Being Authentic

In a very animated tone, P4 described the inner mechanism that helps him connect with clients’ religious beliefs, punctuated with dimensions such as, honesty with self,

knowing one’s limits and holding the tension of the opposite parts of the believing and unbelieving self:

"… the believer must be aware of the unbeliever that resides within himself. And what I mean by that is, yes I have a faith, yes, I’m a follower of Christ…but I also have moments of extreme doubts and despair and meaninglessness…and therefore I know what it’s like to be sceptical and to feel a bit lost. ..and that’s a part of myself I celebrate and it’s the bit of me that wants things to be real, that says I don’t want to swallow any old bullshit…it’s my reality test. So what I find, particularly working with atheists is that I have quite a deep appreciation of their scepticism, their doubt, um…

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the cost that it takes to follow that to the extreme… I identified very deeply with that doubtful part of them… because that’s in me too." (P4: 224-237)

As a religious practitioner, being able to identify with his clients’ doubts, on a personal level, is fundamental for helping P4 facilitate a deeper exploration of the meaning of their religious questions and ideas. To acknowledge these inner conflicts and contradictions, doubts and fears, in one's quest to be real, requires a certain level of inner security. In this respect, P4 is able to use his own experience with religion, as a “touchstone” to deepen his empathy for his clients fears (Mearns & Cooper, 2005). However, in order to get to this point, he has had to wrestle with his own religious beliefs that has helped him weave together his religious and professional self, as well as improve his ability to be authentic and take a "non-expert" stance with the client. P3, also, explained that she has learnt the value of being "congruent", which she describes as the therapist bringing in their "human side". While there is a sense of

urgency to learn this as soon as possible as a therapist, this process can’t be rushed

and is acquired over time:

“I learnt very quickly as the years went by that as a therapist we are who we are and step in the room with our people and congruence is the most important thing, and transparency to a certain extent … there was a human side of you that needed to be present.” (P3: 83-88)

Working with religious beliefs was associated with the paradoxical. Most participants realized through trial and error that careful discernment is required when working with religious beliefs and may temporarily require the letting go of conventional

psychological techniques and trusting their instinct, which had a positive effect on the

client, as experienced by P7:

“We sat down and she was holding my hand and she was praying and I stayed with her and basically did that….It was a very empowering experience…and she felt completely calmed by it.” (P7: 132-140)

P3, feeling unsure about how to respond to a suicidal client described the following intervention that took her by surprise and, also, appeared to move her client deeply:

“And so I trusted my instinct, whatever that was… I don’t know why it came out of my mouth – and I said to him, I feel you have every right to be angry with your god. And he just looked at me, and just burst into tears. Because I think he was somebody who obviously had some faith of some kind, but he was angry with God… Now I say, well,

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they were God-given or spiritually thrown at me, or out of instinct, whatever, I wouldn’t like to put a name on it.” (P3: 138-145)

During interviews, participants were asked about personal growth experiences they had experienced as a result of working with religious beliefs in therapy. For some, it was less clear and more difficult to define, but for others a distinct event during a client session was recalled and connected to something greater than themselves, having a profound effect on the practitioner. P4 and P10 describe two such astonishing and ineffable experiences, accompanied by a sense of time slowing down in that moment:

“She [the client] told a story about her daughter seeing a butterfly fly into her kitchen, and she said, isn’t that strange, these butterflies keep flying into my house. And her little daughter was six or seven – said to her, “mummy, I think they’re angels come to tell you that it’s all okay”, and she told me that story to say isn’t that really cute, I was like, yeah it’s sweet – and then literally at that moment we turned and looked out the window and the ivy outside my office was covered in a hundred butterflies – all just sat there. It never happened before, never happened since, wasn’t a phenomena that had been occurring anywhere else in the county. She lived twenty miles away from my consulting room so it wasn’t as if… I was there… and it was just like this moment, that sort of reassurance in hope and goodness – and in a sense you could say it was spiritual but it wasn’t religious because she was pretty adamant there wasn’t a God and she had I don’t know what the word is – co-incidence – I always viewed it as an answer to prayer." (P4: 186-197)

“He actually got down on his knees on the floor and bowed to me, which was really – I – I – I felt extremely uncomfortable with that, so I got off my chair and knelt beside him. Because that made us equal – I don’t feel I am worthy of anybody bowing down to me, so that sat really uncomfortably with me and so I sat beside him, well, knelt beside him, and I just put a hand on his shoulder and I said something along the lines of, Robert, it seems as though there’s something very powerful happening…and he stayed there for a little while and he sobbed, he was really crying and really sobbing." (P10: 182-191)

The findings suggested that P10’s insight and intervention for addressing the power

dynamic in this way, was nonconforming and divergent from typical practitioner

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Participants who had these experiences, tended to emphasise the quality of the therapeutic relationship between practitioner and client, as well as, their own relationship with/to religion, as illustrated by P3 and P10:

“I learnt from them and I’m sure I’ve imbibed over the years the ability to be flexible in order to stay with the unknown and I’ve actually said, what does that mean? Educate me. And they’ve looked at me in amazement.” (P3: 964-967)

“And what was also important to him [the client] was that it was a genuine felt sense and an experience for him, it wasn’t just platitudes and cognitive crap. It wasn’t just this was the right thing to say, this is what therapists do. It was that profound and fundamental depth of relationship and experience that had changed him.” (P10: 239- 243)

P3 and P4, spoke of having to sit with their not-knowing. In those moments they had a sudden clear perception of their limited awareness and knowledge and a desire to follow this process into a deeper awareness and reality that transcends previous ways of ‘doing’ in their therapeutic work:

“I have to work with the not knowing, and the un-knowing and the…unable, I suppose – feeling disabled at times, because you would in the work. And what you do with that… I suppose, I don’t know.” (P3: 460-462)

"In Jungian terms, I viewed it as a synchronicity, just one of those weird moments where something wonderful happens. And I often find those kind of things happen in those moments when I give up in therapy, where I go, I really just don’t know how to help you, I don’t know what to – and express that in some way – and then we kind of sit in a moment where I feel like there’s some grace that life has for those moments – that helps us." (P4: 207-213)

This was a poignant point in the interview with P4 where I felt profoundly challenged to reflect on the role of humility in my own therapeutic practice and my ability to respond to the "unknowable" moments in my own life, as well as that of my clients. There is the unknowability of synchronous moments outside of the therapeutic couple that must be fathomed in some way.

P10 provided a good rationale for linking the concepts practitioner authenticity and not-knowing:

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“Just sitting with a not knowing, sitting with the dichotomy was really good for us… because I think in a lot of ways we needed to sit with the humanness.” (P10: 87-88)

Sitting in silence was a typical response for participants who had reached the limits

of their own understanding. As Nouwen (1972) says, this is what people generally are so desperately seeking, a "point of silence" within themselves. Practising a faith/spirituality can develop a keenly attuned "felt sense" for the unseen within ourselves and the world as portrayed by P8 in the next segment:

“My way of relating is that...I’m aware that there’s more than this physical body in front of me…even though I might not say it, the way I relate to that person…it helps me see beyond somebody’s behaviour even if it’s been very, very kind of outrageous.” (P8: 123-130)