Clients‟ experience of counselling within a narrative framework

1.3.2. Reflexivity 
As I discovered and met raw parts of myself that emerged through trauma (Etherington 2004) I 
was able to make conscious choices to change. In turn this allowed me to see that using a type of 
poetic writing might enable participants to create such transformation for themselves and 
demonstrate that movement in their writing. Marshall (2004) suggests that looking back over 
time adds to perceptions. In this way the journey through personal trauma may be investigated 
and fully integrated (Thorne and Lambers 1998). Yet it is also an unending process, which 
pursues its own seasons as understanding and experience, are brought together and informed by 
reflexive processes. Such processes enable past experiences to be re-experienced in the safety of 
the counselling relationship (Etherington 2004). This reflexive re-experiencing helped me 
discover meaning in past events which I had been unable to access during the original 

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experience. Reflexivity as it is used and perceived in this study is more than reflection. 
Reflection is understood as looking at an experience as if in the mirror; the experience is re-
viewed. But to reflexively re-experience is to go through the mirror and enter the “stream” 
(Rennie 1998;3) of the experience as it were again; to discover feelings or thoughts that were 
present at the original time but not accessible to awareness. After this kind of re-experiencing the 
meaning or understanding of the original experience may be added to or changed because new 
information is discovered through re-experiencing. The method used to collect data as described 
in chapter 3 demonstrates how crucial it is to the study as does the analysis of both the pilot and 
main study in chapters 4 and 6. The poetic reflexive stance that emerges over the course of the 
research is also a key aspect of the findings in chapters 7 and 8.
Reflexivity emerged through several aspects of my story, through personal counselling, 
counsellor training, the search for meaning and creative writing. Reflexivity seemed to emerge 
from a willingness to examine my internal world. The whole effect of trauma as taken to 
personal therapy is too much to record in a chapter, but may be summarised as shock, anguish, a 
murderous self, and the need to howl. There was both torment and relief in attending personal 
therapy. The torment of the amount of affect there was to experience stood against the relief that 
there was already a secure base in which to do this work (Bowlby 1988).
1.3.3.Shock 
Shock, did not need to be discovered as it had been felt in awareness from the moment of hearing 
that my sister had been murdered. But the effects of shock needed to be examined. My world 
was suddenly different, nothing was recognisable, and it would never be able to return to what it 

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had been before. My known self seemed utterly lost so that nothing about myself was 
recognisable (Siegel 1996). Even the reflection of my face in the mirror looked nothing like the 
self I knew. This was an unbearable symbol of the unknown realm of being that was now 
inhabited. But I had gained enough knowledge from therapy and psychodynamic training to 
know that staying with the unknown and chaotic (Lees 2001) was part of the grieving process. 
However from this chaotic unknown some kind of order (Godwin 1994) needed to evolve, so 
that movement out of such chaos became possible. Re-experiencing feelings aroused by trauma 
and then reflecting on those feelings began what Marshall (2001) sees as the process of 
researching the self. This helped provide movement towards a felt sense of order. If the concept 
of reflexivity (Rennie 1998; 2001; Etherington 2004) had been encountered before the trauma of 
murder it might have been understood at a cognitive level but not experienced at a feeling level. 
Caught in shock, where time appeared to stop, feeling was re-experienced, brought into 
awareness, dwelt upon and cognitively investigated, in order to find some understanding of the 
processes that followed. In a sense I discovered my own reflexivity but had no name for it. Being 
able to name this process helped give credence and position to what felt like an alien world. 
Although in shock, this stuck place was like a platform. I was able to look around and see where 
I was. A stuck place was also discovered in the participants‟ journals and they were able to use it 
in the same way which can be seen in the analysis of the narratives and the participants‟ 
feedback.