INTRODUCTION TO THEORETICAL CONSTRUCTS RATIONALE FOR THE KEY WORDS Containment, Freedom and a Polarity Containment and freedom within the therapeutic relationship may be understood to be enabling in that the counsellor attempts to provide a safe (containment) space (freedom) where the client
can think and feel his / her own internal experience in the presence of the counsellor. However
both containment and freedom as experienced within the internal world of the client may be
disabling. Life events may have provided a containment that was confining and even harmful so
that any from of containment may be experienced as disabling. Freedom may have been
experienced as dangerous or overwhelming so this potential space may also be experienced as
disabling. Within the enabling containment provided by the counsellor the client may experience
the very opposite of what is being provided. In the language of theory this may be described as
transference, countertransference and a myriad of other theoretical terms but these terms do not
describe the client‟s personal experience from their perspective. The key words of containment
and freedom in this study are used to discover if these concepts are understood and experienced
by the client to the extent that the participant client feels the analysis and the theoretical
constructs fit his/her internal feelings as a client. These concepts became the key aspects of my
therapeutic journey when a traumatic event changed me and as I worked through the effect of the
trauma I became conscious of strong notions of containment and freedom within my internal
world. Perhaps one of the most important aspects of my process of change was to know
consciously how life events were affecting me. It was this knowing that in turn enabled me to
have the freedom to reclaim my self from the trauma and create a new life for myself.
Etherington (2000) states:
“We cannot go back and undo the events that have happened to our clients or to ourselves but
we can change how we feel about it and respond to it. To do that we have to know it
consciously, feel it and understand the effect it has had on our lives. The freedom
consciousness creates, allows us to reclaim our selves and in that freedom we can create new
ways of using the rest of our lives – given the resources we discover within ourselves.”
But to discover the freedom that consciousness creates I journeyed through experiences of both
disabling and enabling containment and freedom where these two concepts appeared inextricably
linked. My reflections on the paradox of containment and freedom being both enabling and
disabling led to the idea of a containment-freedom polarity.