Column
‘My Way’ written for the Newsletter of the British Association of Group
Psychotherapists
Notes,
time and money
I want
to be Frank. I'd like to be able to
tell you that I routinely keep notes, detailed reports of each session charting
the ebbs and flows of group life.
'They'll come in handy you know.'
I'd like to be able to say that I write my notes immediately after each
session, in the post group quiet, at that time when the experience is freshest
and most available or that I have created a routine space in my life for
scribbling down the therapeutic encounters of my week. After all, this is the very least of what
any self-respecting psychotherapist should be doing.
However,
I do not keep notes. There, I've said
it. Certainly, up until quite recently
I went about routinely not writing notes firmly believing that I should,
routinely feeling guilty over my lack of professionalism, that is to say way,
feeling short of the full Foulkes, insufficiently Jung.... Anyway, how the hell do you possibly do
justice to the richness of these epic encounters.
Nowadays,
I'm glad to say things have changed. I
still do not keep notes. What has
changed is that I no longer feel I should.
I now see myself as a jobbing psychotherapist who struggles to combine
earning a crust with parenthood, partnerhood and any other hat you care to
mention. My workload is a constantly
changing concoction of sessionally paid contracts between which I am constantly
moving, some of which pay well, the majority quite poorly - have you seen the
rates for the NHS counsellor!! What
galls me most while I breathlessly go about my business is that I could earn more
as a state secondary school teacher - my former hat - and have six holiday
breaks per year instead of the three I now have. I choose not to because I
believe that working as a therapist is on the whole much more interesting and
rewarding. I often find myself saying
that it suits me being my own boss, however in truth I have more bosses than
most. There are times when this choice
is by no means clear and I am tempted to go back into teaching and give up this
more existentially insecure struggle that is my lot as a therapist.
Work
is hard to come by. Each year the pool
of more or less trained counsellors and therapists expands enormously, all
competing for the very limited number of jobs, considerably fewer for the group
therapist. In the place of professional
structures we have threadbare organizations awash with stifling ethical
approaches and bourgeios nineteenth century guilt, benevolence and the unrestricted
giving of oneself. Why do lawyers not
have these problems? I am bound by more
codes of ethics and practice than I care to know and given the rewards
available to therapists I think it is fair to say that we ask an awful lot of
ourselves. Sometimes I think that good
enough is not truly believed to be good enough in this profession. I do not take notes because I do not have
the time and anyway, nobody is paying me to take them.
Peter
Zelaskowski