SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES
Counseling or Not?
There is a huge industry out there that sells smoke; its 19th century counterparts sold snake oil. At least with – usually opium-based – snake oil there was a tangible product with which the gullible could delude themselves. The smoke salespersons are the burgeoning counselling community.
“But surely,” the sensible might interject “there are people providing valuable counselling services to needy folk!?”.
Probably, I’ve just rarely seen them, that’s all.
Most distressing though to this seasoned pedagogue is the ever-spawning fraud called “children’s counselling”.
This can be routinely rendered, usually by a non-intimate, to a merely upset child for something as trivial as a stolen bicycle – or, not so’ trivial but just as inapt, to a child following the death of someone they barely knew.
Observations in this article -are not directed at genuine mental illness carers; rather targeting the “I learnt my skills at a weekend workshop” dilettantes. One recent article cautioned its readers to check how many hours of training: their therapist had received … hours?! Many of these new! age clinicians are ‘projectionists’, such as relationship therapists – who can’t even sustain a relationship!
Anyone can nail up a shingle as a counsellor – and anyone does. The classified and other ads in newspapers and lifestyle magazines promise a cosmic cornucopia of relief and/or enlightenment. The bullseye in their dartboard of the soul are the stress sufferers. This is a malady everyone has – what a market! The core question is: Do the majority of counsellors provide short-term services for long-term benefits? The answer too often is no. In fact, evidence, both apocryphal and statistical, points to the tragic fact that many people finish up worse off after counselling than before – and not just financially!
Angela Patmore, a research fellow at the University of East Anglia, believes that the enti.re stress industry is based on “unsound concepts and flawed research II. She goes further, accusing it of actually making its patients sick!
She said that therapy removes a human survival tactic, which is to fight back: “Stress is a natural mechanism that galvanizes people into action.” asserted Ms. Patmore.
This is especially so with relationships counselling; the record being so poor that if even happily married couples trot along to ‘bring depth to the relationship’ workshops, they are likely to be separated within a year! A case history known to your author to illustrate this epidemic:
Picture a happy, prosperous, middle class family; one which would have done John Howard’s ‘white picket fence’ proud. They had a fine home, seven healthy children, a vegetable garden, bees, and a dog!
The sweet wife was lured (an apt verb) along to a ‘social development’ meeting. This held the promise of even further enhancing her evidently perfect life. After a sustained extraction of the entrails of her soul with a psychic coat hanger, The Group convinced her that hubby was a spiritual troglodyte (he refused to attend, preferring to stay home and mind the children), and that her humble domestic circumstances compelled her to remain unrealized as an individual. They shamelessly played on her innate hubris – “He’s not good enough for you.”
The bewildered husband sensed the increasing divide between them, and the conflict began. Within the allotted one-year time frame, the family was destroyed.
“See, we told you he was a scab!” crowed The Group.
A self-fulfilling prophesy more like it.
In the argot of the counselling skeptics, this is known as ‘false bonding’; psychiatrists are trained to be alert for this and avoid it – especially of permitting the patient to become dependent upon, or even fall in love with, the doctor.
The Smokies often encourage it! Alas there is no public protection Codes of Ethics in the mostly feral ‘personal growth’ industry! So why the smoke allusion?
Well, smoke gets in your eyes, it blinds to reality; one reality is the inverted scale that reveals that the more impractically idealistic, or indeed gobbledegookish, the propaganda, the more popular it is take this example from a recently advertised personal development program (their punctuation!): “The space to be still … To recognize Truth and be acknowledged in That To honor belonging To end separation. To not pretend … to stop the lying and rest in Wholeness.” What in heaven does it mean?! The chronically naive shell out their perfectly good dollars for … smoke!
The following is a brief glossary of the fatuous and fabulist which readers may recognize from their own local papers or supermarket noticeboards : Transformation – transpersonal; insight sharing – intuitive writing; conversations that matter – contact improvisation ; Swedish relaxation – sand play therapy (for adults?!); co -dependency communicating counselling; rebalancing – rebirthing; biographies; homotropic breathwork; unity consciousness ; blessing services (the arrogance!); tarot reading – all smoke.
One night recently, my wife Susan heard a car accident in the street. She hurried out and gave assistance to a mature woman who had crashed her car; but thankfully was okay.
The lady was however hopelessly drunk; as well she was emotionally dissembled due to relationship chaos; which was: blubberingly spilled out as Susan. tried to calm her. ·
Later we saw in the local pager a small ad. that informed its readers that this same woman was ·a clairvoyant, tarot, and palm reader. She promised her would-be customers, among other things, that she woul9 “release your blockages”.
Susan was not all that keen to attend!
In a saner age, when this counselling compulsion was unheard of, comforting by ‘true bonds’; like family and friends, usually pulled the grieving, distressed or despairing back from the brink. If not, professional help was sought.
A lot of the smoke is pseudo-religious, with salvation promised without the encumbrances of the time-honored rituals, doctrines, responsibilities, and limitations by which the established faiths are bound. For many, the counsellor has replaced the clergyman.
While on God; it’s difficult to know His will in these vexing matters. A reading 9f the scriptures however can give us a peek into the divine dynamics of life’s travails.
Poor old Job was a candidate for a stress-related collapse if anyone in history was. He had lost all; family, wife, public esteem, health (those open sores ugh!). He was banished in disgrace and poverty to sit outside the city walls. The one thing to pull him through was his immovable faith in his ever-wise Creator.
How would this story have been different if a well-meaning counsellor had taken Job in and workshopped his problems? The Group, in reviewing his reconstituted circumstances, may have opened with – “Your wife deserved what she got … a chance for you to grow.” Poor old Job would have been terminally stricken with cracked conviction.
The idea is not for one to suffer alone, but to be careful with whom one shares one’s innermost secrets – hence vulnerability. Latest research supports this common-sense caution, suggesting that stress is a necessary accessory to life’s obstacles. It is a psychosomatic response that actually braces the enigmatic immune system. Otherwise, why would stress be such a universal – in animals and man – psychic component? Many people, including children and especially teenagers, often – unconsciously or otherwise – compensate a modern relatively stress-free existence with danger sports, boss taunting, road rage – or other nerve -shredding devices.
The personal problems people solve together usually stay solved. Those who hand over responsibility to a third party, often a stranger, at best receive band-aid therapy – at worst, tragedy. Good old common-sense and home comforting beats the blinding smoke of counselling any day.
“The more laws that are written, the more criminals are produced:” Lao Tzu
Or in pedagogical parlance: the more school rules, the more miscreants.!
Bernard of Clairvaux, l2lh century Cistercian monk highly regarded in anthroposophical Esoteric Christian circles, found value in the ‘spirited’, to use Steiner’s term, individual. What he asserts here is in complete harmony with the values espoused by a good Steiner teacher for his/her class: “If ever there should be a monastery without an awkward and ill-tempered member, it would be necessary to go out and fine one and pay them their weight in gold – so great is the profit that results from this trial, when it is used properly.”
Important Earthschooling Notes
Copyright Alan Whitehead & Earthschooling: No Part of this book, post, URL, or book excerpt may be shared with anyone who has not paid for these materials.
Alan speaks in a very symbolic and esoteric manner in some parts of his books. Although they can be read anthroposophically, passages speaking of Atlantis, archangels, gods, etc. do not need to be taken literarily to be meaningful. The more you read, the more you will realize he uses many different religions to express ideas in a symbolic manner and not in a religious manner. His writings are not religious. In some places his writings are meant to refer to religious events in a historical way. In some places he is using religious figures (from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism, Ancient Roman and Greek Religions, etc.) in a symbolic manner. However, at no point is he promoting a specific religion or speaking from a religious point of view.
I have kept the writing as close to one-hundred percent original so you will also find that he speaks of Australia often and some spelling or manners of speaking may be cultural. Any words I have changed are presented like this: <word>.
Also keep in mind that these books are written by a Waldorf teacher with decades of experience who also studied with a Steiner student himself, so he speaks to an audience that is dedicating their lives to the Waldorf method without exception.
Because of this, all of his views are not reflected in the Earthschooling curriculum and not all of them may be ones you want to embrace or are able to use. In all of Alan Whitehead’s writings the opinions are his own and may not align with Earthschooling or Waldorf Books. In some cases, we will be updating some of these chapters in the future with additional and/or updated information.
Ultimately, however, as I read through these passages I find I can distill wisdom from even those paragraphs that do not resonate with me.
We invite you to read with an open mind and heart and with eagerness to learn and discuss.
END NOTE
Alan has presented dialogue in his writings in an expressive form, where he tries to capture the accent of the person he was with to give his writing more authenticity and to allow the reader to “be with him” in his experience. In no place in his writings is he using expressive language to make fun of or demean the speaker. So, as a person with a linguistics and anthropology degree I find this enriching and informative to me as the reader. Thus, we have made the decision to leave all expressive writing in its original form.
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