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.