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Looking up and Out: Transcending Techniques in Counselling for Grief

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Science and Mathematics Education Centre Looking Up and Out: Transcending Techniques in Counselling for Grief and Loss with Philosophy Dianne Margaret Stow This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Curtin University May 2013 Did philosophy have something to do with it? Every few years Treslove decided it was time he tried philosophy again. Rather than start at the beginning with Socrates or jump straight into epistemology, he would go out and buy what promised to be a clear introduction to the subject — by someone like Roger Scruton or Byran Magee, though not, for obvious reasons, by Sam Finkler. These attempts at self-education always worked well at first. The subject wasn't after all difficult. He could follow it easily. But then, at more or less the same moment, he would encounter a concept or a line of reasoning he couldn't follow no matter how many hours he spent trying to decipher it. A phrase such as 'the idea derived from evolution that ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis' for example, not impossibly intricate in itself but somehow resistant to effort, as though it triggered something obdurate and even delinquent in his mind. Or the promise to look at an argument from three points of view, each of which had five salient features, the first of which had four distinguishable aspects. It is like discovering that a supposedly sane person with whom one had been enjoying a perfect normal conversation was in fact quite mad. Or, if not mad, sadistic. Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question i Declaration Page This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university. To the best of my knowledge and belief, this thesis contains no material previously published by any person except where due acknowledgement has been made. ii iii Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge everyone who has contributed in any way to this thesis and thank you all for encouraging and supporting me through my thesis journey. I would like to especially thank Dr Roya Pugh, in her role as thesis supervisor, for guiding and inspiring me from the very beginning of my thesis inquiry and especially during the writing phase of my transforming, life-changing experience. I thank John Pugh for all the cups of tea and stories we shared over many lunches. Thank you to Dr Bevis Yaxley for his great support and wise influence on my thinking from the 1980s when we worked together on my Master of Education. Roya and Bevis' encouragement and confidence in me has sustained me. I am grateful for the inspiration my fellow Curtin students in the Tasmanian cohort gave me. I warmly thank Emma Weitnauer. Inspiring in her main roles as firefighter and athlete, she edited an early version of my thesis and proof read it at the last. I give any thanks to Dee Webb for her expert formatting. Thank you to my dear husband Nick who was there from the beginning, stood by me always, and made it possible for me to practise, read, write, talk, laugh, and cry by looking out for me in very many ways and living the experience with me. Thank you to our three beautiful daughters for their genuine interest in what I was doing shut away for so many hours. Thanks to my loyal and faithful dog, Gertie—and I hope she senses I am thanking her. She sat by me for days, weeks, months, some years, as I sat at my desk in my study. As well, with her doggie presence, her love and unconditional iv positive regard, she sat with me and with some of my amazing clients, sharing her calming presence. I wish to acknowledge the wonderful people who have provided me with professional and personal support throughout my career, and for helping me understand better what it takes to work with people through grief and loss. I express special acknowledgement to my awesome clients at my business, Di Stow Counsellor. They have moved and shifted and grown with me. My friends have been barracking for me. Gwenyth Larsen who I talk about in my thesis, took me on and mentored me. Dr Margaret Wallington, and Kevin Gumley, provided a safe and secure and positive space for me to work from with my clients. My mates willed me to keep going and finish. My friends and colleagues from the Justice Department of the Tasmanian State Government always believed I would do it. My counselling colleagues wondered how I made the time from working with clients to write. My Rotary colleagues are waiting for me to return to the roster for the sausage sizzles. I thank them all. I am humbled by the love I have received for this major work. v vi Abstract This thesis is an interpretive study of the phenomenon of heeding consciousness in the lived experience of a counsellor. Narrative studies of the lives of a counsellor and her clients embrace vulnerability as courage, as strength and will to face adversity, death and loss, and to weep, to wail, to question, to be depressed, to face life once again with resilience. With biographical and autobiographical details, this thesis explores our human capacity to create understandings of historical being. It explores philosophy and literature in ways one might discover what is immanent in the life a counsellor who can be present with those who suffer grief and loss. This involves the narrator-counsellor in questioning technique and theory in counselling by heeding consciousness. Inquiring into the historicity of self and others requires an ethics of époché— ethical, right restraint. Story, history and historical consciousness must be central to acts of counselling. They enfold each person’s fore-structures of understanding that shape and determine the ways we see and interpret in the world. In the in-between-ness of questioning the intimate relationships that develop between heeding consciousness and historicity, a forceful question leads the unfolding of this thesis. How is one to conduct and renew oneself as a counsellor? The works of philosophers, psychiatrists, psychologists, architects and photographers greatly assist in unfolding my question, and enfolding within it conscious understandings about the intimate lived experience of counselling those suffering grief and loss. Stories, anecdotes, metaphors, symbols, images, poems and literature colour my text and enrich, I hope, its linguistic possibilities for my reader's engagement with it. vii Grief and loss are ultimate situations in life. The inquiry of this thesis reveals another ultimate situation: being as counsellor is primarily being self in genuine conversation with clients, reverently holding humanhood in cupped hands. viii ix Table of Contents Declaration Page ..................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................... iv Abstract .................................................................................................................... vii Table of Contents ..................................................................................................... x Chapter 1. First, responsibility and humanness ........................................... 1 The awful‐ness and awe‐fullness of grief and loss ........................................................... 6 Encounters ........................................................................................................................ 8 Muse and metaphor ....................................................................................................... 10 Reason and narrative ...................................................................................................... 11 Writing as a moral act ..................................................................................................... 15 Extra literary devices....................................................................................................... 17 Chapter 2. Are we what we think we are? ................................................... 19 My theoretical self .......................................................................................................... 21 My anecdotal self ............................................................................................................ 27 My existential self ........................................................................................................... 34 Chapter 3. Patterning and unpatterning traditions ................................. 44 Changing minds ............................................................................................................... 48 Gellatt’s mantras ............................................................................................................. 51 Iconic dogmas beware .................................................................................................... 55 Chapter 4. Where theory encounters humanity ........................................ 62 Carl Rogers and subjective experience of the world ...................................................... 62 J. William Worden de‐phased ......................................................................................... 75 Conceptualising grief .................................................................................................. 76 On Worden with his contemporaries ......................................................................... 77 Worden on crying, biological mechanism and human catharsis................................ 80 x On Worden’s resolution of
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