and with the patient, between the lines, is also important and needs to be part of the therapeutic venture.

So “childhood adversity” is a tautology. The presence of adversity in childhood is a question of degree, not one of dichotomous presence/absence. We need to have an expectation that adult interactions with the child contextualise the adversity and either buffer or heal the trauma. The intensity and duration of this interaction, and the set of skills brought to bear, will depend on the child’s need, and the adult’s position and capacity. As trauma is ubiquitous, clinical services need to be therapeutic.

2) Therapy

Here is my off-the-cuff definition of therapy. Therapy is the bringing professional skill and experience to bear on the matter of relating to people in order to help them back to a healthy trajectory

If “therapeutic” means helping to restore health then all clinical services should be therapeutic, and many of the things parents do are likely to be so as well. Most of this would not be “therapy”, though. The parent has skills and experience and they relate to their child, but that is not their job or professional expertise. It comes as part and parcel of being a parent to that child. If the skills and expertise amount to professionalism, then this person is not acting as a parent or a member of the public, but in their professional capacity. If, furthermore, they explicitly use the relationship in some way to achieve their aim which is to facilitate the restoration of a healthy developmental trajectory, then this is therapy, and they are being a therapist. It is primarily the relationship that is the tool. It requires skill and experience, and they are doing it as their job.

However, the timing and nature of therapy need to be sensitive to the needs of the individual, their capacity to tolerate various tensions, and the capacity of parents to tolerate supporting their child in therapy. The last notably involves tolerating not-knowing what is going on in the therapy.

So therapy may be something that takes place during a young person’s path through life, or through clinical services, but there should be no expectation that they begin therapy on entering a pathway and leave the pathway the moment they stop or drop out of therapy.

In other words, therapy and pathway should not be contingent upon one another.

More needs to be said about “pathway”, and that comes next…

3) Pathways

Predetermined service-delivery “pathways”, like the glass slipper or procrustean bed, risk the mutilation of people in order to fit them in.

The idea of clinical pathways has become common in the last few years. Some say that that this was on an ill-founded (in CAMHS) expectation that payment-by-results would shortly be introduced. My own cynical belief is that the popularity of “pathways” in clinical service delivery is due to their providing what Menzies-Lyth would call an “institutional defense” against anxiety. The shift away from clinician-patient relationship as the primary clinical entity, to the pathway, depersonalises the process and therefore makes it easier to discharge a patient from, or deny them access to, services.

It would be perfectly reasonable to observe that an individual undergoes a journey through the service. They enter the service and, hopefully, leave it. In between, they will encounter a range of clinicians and staff. They will disclose information of various kinds, and endure or enjoy a number of questions, tests, and treatments. These things could be set out on a time-line, and calling this a journey would seem fair enough. The words “path” and “pathway”, though, introduce an ambiguity. Someone’s path can be traced after the event and may turn out to be quite different from the path laid out on the ground and paved or marked with signposts. The latter is an intended route, but the path that a patient takes through services may not be the intended one at all.

This language reveals at least two arrogances. It is arrogant to think of the path that the patient takes through the services as being the only important one. Far more important are the paths that they take through their lives. We all have hopes for these paths. We hope for an absence of severe or enduring pain. We hope for company. We might hope for children. None of us sets out on our journey hoping that it will include a period of psychiatric treatment. Concentrating on the aesthetic of a predetermined clinical pathway is to neglect, relatively speaking, the more important path of the patient’s lived experience.

The second arrogance is to believe that the service can decide the pathway beforehand. Service design needs to have sufficient flexibility to adapt to each individual patient’s needs, values, and circumstances. You cannot constructively start therapy when it suits the service if the patient is not ready or if therapy is not what they want. The nature and timing of treatment in mental health services is co-constructed – or should be. If it isn’t, then it is not likely to be very therapeutic. Forcing someone into a pre-determined path, like forcing minced meat and breadcrumbs into a sausage machine, is anti-therapeutic, even if the path is called a “therapeutic path”.

4) Control

Life knocks us off our healthy developmental path. Services should give back to patients the agency to determine their path, using borrowed resources

Anything that knocks people off their healthy developmental arc (anything that is traumatic, for example) should be responded to with the aim of restoring agency, if not total autonomy, as soon as possible. Some people may manage to negotiate this without assistance, but many will require skilled support of some kind. This dependency should be temporary and partial. That is to say that the person should retain a significant degree of, if not full, control of decisions, and if they do hand over responsibility, this should be returned by the end and incrementally throughout, if possible. So the aim of clinical services, where someone has lost or suffered a set-back in their control, should be to restore to them, to the extent that is possible, the agency or access to agency that they have lost. This should be done actually, but also symbolically. We should not, therefore, even appear to predict or dictate their direction through services. We can make suggestions and recommendations. We can offer alternatives. In retrospect we can ask them about their pathway through the services and, in particular, if there was anything that we might have done to improve or detract from it. We cannot, and should not attempt or claim to, set it out in advance.

5) Development

Life = development and does not stop at 18. Therefore developmental ethos should continue through adult and elderly services

It may be true that childhood and adolescence are times of particularly acute developmental change, but the whole of life is developmental, and autonomy should lie with the individual as much as possible throughout.

Coda
This is not an argument against therapeutic expertise, but an argument for it. Nor is it an argument against the consolidation within a team of expertise in specific therapies. All teams and practices should be “therapeutic” but therapy teams within services are justified by the expertise that they preserve and concentrate. They can be used for specialised treatment, but they also inform the culture of services as a whole.

The retrospective study of patients’ paths through the services is justified if it leads to smoother transitions and greater responsiveness to needs and values of the patient. Pre-ordained pathways, on the other hand are not justifiable, whatever they are called, but calling them “therapy pathways” commits a whole bundle of sins.

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Transference: A reflection on not being the Other

Transference happens. We could argue about how much, exactly how, and whether the name is right, but that would be pointless. The point is that we can, at times, react towards another person as though they were not who they actually are (friend, boss, shop assistant etc), but an important other from our own past or distant lives.

Some of us do it more than others. Some people seem almost to do nothing else. It can be trivial, but it can also seriously hamper relationships and personal development. People who enter therapy are likely to be doing so exactly because they do have problems with their relationships and their personal development. They may be expected to be particularly prone to this type of relating. For this reason, therapists need to be adept at managing the situation.
                                                                                                                                                          Therapy encourages transference by 1) establishing a particular kind of relationship which has inherent in it a degree of asymmetry, and then 2) having as its remit the exploration of areas in which the patient or client is unconfident or unskilled and which evoke earlier relationships. Some styles of therapy may further encourage this by their use of silence and by developing what has been called the “frustration tension”.
                                                                                                                                                                  The therapist cannot simply dismiss the confusion by saying, for example, “Stop it. Don’t be ridiculous! I’m not you mother!” They have to keep it going enough for it to be seen, understood, and worked with. It would be unforgivable, though, if the therapist were to encourage or consolidate the confusion, by continuing to play the part and recapitulate the original trauma.
                                                                                                                                                                      In other words – and here I am getting to the crux of it – the therapist has to be able to be enough of all these others (these fathers, mothers, lovers, siblings etc) to be plausible to the client’s unconscious whilst manifestly NOT being these people. In a sense, they need to be able to be any number of people whilst emphatically not being them.
                                                                                                                                                                           Not being should perhaps have a hyphen, because this activity of not-being is different to a simple absence. As in the mind-experiment of trying to not think of a pink giraffe, not-being to a large extent draws attention towards being. Not-being subsumes a degree of being. In a sense, it flirts with being. Think, for example, of the counsellor whose skill set should include knowing how one might take the session deeper, in order to not-do so. Or the doctor who is required to be able to prescribe a medication before their decision to not-do so can take on significance. The mountain guide must know what would be a reckless action in order to be saved from carrying it out.
                                                                                                                                                            Adding to this, the therapist must also be genuinely themselves and 100% present whilst in a way leaving much of themselves outside the room: bringing their skills, attention, and beneficial intent into the room – giving them a voice – yet leaving their own factual lives outside. They have to remember the right things. They have to remember who they are without the constant rehearsal of self-revelation and, whilst stripped in this way, they have to not-accept the roles and characteristics transferred within the therapeutic relationship.
                                                                                                                                                            Therapists, then, if they are to be therapists rather than functionaries, have to be sufficiently capable and supported to perform this balancing act; a balancing that includes things repeatedly touched upon in Being With and Saying Goodbye such as equipoise, believing whilst suspending belief, uncertainty, and paradox. The space between being and not being (which I have here called not-being) is what Winnicott might have termed a “potential space”. It is there yet not-there; the essential ambiguity needed for the play that is therapy.
                                                                                                                                                                    Do think, reply, discuss. Here, or @afwesty via Twitter