Training the heart with mmmmms

Since October last year, I have been taking part in a course in client-centered counselling. My motives were a bit dodgy, I was bored on Monday nights and H. kept lording it over me that he had undertaken pastoral training and I hadn't. So to shut him up, I went for the most acknowledged and accreditted course in Leeds, which makes his two dozens of CPE hours in seminary look like the catpiss that they are.

After the first few hours of painful awkwardness during which we pondered on the basics, I found that the training was amazingly rewarding. For the level two CPCAB award, they really hammer into you the ground rules of counselling. A bit like learning to drive, you've got to be outrageously obvious in applying each of the rules, not like real life at all. While participants found it really constraining to be taught the same few principles every week like pre-schoolers, we also got a lot better, more relaxed and more real, with each passing session.

My favourite aspect of the course, though, was the openness of the course leader. I kept pushing the limits of the theory. It turns out that this was quite acceptable, and that, when you reach a certain level of skill, you are expected to break all the rules again, when this feels called for. That is why they hammer them into you during six months.

Self-disclosure is a case in point. The ground rule is "stay focused on the helpee's agenda, no self disclosure at all", so we spent hours and hours doing it it Carl Roger's style and encouraging the helpee to spill their beans with nothing but "mmmm". That worked for a while until someone cried out that IF KEVIN MMMMS ME ONE MORE TIME I'M GOING TO PUNCH HIS FACE OUT. This then led into an hour-long discussion about the limits of mmmm-ing and paraphrasing.

At the end of yesterday's class, we were told that we would soon be ready to enroll for a level 3 course, if that's what we wanted to do. Level 3 being more of the same, but with more questionning, more of "being real", and a series of supervised placements. Almost two thirds of the class was totally taken by the idea.

Right now, I feel sorry for people who've had nothing but a very short introduction to counselling skills, like I received when I was a volunteer nightliner. Counselling practice is so much more than mmmm-ing along like a moron. It is a course in loving people, and some very clever folks have spend their lifetimes finding out how to do just that.

Growing the social enterprise bubble

The other day, I was attending a social enterprise fair for work (actually more than attending it, my employer set up this fair years ago and runs it every year). At lunchtime, while everybody balanced their lunches on their knees, we had a designated table.

I'm fairly junior in that organisation, but as that table wasn't getting used and I spotted one of our trustees in the room, I invited him up there. Soon another guy showed up. Our trustee runs a very succesful children's charity. The other guy runs a social enterprise alternative to Starbucks. That means his coffee is uber-ethical, and his workforce is almost entirely composed of vulnerable adults. None of the styrofoam plates feel here though. He simply does a great job.

Before my very eyes, the trustee with the children's charity said to the other guy that he was looking to sell coffee on his street corner, to raise funds and be more visible at shopfront level. The two guys very nearly stroke a deal right here and there.

I said something along the lines of "mmm this social enterprise fair seems to work alright, doesn't it?".

We then talked about how social enterprises can support each other and be each other's first clients. For lack of a better word, I said we could be like a tumour, growing our own little organism doing its thing in relative autonomy from the mainstream capitalist beast, to the point at which it becomes easy for groups and individuals to choose to inhabit the social enterprise bubble. I felt like plugging one of my favourite motto, the IWW principle of "forming the structures of a new society within the shell of the old".

But then I thought, hang on, where do we draw the line between what's a social enterprise and what isn't?

Specifically, I was thinking of my local sandwich shop near work. I mean sure, her sandwiches are way more expensive than what I could bring from home, so I could think that buying them is a luxury of sorts. But on the other hand, something in her eyes tells me she really needs my business. Is she a social enterprise? Nope. Should she be included in the bubble? I think so. Because a business that keeps a couple of people in employment bestows essential quality of life on them, and this is eminently desirable. So I'll favour a bubble for the dogooders and independents together.

As an aside, society is talking a lot about ethical stuff these days. The tories have been at it for half a decade too. And so pretty mainstream firms are rebranding themsleves as social enterprises because they have realised that a number of government agencies simply lurrrrve comissioning with social enterprises and favour them over mainstream firms. Buggers.

"Your Palestinian Gandhis exist… in graves and prisons"

Further to the non-violence dilemma, I strongly recommend Alison Weir's scathing response to Bono's waxing lyrical about non-violence in Palestine. She's got one hell of a point.

"For the reality is that nonviolence is only as powerful as its visibility to the world. When it is made invisible through its lack of coverage by the New York Times, the Associated Press, CNN, Fox News, et al, its practitioners are in deadly danger, and their efforts to use nonviolence against injustice are doomed."

Everyday greatness

Welcome back, lover of the cute little anectdote drawn from observations of day-to-day life in my neck of the woods!

I cannot fail to observe the following phenomenon: a couple of years back, my divorced mum met a new partner, Tom, who had been very isolated in the decade that preceded their meeting. Broadly speaking, he could not stop talking, all the time, and for hours on ends, about a whole lot of random stuff. To be honest it was fairly annoying, but my mum kept saying that it was getting better, and her partner is otherwise a fairly impressive all-round good egg.

Next door to my mum's lives a deaf man, Frank, who's not got the best of social skills. He would ring your bell every twenty minutes and is fairly pushy. To be honest this too can be annoying and his beahviour has driven away exasperated neighbours who ended up hating his guts and selling their house just to get away from the guy. My mum just thinks he's a bit pushy, but that it's hard acquiring a grasp of normal (read incredibly individualistic) social norms when you're deaf, isolated, and hated by your neighbours, so she does not mind him and is fairly welcoming.

But Tom and Frank get on like a house on fire! They "chat" all day long and have lunch together whenever they can, or whenever they know that their neighbour is likely at home alone and would love the company. As a result, Frank loves my mum's house, watches the cat, and rings her bell to give her and Tom home-made soup quite often.

Ten months ago, one of my school acquaintances moved into the house which lies on the other side of Frank's house with her partner and three children. I urged her to go and speak to my mum so she could learn about Frank and not start hating him. I have never been so insistant in my life, I pressed the point like a maniac, but I did not think she would go. In fact she did. So far she has no problems with Frank and does not resent his clumsy pushiness. She also decided to re-arrange her home like my mum's (the houses are built the same, but the walls and stairs were in different places and she likes my mum's better).

So there I go with my little story of flawed, communicant members of the body of Christ who are all divorced, pushy, talkative, hurting in so many ways, and are having a ball of a time together. I don't really like pontifying cute stories, even when I write them myself, because they are the essence of the toothless spirituality I grew up with. But deep down I know that in that story, I would have been the exasperated neighbour who sold their homes to get away. And so I write cute stories. Hell, Jesus told cute stories. And at the end of the day love lives on my street (the awesome lyrics can be found here)!