©Andrew Dettman 2007      

Philosophy and Approach to Counselling.

"Early in the history of counselling it was assumed that the advice given by counsellors made the
difference. Later on, improvements in the client’s health were thought to be a function of the
methods that the counsellors used, and practitioners argued at great length about whether directive
or nondirective methods were most efficient. More recently, the relationship between the counsellor
and client has come to be regarded as the most significant aspect. At first, this came about
because counsellors focussed on the facilitative effect of the relationship on the exploration of
meaning. Now, we are beginning to understand that the relationship does much more than simply
facilitate; it teaches as well." (Helping Relationships. Combs & Gonzalez ISBN 0-205-15022-5 pp 112)

Consequently, if a person really has the desire to open themselves to new ideas about life and about
how the experiences of other people might become applicable to their own understanding, then a
counselling relationship can attempt to contract any pressing problem to potentially be resolved –
new skills for living can be learned within just such a contractual relationship.

"Counselling and psychotherapy is a contractual arrangement by which a practitioner meets a
client, in privacy and confidence, to explore distress the client may be experiencing. This may be a
difficulty; their dissatisfaction with life; or loss of a sense of direction or purpose." (http://www.bacp.
co.uk/seeking_therapist/right_therapist.html#Counselling)

Any such contractual arrangement with clients must contain confidentiality clauses, but practitioners
should also be open to professional scrutiny with the results made public where necessary, and all
therapeutic alliances should be arranged within a clearly defined ethical framework.

"Professional responsibility does not demand a prescribed way of behaving but rather that whatever
methods are used have reasonable expectations of being good for the client. The emphasis is not on
guaranteed outcomes but on the defensible character of what is done. Doctors, for example, are
not held responsible for a patient’s death. What they are held responsible for is being able to defend
in the eyes of their peers that whatever they did had the presumption of being helpful when applied.
Other helpers too must be prepared to stand this kind of professional scrutiny of their information,
beliefs, and purposes and on the adequacy of the techniques they use. Their actions should be
based on good and sufficient reasons, defensible in terms of rational thought or as a consequence
of informal or empirical research." (Helping Relationships. Combs & Gonzalez ISBN 0-205-15022-5
pp 223)

As I have said on my website, I believe addiction to be a 'diction dysfunction'. As such I hold that my
experience of working with drug addicts and alcoholics can be broadened to examine the inner
dialogues that might be troubling people who present with other addicted behaviour patterns.
Simply, what ‘meanings’, what quality of ‘diction’ are they giving themselves in their thoughts and
beliefs about themselves and other people as they talk to themselves – and if they arrive at a
conclusion that they do not like particular thoughts and beliefs, what action do they take to ‘fix’ any
feelings of dislike? People look for fixes in many different ways.

In my work I utilise a model of my own design that has been proven in the field of my prison work
that asks questions of individuals or groups around this core word diction - it identifies the unique
inner dictionary that can be seen to be the command centre of the inner organism and the filter of all
transmission and reception of life experience. It is then possible to examine the predictions that
might have instigated difficult habit patterns around failed predication outcomes that are then denied
and that become the maledictions that trigger the repeated efforts to change with addiction
formulations that lock into a tripartite vicious cycle - mistakenly and simply reduced to one behaviour
termed as addiction. Only a true admission of a contradiction into the inner diction chamber can start
the inner wrestling match that eventually incorporates the benediction of true problem resolution;
valediction to the old behaviour then ensues with a balancing antidote to the malediction vivifying a
'yin-yang remedy'.

This model opens addiction up into a continuum that clearly can become stuck. When the continuum
phenomenon is unlocked, never to trap the person ever again, the word addiction can then be seen
actually as simply one component of a process. Simple principles can be learnt, applied and reapplied
to an ever expansive inner dictionary of problem resolution, restoring a person to a life-view that
embraces meaning and restores belief patterns, even through sickness. Potentially invalid views are
tested, inner arguments transformed, experience validated and behaviour changed.

In my opening, I aligned myself with a view that counselling is a facilitation process, subject to a
mutually acceptable contract, that invites a client to be taught how to change their own behaviour
through changing their inner understanding of themselves and of others. Of all of the general models
that I studied as part of my Diploma in Addiction Counselling, I have chosen REBT to present my
service to the general public. I believe that this model most closely fits with my experience and
qualification to be able to competently respond as clients present with addiction profiles symptomatic
of problems other than, and as well as, alcohol and other drugs.

"REBT advocates a  situational ABC model of psychological disturbance and health. A situation
occurs in which the person has an emotional episode. A stands for the activating event and it is the
aspect of the situation about which the person has an emotional reaction. This aspect is frequently
an inference. B stands for belief (rational or irrational). C stands for the consequences of holding a
belief about A and can be emotional, behavioural and cognitive. Thus A’s do not cause C’s but
contribute to them. B’s are seen as the prime but not only determiners of C’s. Holding a rational
belief about A leads to healthy emotions, functional behaviour and realistic subsequent thinking,
whereas holding an irrational belief about the same A leads to unhealthy emotions, dysfunctional
behaviour and unrealistic subsequent thinking." (Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy. Dryden &
Neenan. ISBN 1-58391-741-1 pp 3)

Dryden goes on to say,

"REBT therapists frequently employ an active-directive counselling style and use Socratic and
didactic teaching methods. However, they vary their style from client to client … As clients learn
how to use the skills of REBT for themselves, their therapists adopt a less active-directive, more
prompting therapeutic style … REBT therapists are judiciously selective in their eclecticism and
avoid using methods that are inefficient, mystical, or of dubious validity." (Rational Emotive
Behaviour Therapy. Dryden & Neenan. ISBN 1-58391-741-1 pp 6)

In my adaptation of REBT for individual addiction counselling I am mindful of my professional and
practical experience of the 12 Step Programme. (12 Step Presentation courtesy of Wired at www.
wiredinitiative.com). There are Fellowships for most of the symptoms that can afflict mankind through
addiction and all of them at heart espouse the following recovery principle that is implicitly repeated
throughout the literature of Narcotics Anonymous.

"We have learned that if a solution isn’t practical, it isn’t spiritual." (Narcotics Anonymous ISBN 0-
912075-02-3 pp 87)

Therefore, although some REBT professional colleagues might consider a 12 Step Programme
‘mystical’ and non-empirical, in fact the results worldwide over the last seventy years undeniably
prove the practicality of its spiritual step format. Consequently my approach to treatment does
embrace the rigour of a conventional REBT practitioner model, but it is informed by my experience of
the 12 Step Programme and of how to interface with its spiritual dynamic in a way that is integrative
and practical without being apologetic.

There is a synchronicity at the heart of REBT and the 12 Step approach as both look to restoring a
person’s sanity through challenging the beliefs displayed in their diseased reaction patterns to life
events and their consequent behaviours, the B’s in REBT language. In another model of my own
invention, behaviour can be broken up into four treatable components that are reflected in the word
itself.

BE: This verb denotes the power to create be-ing, where the –ing is the process of doing the verb.
So, ‘talk’ is a verb, talking the process of doing it. The verb ‘be’ is God’s word in the terminology of
the religions. In today’s more secular world the verb ‘be’ is still very powerful and where a person can
identify who or what owns or wields that verb most consistently in their inner and outer experience
apart from or as well as themselves, then such a person is on the way to identifying potential or
actual problems in their sense of ‘being’. Carl Jung identified the danger of an ill-informed, or
theoretically absent, ‘be’ position very clearly when he describes the dynamics of behaviour change
and the collapse of a spiritual perspective as follows.

"If dull people lose the idea of God nothing happens - not immediately at least. But socially the
masses begin to breed mental epidemics, of which we have now a fair number." (C.G. Jung,
Psychology & Religion(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1938) 105)

"In as much as collectivities are mere accumulations of individuals, their problems are also
accumulations of individual problems ... Such problems are never solved by legislation or tricks.
They are only solved by a general change of attitude. And the change does not begin with
propaganda and mass meetings, or with violence. It begins with a change in individuals. It will
continue as a transformation of their personal likes and dislikes, of their outlook on life and of their
values, and only the accumulation of such individual changes will produce a collective solution." (C.
G. Jung, Psychology & Religion(New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 1938) 95)

HAVE: This word connects past, present and future processes very effectively. So one might say ‘I
have a pen in my hand’, that is a statement in the present: equally one might connect ‘have’ to
another verb and then it tends to describe an event in the past, i.e. ‘I have eaten tripe once or twice
but I didn’t like it’. When the word have is connected to an infinitive, it opens a door to the future, i.
e. 'I have to change'.

I: The first person singular pronoun. Self explanatory and affirming, or part of the problem, as the
case may be. The word ‘ego’ is simply the Latin word for ‘I’.

OUR: The word that describes a collective experience, expression or possession. This collective
orientates itself to power and the ‘spirit of the age’ sometimes harmoniously, sometimes with great
upheaval as the history of the rise and fall of civilisations can graphically record. Jung again offers us
an insight into the collective change dynamic.

"Since the idea of God represents an important, even overwhelming, psychical intensity, it is, in a
way, safer to believe that such an autonomous intensity is a nonego, perhaps an altogether different
or superhuman entity, 'totaliter'. Confronted with such a belief man must needs feel small, just
about his own size. But if he declares the 'tremendum' to be dead, then he should find out at once
where this considerable energy, which was once invested in an existence as great as God, has
disappeared to. It might reappear under another name, it might call itself  'Wotan' or 'State' or
something ending with -ism, even atheism, of which people believe, hope and expect just as much
as they formerly did of God." (C.G. Jung, Psychology & Religion(New Haven and London:Yale
University Press,1938) 104)

So behaviour, or be-hav(e)-i-our, is a word that gives the clue to its own descriptive meaning or –
ism (including alcoholism) as Jung described. The energy and appearance of a person’s behaviour,
flows through the word originating from the power of the actual word ‘be’, through the mental realm
of experiencing past and present, authenticating or disguising the ‘be’ with whatever memory,
sensation or conscious plan the person might ‘have’, into a sense of ‘self’ and then into the interface
that expresses from the one to the ‘many’: from the inside out.

The poetry of this model provides a clue to the importance of healing the B’s in the REBT approach,
for that which holds the power of that little verb ‘be’ inside a person defines their be-lief, and from
that belief flows their behaviour with all its consequences that reinforce such beliefs and entangle a
situation further. Factor into this drugs and alcohol, or food or gambling or sexual excess etc.,
kidnapping the ‘be’ word to dictate to a person that they should be drunk or stoned or whatever to
fix a troublesome ‘be’ in the first place and one can hopefully see how my approach can start to shed
some light on any addictive behaviour eventually.

"REBT may be seen as an example of theoretically consistent eclecticism in that its practitioners
draw upon procedures which originate from other counselling approaches, but do so for purposes
that are consistent with REBT theory." (Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy. Dryden & Neenan. ISBN
1-58391-741-1 pp 6)

My aim is to try to bring some benefit to addicted people with all forms of the illness through
whatever approach is consistent with REBT theory and that also speaks to their place of yearning
and resolution for a more human experience of life. The beauty of having worked in a prison rehab, a
testing environment, is that I have been able to try out vehicles of therapeutic expression like the
above mentioned ‘behaviour’ model. When such models have brought clarity and practical benefit to
the client group there, then I can bring them to my general practice with confidence and adaptability.

Behaviour then is rarely permanently changed from the outside in. It responds to change in the way
behaviour actually manifests, from the inside out. Addiction is described in 12 Step parlances as a
three part disease – physical, mental and spiritual. In my described behaviour model, the ‘I/our’
interface is physical, the ‘have’ portion describes the mental realm and the ‘be’ is the spiritual
element. This then clarifies addiction in my philosophy as a spiritual illness and behaviour therapy that
attempts to redefine be-ing for a person as a spiritual remedy that still fits into my REBT model for
individual counselling – modelled change disputing behaviour from the inside out.

The limitations for my approach arise through the misunderstanding amongst other agencies around
addiction as a spiritual sickness and through the inherent denial mechanisms that describe addiction
for a client in the first place that may preclude them further from being able to accept a treatment
model that identifies power as a spiritual concept. In answer to the question, ‘why do people need
counselling?’, I would clearly answer that counselling is needed to help a person realise more fully that
which they already know to be true in the light of what their particular problem is trying to tell them.
My REBT model provides a vehicle that can assist a person to establish, clarify and then to interpret
their own sense of acceptable contradiction, moving as quickly as possible into being able to dispense
with the services of a counsellor having learnt skills to more easily navigate themselves through
future problems.

Coherence can only be assured through stringent supervision and ongoing professional development.
My supervisor is a Senior Accredited Member of the BACP and we meet for supervision twice a month.
I feel confident to assess any form of the disease of addiction as I understand it, but would
unhesitatingly refer a client on to a fellow practitioner or to their GP if I felt, in consultation with my
supervisor, that their condition was outside of my treatment competency or that my approach would
not suit their condition.

As individual assessments and treatment modulations might indicate, my service also embraces a
more bespoke counselling approach that offers treatment over an open-ended time frame. In this
way clients may develop a deeper insight into their ability to resolve existential anxieties through the
utilisation of a contracted counselling alliance.

My practice experience accommodates the treatment of a range of dysfunction and this brings me
onto my understanding and provision of Group Therapy sessions for addicted people. My experience
of having facilitated hundreds of hours of group therapy in a prison setting bear out the excellent
work of Philip J. Flores PhD as he writes about the matter in his book ‘Group Therapy with Addicted
Populations – An Integration of Twelve-Step and Psychodynamic Theory’ ISBN 0-7890-6001-9.
Group therapy is at the heart of treatment in a successful drug misuse rehabilitation unit and my
service tries to extend the proven efficacy of the form across the widest possible presentation of
need whether clients are apparently suffering from addiction or not.

Group work in my private practice is informed by my experience as Senior Counsellor in a rehab and
guided by the work of Flores. My private practice supervisor is very experienced with group work in a
person centred model and for groups of up to eight clients maximum we have agreed that I do not
need to employ a co-facilitator, but to utilise my supervision sessions to safeguard and improve my
practice.

My treatment modality is flexible and eclectic. It fits in with my simple wish to help people arrive at an
ideal, a valid and practical conception, of what a human being might be like in their aspiration: then to
try and help them engage with a process of evolution as their conception is personally realised. This
then harmonises with my own ideal of myself engaging with life in my personal and professional
capacities.

Thank you.


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