Accepting the merging of the personal and the professional

Participants’ sense of having expanded was also linked to having survived their experience. Their experiences of loss had profound implications for participants, both personally and professionally. They were forced to take a close look at their altered landscape (personal and professional), and do the viewing through a new lens. This encouraged a deeper reflection on these aspects of participants’ life-worlds.

Kate speaks of having experienced a profound change in her perception of herself:

“I was able to get through it, I didn’t collapse, I didn’t lose my marbles or have a nervous breakdown, not cope, I was actually far stronger that I thought I could be which was actually really (reflective pause) a relief and also indicated to me that that’s something that I believe my clients can also find in themselves, they have the internal resources to help them” (Kate: 390-395).

Participants acknowledge that while their grief is always there, they now have a deeper understanding of it, one which beckons them to accept and embrace rather than resist and deny. This they believe has facilitated the integration of their grief experience into their life-world. With this acceptance and integration of grief, there is recognition of the need to manage what has been integrated. This capacity to cope

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with grief has also contributed to participants’ sense of themselves as expanded beings. Gill gives voice to this idea:

“Having gone through this bereavement…um has shown that I can handle what’s given to me…” (Gill: 402-403).

“It’s not even about being frightened of the work; it’s not at all I’m just very accepting of it. If it’s a bereavement that’s coming through the door I’m not feeling ‘oh my God, I’m not going to be able to do this at all’ it’s not, I just absolutely go with it and work with it” (Gill: 405-409).

Mary speaks of death both as a harsh reality and as something that is survivable. She too has experienced a triumph over loss:

“Death is what it is and life does go on afterwards and that’s the other learning. We have all survived this, we are all still here” (Mary: 426-427).

Following his loss, Noah also eventually experienced a newfound resilience and a further developed sense of his professional identity, including his role in supervision:

“It reassured me that I felt quite resilient and I think as I’ve said before it kind of solidified my view of supervision” (Noah: 231-233).

All participants seemed to have progressed along a path with certain shared features. From feeling overwhelmed and disorientated in the initial aftermath of their loss, they had found ways of repressing their emotions for the sake of their therapeutic work and their established professional identity. Subsequently, they had become more accepting of their limitations and vulnerabilities and had given themselves permission to integrate these aspects into their self-identity and professional identity.

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The expansion of the self post-loss would appear to encompass both a ‘being-with’ emotion and a more compassionate approach to the self. It also possibly features a closer merging of therapists’ professional and personal identities. With self- expansion there is a greater sense of freedom: more room to roam; greater recognition of multiple abilities; enhanced permission to be human.

Reflexive exploration

This analysis was my first attempt at utilising a phenomenological method. I found writing up the interviews time-consuming, intense, often exhausting but also very provocative. Listening to the tape-recordings and typing out the transcript provided another layer to the process of analysis. I found myself reflecting on what was

emerging from a participant’s account, on how I had conducted the interview, and on my own reactions to the narratives as I re-visited them. Fore-understandings often emerged as part of this process, only to be challenged and altered (Smith et al, 2009). In contrast to the interviews, which felt encapsulated and time-bound, the

transcription process was an opportunity to slow down and engage with the smallest details in front of me. My note-taking during analysis was predominantly theoretical and conceptual. Annotating the transcripts also facilitated a reflective process and shaped this aspect of the analytic process.

Initially I found IPA’s flexibility and lack of prescriptive structure rather

disconcerting; I found myself wanting a structure to ensure that I was ‘doing it right’. At the same time I found it liberating to be able to immerse myself in the data knowing that my personal contribution and interpretation was as much a part of ‘doing it right’ as following another person’s rules and prescriptions. I found myself relaxing

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into participants’ accounts and allowing myself to be inspired and excited by what emerged in the matrix of their narratives and my interpretations of their stories.

When writing this analysis chapter, I found myself being unexpectedly transported back to my interviews with participants, and felt incredibly inspired as a result. For me, this underlines and reaffirms the power, uniqueness and richness of the interviews -- at many levels.

Mindful of the importance of taking an idiographic approach to analysis, I sought to immerse myself in each narrative, only moving on to the next once I had completed analysis of the previous one. Following analysis of the first case, however, I was aware that my fore-understandings had been influenced by the case I had just been working on. My perspective on the phenomenon under exploration had already undergone change. Despite this, I still wanted to treat each case as a unique entity, retaining an open stance so as to allow participants’ narratives to challenge any fore- understandings and surprise me as I proceeded. I strove to bracket any fore-

understandings from a previous case before moving on to the next one. My hope is that my open stance, and constant use of reflexivity, made it possible for me to appreciate, and do justice to, each participant’s account.

The process of analysing across cases was a challenging exercise as I was faced with having to make significant decisions about what seemed particularly meaningful and representative of participants’ accounts across cases. The tension between remaining faithful to the uniqueness of participants accounts whilst also seeking to find broader meanings became apparent at this stage. At the same time, this process also afforded me the opportunity to delve into the data in a different way than I had done whilst looking at the narrative on a case by case basis, as I endeavoured to take a more

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over-arching view of what had been presented to me in participants’ accounts. I found myself feeling the weight of responsibility, to a degree, to do justice to the accounts in an attempt to present a faithful account of the data. Having said this, I was mindful of my own position as researcher and that even at this stage I was influencing the data set in my decisions about the themes that seemed particularly prominent and

important and those that seemed to naturally fall away. When I felt the final set of themes had emerged, through this rigorous process, I remained particularly

interested in the ways that I could capture both the similarity among participants as well as the uniqueness of the individual experience.

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Chapter 6 Discussion

The purpose of this study was to understand the lived experience of a therapist’s bereavement and how this might impact the therapeutic encounter. Semi-structured interviews were employed to gather the data, followed by analysis of participants’ accounts using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Four rich super-ordinate themes emerged as a result of a double hermeneutic engagement with the participants’ accounts.

In this chapter I begin by discussing the fundamental aspects of the phenomena investigated in relation to existing literature. I then engage in a critical reflexive evaluation, outlining the strengths and limitations of my methodology and method. Following that, I explore the implications of the research for clinical practice in the field and suggest avenues for future research. I end the chapter with a reflexive account of my experience of the research process.