For every thing there is a season: Reflections on the purpose of the CTP foundation course

Spring thaw. This process comes to mind when I think my experience on the CTP Foundation course along with eleven other trainees. In spring, the earth shifts on its axis towards the sun. In a similar manner, I feel that the course has shifted my axis, and, in so doing, has aligned me with the light of new knowledge in relation to counselling as well as my own personal development. Throughout the year, the theoretical knowledge has been grounded in the rich soil of experiential learning and practice. In such an environment, all of us flourished. Of course, flourishing involves personal growth and growth can engender pain, but that pain was contained in the space created by the trainees and tutors, Jan Mojsa and Paul Dunne.

For me, the first sign of a thaw came during the Initiation weekend that began with a Zen rice ceremony in honour of our ancestors and those who had touched our lives. As I threw rice grains into the central, candlelit circle, calling out the names of my mother and Aunt who had died not long before, I instantly felt myself seized by an emotion I could scarcely contain and, for the first time, expressed my grief in public. I cried in front of people who were then “complete strangers” but who did not feel foreign to me. Perhaps it was our common desire to understand more about ourselves and others that made us feel more like kindred spirits than strangers. Perhaps the ritualised containment of the ceremony provided a kind of bottle for my tears. For me, those tears marked an embodied experience of a new kind, one in which I could not retreat behind intellectual abstractions or theories or even words. Through a combination of theory and practice, the power of the Zen Rice ritual pervaded the entire course, allowing for a fusion of content and feeling—the result was an incredibly meaningful learning experience.

The form and content of the CTP Foundation course are not easily unwoven. The underlying form of the course supports the content like a trellis buried under green cascades until its supports are not longer visible. Yet, the underlying form remains essential to the beautiful, mysterious display. The trellis is analogous to the under girding course structure which, when combined the experiential nature of the content, creates a meaningful learning experience, replete with dappled light and shadows, mysterious, colourful blossoms from the unconscious, as well as the inevitable weeds and hidden thorns. When describing the form of the course, I could outline its underlying structure—the check-ins, the introduction to counselling skills, the time for skills practice and supervision, the tutorials, the opportunity to receive a Level 2 certificate from the Counselling & Psychotherapy Central Awarding Body (CPCAB), the introduction to psychological theories, the group process sessions—but this would not do justice to the actual experience of being on the course: that of participating in a real life process rather than analysing from a distance a content that has been abstracted from life.

In the past, I have studied psychological theories from an academic point of view. While I found the theories intriguing, the theoretical approach to the material caused me to intellectualise their content, thus excluding the feeling value that gives personal and transpersonal meaning to an experience. In contrast, on the CTP course, the presentation of the materials and class activities encouraged interaction while the variety of approaches to the material addressed the needs of different learning styles. Basically that means the material was humanised. How so? Let me give a profound but not uncommon example. As an introduction to a theoretical lecture on Object Relations, we participated in an experiential activity in which half of us were led blindfolded around an obstacle course by either an overly nervous or completely disinterested guide. From this activity, I got a strong sense of how traumatic it can be for a child or adult to be in a vulnerable situation in which he or she doesn’t understand what is happening and is dependent on another. How hard it is to learn to trust the carer, and, of course, perhaps the carer isn’t trustworthy and one is neglected and even abused—the vulnerability makes it all the harder to bear. And, looking at the experience from the guide’s point of view, how hard it is to be a “good enough” caretaker when one is seized by one’s own fears and compulsions.

The activity also brought to light some of the coping mechanisms I had developed to make an intolerable, ambiguous situation more bearable: trying to be helpful to the other, trying to be better than good, going along without complaint. Although I had a book-knowledge of Object Relations, it was the experiential activity that gave me a felt sense of what the theory represented in actual life. In the therapy sessions that I took in tandem with the course, I was able to explore and amplify the felt sense that the course had re-introduced to me. Throughout the year, there were many “ah-ha!” moments in which a theory such as Object Relations became humanised as the personal therapy session and the class sessions became containers for healthier Object Relating.

In addition to the taught sessions, two other central aspects of the course brought home the felt sense of the theories we studied: the skills group practice and the group process. In the former we met up in small groups of four outside of class to practice our skills under supervision; in the latter, the group as a whole came together to talk about the group processes. In both cases, many personal issues came out. To summarise, in skills practice, as we practiced counselling skills on a “client”, we came face to face with our own issues, needs, fears, and agendas. We also learned to trust that, in spite of such weaknesses, or perhaps because of them, the counselling skills would serve to bring out our strengths and our ability to relate empathetically to another person. In the group process, we each learned what triggers us and what energies can posses us or move us; we learned to recognise our need to be heard, to be understood, and began to recognise the source of such needs. In a sense, we grew up together as we learned to negotiate a new familial relationship.

The Transpersonal component of the group process became especially clear during a moving session in which we participated in sound therapy led by Russell Stone. In this session, we started off by singing each other’s name and ended with a inspired concert of drum beats, chants, and dance in which the energies flowed in and through all of us. As a group we moved in a larger, archetypal space of energy-charged vibrations. It felt in some sense like one of the talked-through group processes but with more space for a compassionate view of one another. For the group as a whole, the thaw was complete. The tears that fell during this session were one of release and reconciliation. They sprang from sense of joy at the reparation gained through the highs and lows of relating to oneself and others. They flowed from all we had been privileged to learn on the course and all we have yet to learn. They fell for every purpose we have yet to discover.

Mary Melinda Ziemer

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