Removing pain’s barriers to healing

How do we open the window to let the air in?

Katherine Amphlett

Katherine is a counsellor based in the West Midlands.

A window sheds light through locked bars into a dusty and dark room,

Denny Müller on Unsplash.

One of the trickiest situations you can encounter if you’re a counsellor is having a client you can’t reach. They sit there in front of you, pain in their eyes, but somehow every approach you make meets with resistance. It’s like trying to touch someone through a closed window – you can see them, but you keep bumping into the glass.

I have two at the moment. One is Cypriot; I’ll call her Androulla, and she scares me rather as she is a doctor and never smiles and knows everything. ‘Yes, I have tried that,’ she says. ‘Yes, I am familiar with that book/ line of thinking/ philosophical method – it hasn’t worked for me.’

And I know that we’ve found the poisonous plant in the heart of her heart and pulled it up by the roots. I am as sure as I can be that she will get better now.

Yet she is dreadfully sad. Her mother died out in Cyprus, and she couldn’t get there in time. Her grief is eating her. She glares at me, desperate to be helped but bristling with gun turrets. Hmm.

Eventually I remember something Jane Goodall said. Jane Goodall is one of the world’s wonderful people… her work with chimpanzees back in the 60s dramatically changed our relationship with animals, and she still travels the world at the age of nearly 90 encouraging young people to take action on climate change. In her lovely Book of Hope she describes how when she’s completely knackered or stuck with something, she sort of hands herself over to an outside power. ‘I just relax and decide to appeal to the source of hidden strength,’ she writes. ‘There’s a wisdom that’s far, far, far greater than my own.’ When she surrenders in this way, she often gives her best lectures she says.

I think I might give it a try with Androulla. As a gradually-learning-to-be-more-trusting Christian, it seems most appropriate to follow in the footsteps of St Francis. So just before our next session I shut my eyes and say, ‘Help Lord, I don’t know what to say to her. Please take over and use me as a channel – she could really do with your peace and grace, and I seem to be in the way’. I’m quite a controlling person normally so I feel a bit reluctant… but if it works for Jane Goodall and for St Francis, I’m not going to argue!

To my surprise, I find myself asking Androulla what her understanding of the word ‘mercy’ might be – not a very usual counselling question. Even more surprising, her eyes fill with tears and suddenly she says that the last time she saw her mother, she told her she hated her, and had a physical fight with her and hurt the skin on her old arms. Crying properly now, the poor woman says she doesn’t deserve forgiveness after that, and I find myself telling her how mercy sees everything with utter clarity and loves and accepts it whatever is deserved or not deserved. And I know that we’ve found the poisonous plant in the heart of her heart and pulled it up by the roots. I am as sure as I can be that she will get better now.

Something compassionate has breathed on these locks, and the stuck windows have suddenly yielded and opened to let the air in.

Then today the same thing happens again – with Bella, my other client who cannot forgive herself, in this case for the fact that her violent alcoholic husband drank even more after she finally left him and died of organ failure in a homeless shelter. We’ve gone over and over her guilt for weeks, and she has remained shiny and brittle and artificially bright and fine. We’ve got nowhere. Until now. ‘Dear Lord,’ I say before I ring her, ‘help me find a way through to her. Let me remove myself and all my assumptions, so that your healing can flow through to her and give her some rest.’ I do my best to relax into our conversation, just to let what wants to come, come. And out of nowhere, I am suddenly inspired to ask her whether she’d feel guilty if her husband had died of some terrible illness like cancer.

‘No,’ she says.

‘Well… you’re a medical secretary. You’ll know better than me that alcoholism is an illness,’ I say.

There’s a very long silence.

‘Doesn’t that mean you’ve both been suffering from this terrible illness?’ I ask eventually. ‘Dave because it drove him crazy and then killed him; you because it blighted your life, and is blighting it still? Isn’t it time you said, “No, enough!” to this pestilence?’

I can see it in my mind’s eye, the alcoholism, like a swarm of red locusts or a scarlet dragon, devouring both Bella and Dave. I don’t feel that’s an image I came up with, it’s just there in my mind. I can feel this lodging in Bella’s mind too… a whole new way of thinking, a great big shift in emphasis, a transfer of responsibility from her to the monster.

I don’t know whether the idea is fully rooted yet, whether we can rely on it to grow and flourish and bear good fruit. But I sense that it is at least planted and watered. A bit more sunshine, some careful tending… and probably a lot more trusting would seem to be the way forward.

It’s not in the training manual, this technique. You won’t hear the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy recommending that therapists hand themselves over to Jane Goodall’s ‘outside power’. But something compassionate has breathed on these locks, and the stuck windows have suddenly yielded and opened to let the air in.

Column

Change

Community

9 May 2024

4 min read

Reform votes: what really matters in the end

Two votes, three decades apart.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A grand dinner table set for a meal sits within a large room with paintings on the wall.

The dining room of the Garrick Club.

I was this week one of several hundred members of the Garrick Club, with many more attending online, crammed into a central London conference room to vote on whether women could be admitted as members for the first time since our founding in 1831.

We Garrick members rather fancy ourselves as a secret society – and it was a rich irony that our vote was held in the same block as the Freemasons’ Hall in Great Queen Street.

Actually, I rather like the tradition that what’s said and done in the Garrick stays in the Garrick. So this isn’t about our club’s internal wrangling and politics, beyond the now widespread news that women were voted as eligible for membership by a majority of 60 per cent.

Rather than go further into that, I want to compare it with another well-fought fight for women’s inclusion: The admission of the female gender to the priesthood of the Church of England, more or less exactly 30 years ago in 1994.

Much of what was going on in the Church then was being rehearsed again in London WC2 this week. You might call it long overdue dismantlements of patriarchal institutions, even if neither the Church nor our club would self-identify as such. No case could continue to be sustained for all-male preferment in our Church or in our club.

To their great credit, the vote was won for reform by those who decided to work together, without rancour or resentment, in preference to further division and bitterness.

There are two observations I would make of the Church precedent that may be of some comfort to my fellow club members, who may feel that nothing will ever be quite the same again. The first of these is quite a quick point. After a couple of weeks of women’s priesthood, almost everyone in the Church wondered what all the fuss had been about. Ordained women became a natural part of the priestly fabric of the Church really that quickly.

Yes, provision had to be made for those who in conscience couldn’t accept women’s ordained ministry, so the process was not without its pain. But three decades on, women priests (and subsequently and inevitably bishops) are so much part of the weave of that fabric that most church congregations feel they’ve always been there.

The second point I would make is that I know anecdotally of very many traditionalists opposed to women’s ordination who, at the General Synod, either voted for women or abstained when the result became inevitable. To have fought a last-ditch, hopeless defence could only have lastingly damaged the Church’s reputation and ministry.

To their great credit, the vote was won for reform by those who decided to work together, without rancour or resentment, in preference to further division and bitterness. My feeling is that a tranche of Garrickian votes were cast for similar reasons.

These were women at the top of their game. It’s just taken a couple of millennia for our churches and clubs to catch up.

The comparison of a gentleman’s club and gentleman’s church is an imperfect one. Members of a church could be male or female; only the clergy were strictly male. There were profound theological and ecclesiological arguments (though I don’t share them) made against the prospect of women priests by Anglo-Catholics, which aren’t available to fans of men-only clubs.

But the similarities between the institutions are founded on the principles of patriarchy nevertheless. The idea that men, in private circumstances, can behave and associate in the pretence that they are still in charge of everything, as they were in the nineteenth century, both at church and in clubland.

This doesn’t matter much when it comes to the likes of all-boy or all-girl sports teams – though it’s a delight to see Woodlanders Football Club, Lioness-cubs to a girl, beat the boys to win their cup.

It begins to matter very much indeed when the senior figures of professions and public institutions seek to associate only with their male colleagues. That’s as true of a boss who takes only the boys in the office to a rugby match at Twickenham as it is of gentlemen’s clubs. It may be patriarchy-lite, but it is rooted in the same hegemony that gave the Church its patriarchs.

It’s an irony as rich as the location of this week’s Garrick vote that the gospel is far from patriarchal in its narratives, even though the language of Father and Son so ostensibly is. The Nazarene, scandalously for his day, freely associates with women. The Jesus movement is radical in gender equality in a manner that its Church has failed down the centuries to emulate.

Jesus gives full messianic attention to a despised and shamed Samaritan woman; he saves an adulterous woman (code for prostitute) from stoning; he stops to address a bleeding woman who just wants to touch him; as the risen Christ, he gives a woman, Mary of Magdala, the greatest apostolic mission in history to tell his dispersed disciples what she has witnessed.

Little wonder women appear so prominently in the Acts of the Apostles. These were women at the top of their game. It’s just taken a couple of millennia for our churches and clubs to catch up.