Scratch Pad, Counselling Thoughts

I occasionally have some very definite thoughts about counselling. And I change my mind about them.

Now that most of my own process is nearing its final stages - I'm somewhat past retirement - I find myself looking more and more at process and less and less at outcomes.

This could be because I have less future for outcomes, but still live constantly with process. Despite what I might have imagined about this stage of my life when I was younger ...

But, returning to counselling thoughts:

I thought I might start by writing down what I presently think counselling might be about. Subject to revision:

More and more, issues of agency and relationships - and, of course, their interaction - occupy my mind. How we practice autonomy within social contexts. How our interactions make us free. How we free ourselves from damaging interactions?

Almost no philosophical writing on free will or coercion is illuminating here. Neither metaphysics, nor psychoanalysis, nor how we use the words 'free' and 'constrained' are much help to us.

We both free ourselves, and discipline ourselves, in our conversations. We can't make sense just on our own, and senseless action is not free in any meaningful way. We make sense to each other, and to ourselves, and act freely within the sense that we make. When the action, the shared sense, and the feeling of sense, begin to conflict with each other then the world goes dark.

This is the core of the 'talking cure': To bring light, love, and autonomy into congruence.

Or at least to find the conviction that this is possible, and to walk along that road...