Stories from the river: developing political awareness within psychotherapy in counselling sexual violence

Abstract

From the stories in the river (Solnit, 2020) to the process of unfolding within the counselling room; this thesis invites, you, the reader, to join my fictive clients and I on a journey of observing how the ideologies (Kearney, 2018) of a post Trump era have continued to simmer within ourselves as individuals as well as the practice of counselling and psychotherapy when working with those who have experienced sexual violence.

From the noticing of the ideologies instilled within our identities, to the re-emergence of the structural inequalities of oppression in the political world around us, the phenomenological contextualism of this process grapples with how the experience of relating between counsellor and client initiates the unfolding of such ideologies. A journey that may bring anxiety as counselling training has continued to ignore the context of these ideologies, leaving trainees with expectations of how this may be separate to the process (Kearney, 2018) rather than an important part of it.

The hope, or rather the invitation, is to discover a language for this once ignored area of counselling theory and show you, the reader, how I grapple with the parts of my identity affected by Trumpism within the counselling room as I work within the streams of Islamophobia, Transphobia, and Neoliberal Feminist forced ideologies upon individuals who have experienced sexual violence through the reflective process of intersectional feminism.

With fictionalisation and the display of my own reflexivity (Etherington, 2004), this journey from the river, to creation of my fictive clients, to the murky soup it generates, and the tasting that follows, leaves blueprints to how trainees, and you, the reader, may also wonder upon and discover their own language for the articulating these ideologies that appear within the counselling session when working with those who have experienced sexual violence.