Clients‟ experience of counselling within a narrative framework

CHAPTER ONE 
THE VOICE OF THE PRESENT 
 
 
“the creative process would seem to require a complex coordination between both 
conscious and unconscious forms of thinking and feeling to create a new identity that 
moves beyond both.” (Maltby 200; 66) 
1.1. Introduction
This chapter intends to introduce the story of a personal journey and the research journey that 
followed. Long before this research journey began I was a teacher and youth group leader who 
used poetry and poetic writing as a way of helping young people describe experience. When I 
eventually left teaching and trained to be a psychodynamic counsellor I learnt how trauma may 
impact on the present and even the future. Then I had a family trauma of my own to work 
through. Living through trauma impacted on all areas of my life, changed my thinking, my 
perceptions, my voice and created change in all areas of my life. The significance of these 
changes is that they gave me the confidence to create and discover my voice of the present. For 
example the use I made of writing poetry though trauma enabled me to see the possibility of 
participants writing narratives in a poetic style. The influence on my original thinking of the fairy 
tale, Beauty and the Beast, demonstrates how the concepts of containment and freedom were 
fashioned within my internal world. Like myths, the symbolic content of the fairy tale has the 
potential to offer many possible arrangements (Gee 1991) which provide meaning. The personal 
story and experiences that led to the conception of this research provide context and an 
understanding of my passion for such theoretical concepts. The main aim of the research 
question will also be outlined in this chapter and will be followed by the objectives that helped 

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me to achieve that aim. The learning and processes of my story, like opposition, reflexivity, the 
search for meaning and creative writing all intertwine creating a many layered text where each 
part interacts with others. This multi-layered (Bond 2002) quality is mirrored throughout the 
thesis demonstrating the challenges and depths of narrative research. 
1.2.The pre-conception of the concepts 
The presumption that the conception of an idea is the genesis of that idea is all too easy to fall 
into. Prior to conception some meeting between thoughts, experiences, feelings or even 
individuals has probably taken place. Ideas may appear to pop out of the blue but in reality 
something has happened to create that moment of conception. Before this journey began I was 
already interested in containment as a process within counselling, perceived by Bion (1962; 
1970) as a function of maternal reverie within the counsellor. As a counsellor, the concept of 
containing the client and enabling a process of “transformation of the self” (Solomon 1998; 225) 
was intriguing. From the perspective of the client I had experienced being contained by my 
counsellor and was aware of the value of such a process. However, after living through the 
trauma of murder within my family of origin my experience as a client was dramatically 
changed. I struggled to find a way to go on living with murder as part of my life experience. The 
violence of feelings which were brought into awareness felt uncontainable. Even if my 
counsellor could contain all I took to a session, I did not want to. I wanted to get rid of murder 
and all that followed in its wake. Within the process of being a client I felt bombarded by 
opposing feelings, thoughts and experiences; such conflicts within my internal world felt 
overpowering. Jung suggests (1969) that: 

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“The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security, and calm 
which is not easily disturbed, or else a brokenness that can hardly be healed. 
Conversely it is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed 
in order to produce valuable and lasting results” (26). 
Working through such conflict created a security that has become a crucial part of my internal 
world which appears to confirm Jung‟s sense of „lasting results‟. It is a security that enables me 
to trust who I am, with a confidence not present before trauma. By working with the processes 
that followed murder, the counsellor within me became interested in what I contained and what I 
wanted freedom from containing. Somewhere within the chaos, as thoughts, feelings and 
experiences clashed together, a meeting between the concepts of containment and freedom 
(contained in the metaphor of Beauty and the Beast) began to take place, and an unformed idea 
started its journey towards the birth of this thesis. 
1.3. My story 
One beautiful summer‟s day, over a decade ago, my youngest sister was murdered by her 
husband. The shock of such an horrific reality could not be taken into my internal world. My 
strongest feeling at the time was that everything changed. My internal world and the external 
world were suddenly so alien that an immense sense of isolation (Storr 1988; Fromm1942) 
invaded me. It charged the therapeutic relationship I was in as a client into a stormy commitment 
(Parkes 1972) of close engagement. Internal containment of physical, emotional and cognitive 
reactions was fought against as none of these experiences were wanted within my known self. 
Yet the internal freedom to feel the affect of such an experience was a primitive (Garland 1998) 

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response unable to be quietened in the transformed self who began to emerge. Without knowing, 
I made myself the primary data (Jackson 1989) of a personal story. In coming to understand my 
story there was also a desire to give voice to an experience that is often shrouded in secrecy 
(Ellis and Bochner 1992). Within this secret world opposition filled thoughts, perceptions and 
feelings as the unknown fought with what was known. The difficulty of accepting murder as a 
reality in my life led to the questions „how do I contain murder?‟ and „how do I free myself from 
murder?‟ In this way containment and freedom became aspects of me that I wanted to understand 
as well as opposites that fought for a place within me.