A Pilgrim
at Candle Creek Falls
Clive Perraton Mountford
Published in Person-Centred
Quarterly August 2006
Clearwater Valley , British Columbia , Canada
It is spring in the
Three days ago I revisited
Okay, I eventually asked, what are
you feeling? , and the answer was an almost unspeakable pain and sorrow. What for? I inquired. I hesitated,
knowing that it wasn't just for the clear-cut chunks missing from the forest which
make flying home across western
Does that make sense? I am not sure that it makes sense to me because I find no satisfactory way to conceptualize the awareness of presence which is so strong in these hills and mountains. I have tried to rationalize this kind of experience, and I have tried to tell myself that I simply love mountains and a certain kind of beauty, but that doesn't quite answer. Somehow, the experience is about more than mountains and more than beauty, or rather, they are part of something more than themselves…as I am. At least, that is how it seems at times like this, and—of crucial importance—the "something more" is badly wounded and grotesquely abused.
As I hauled my increasingly sedentary self back up the trail, I discovered that what had happened was helping to answer questions I have been putting to myself over the past few weeks and lending various matters a perspective such that they at least seem to belong together. Since finding myself with a chapter in a book entitled Counselling and Spirituality (Moore 2006) I have been much exercised. Am I a fraud? I often don't believe that I really know what spirituality is, and I frequently find myself confused when others speak of it. Even worse, my contribution to the book is an extension of an argument properly belonging to environmental ethics. What is it doing in a compendium of articles about counselling and spirituality?
Sitting here, today, watching clouds move up the valley, and buds almost visibly opening (they are certainly more leaf-like than when I got up this morning) I feel that maybe it does all make sense, and maybe I am not a fraud, and maybe I do have something to say about a possible relationship between Candle Creek Falls and person-centered practice. I want to try to spell it out as simply and clearly as I know how right now in a way that is primarily intended for other person-centered practitioners.
A Beautiful Family Home
Here is a place to start. Suppose that you
and I belong to a large, extended family which has inherited a beautiful old
house. Let’s say that house is situated here in the
There are a lot of people who claim that the way humankind is treating the planet is akin to someone chopping a hole in the roof of our family home. There are also those who think that what is happening is simply non-lethal change which some folks just don't like. Who is right? Nobody knows for sure, but I think that the best course of action is pretty much the same in either case. Physical intervention aside, broadly two things can be said to the person who is wrecking the house, and they both lead to the same place. Those two things are:
·
This is not sensible behaviour. Self (or species) interest says: Don't do that! This is our only home, and we are quite vulnerable creatures. The
weather doesn’t have to get very cold or very warm before humans cease to
function; we need a particular blend of gases in the atmosphere; we need
sunlight, but it has to be filtered, and so on. Humankind fits a particular
Earth environment, and we shall be in big trouble if that environment changes
very much.
· Earth and what some call "the created order" are important and of value simply in themselves. The way that we are treating Earth is plain wrong...morally wrong even.
The first response characterizes just about everything now being said in the press, and on radio and television, about "climate change" and "the environment". We are routinely enjoined to change our ways because our well-being depends upon it. Earth is portrayed as a means to an end which, roughly speaking, is human flourishing.
However—and with heavy irony unfortunately—this kind of strategy isn't
going to work. There is no evidence that we humans are currently capable of acting in our own best
interests environmentally speaking. We want wealth, economic growth, knowledge,
as many toys as possible; we want them now. We sail as close to the wind as we
think we can; we take risks. My hunch is that we are wired that way; speaking
for myself, I delight in risks which make no rational sense.
To make matters even worse, the
calculations that would be involved in trying to figure out what is safe
behaviour and what we can get away with are beyond human competence in practice
and probably in theory. We often don’t know what consequences small changes and
seemingly innocuous activities might have, and that is not just remediable
ignorance. Complex, chaotic systems are involved, and it may be that they
cannot be accurately modelled.
What
do we do? Speaking as a part-time moral
philosopher, the answer is staring us in the face. We need to protect Earth
from our own folly and our potential to abuse, we need to play it really safe, and that is just the kind
of job which morality seems designed to do. If we stand back temporarily from our
own particular moral beliefs and commitments and ask what human morality would need to be like to best promote human welfare in a populous and high technology
culture, then I think the answer is pretty clear. Morality will need to promote
a caring and protective relationship with Earth such that Earth is treated as
an end in itself and not simply as a means to satisfying our material ambitions
or distracting us from our pain. What we need
is an Earth-friendly morality. What we must do is develop and seek to follow such a morality.
This sketch—and believe me, it is just a
sketch—invokes a tactic which is philosophically sound even if it is not always
smiled upon. More importantly, perhaps, my proposal is consistent with the
broadly held belief that morality’s raison d’être is human
welfare, and it meets the reasonable concerns of those who believe we must protect Earth for the sake of human interests.
About here I am sometimes told what a bloodless, even cynical way this is to argue about our beloved family home. I feel particularly vulnerable to that charge right now given the kind of things I was saying earlier about my experiences here in the Clearwater Valley. I also feel exposed to the riposte that this talk of morality is beside the point when what is really needed is that we each find a different, more caring way of relating to Earth and the "something more" and I also wrote about earlier. I guess the short answer is that morality is for when things go wrong. If love and caring are abundant then we hardly need morality at all. Morality is for the lean times, for the times when understanding and compassion fail, and it is also a practice which can lead us back towards those qualities. My sense is that we are living in lean times.
The long answer? That is coming next, but I promise that it won't be too long.
The Next Step
Believe it or not, the detailed version of this took me nearly 10 years to produce and eventually get accepted as a doctoral thesis. Some fancy conceptualization and terminology got developed along the way which, if you are interested, gets a brief airing in the chapter in Spirituality and Counselling (Mountford 2006a) and in a recent article in Self and Society (Mountford 2006b). However, I am not sure that stuff is necessary here. What is important is that it was around this time that I petitioned for one of my periodic divorces from philosophy and took up with person-centered counselling.
There were many reasons for this change of partner, not least being my recognition that I didn't know where to take my philosophical argument next. I had a pretty compelling case for something tantamount to Deep Ecology[1], and—with a naïveté which I at least find touching—I viewed its development as a useful contribution to environmental sanity. In practice, however, it all seemed to stir up more hostility than converts, and I was painfully aware that my argument was incomplete.
I was claiming:
· It is in humankind's best interest to practice a morality that not only treats human beings as morally important and as ends in themselves but extends this privilege to the whole of the nonhuman world or created order.
That alone is a pretty radical claim, but then I was adding:
· In order for this to happen, most of us are going to need a program of deep personal change. We are going to have to learn to relate to the nonhuman, to the created order and all of its parts, as something precious to be treasured and respected. Unfortunately, I don't really know how that is to be achieved.
End of the road. I was going to need a new way to continue my lifelong obsession with the fact that human beings have a distinct tendency to wreck their surroundings. I reasoned that if, as a species, we incline to behave much like a person chopping a hole in the roof of their only home and shelter, then, as a species, we are disturbingly similar to a crazy person. What I needed to do, therefore, was train as a therapist and possibly practice as a therapist in order to learn more about that kind of craziness.
On the strength of this logic, and with the
perhaps surprising blessing of my wife and daughters, we sold our family home
and only shelter, and my wife and I moved to
Dr. Rogers’s Troika
At the heart of person-centered practice is a way of being and a way of relating to others. I would even go so far as to say that the way of being, properly understood, is person-centered practice.
Positioned, as it were, on the right-hand of this central way of being is a basic recipe for acquiring and practicing it. Positioned on the left-hand is a theory about human nature and therapy which offers intellectual support for the recipe. The recipe consists of the famous list of six therapeutic conditions which Carl Rogers (1959) deemed "necessary and sufficient". The theory is a story about the innate human tendencies to grow and develop, to seek relationship, and to be affected by the expectations and conditions placed upon us by others. What goes wrong in human lives is that the love we receive—if such a thing can truly be called "love"—is all too often tainted by what we know as "conditions of worth", those ubiquitous I will love you, if… clauses which are so much a part of growing up and of everyday human relating. The antidote to this conditionality, and what heals the wounds which it inflicts, is the experience of a relationship relatively free from conditionality and grounded in the necessary and sufficient conditions. Providing that relationship is a counsellor's main job.
As I review the outlines of
There are different ways of thinking about
this flaw. In a general sense, asserting
necessary and sufficient conditions for therapeutic healing is just too
strong. Necessary and sufficient means if
and only if, and even hard science is leery of
claims that strong. A useful
hypothesis needs to be strong enough that it can be shown false—if not, it is
scientifically valueless—it does not need to be so strong that it is almost certain to be false. This kind of
thinking dates back to a dream of certainty which our intellectual culture has renounced.
More specifically, as Campbell Purton (2002 and 2004) has so clearly argued,
the necessary and sufficiency assertion depends upon the hypothesis that all psychic distress is rooted in
introjections of conditional acceptance usually experienced in childhood, and
this really doesn’t seem to be the case.
In other words, there is a fallacy at the very centre of our theory. We can draw a veil over this embarrassment and carry on as if everything is fine. We can retreat to the halcyon days of the 1950s and call ourselves client–centered purists. We can seek "integration" with other theoretical partners in order to shore ourselves up. We can also note that the way of being is the heart of person-centered practice, acknowledge our theoretical difficulty, and carry on offering a person-centered therapy with confidence while giving thought to the need to revise person–centred theory. Obviously, my money is on the final option, but I find myself in the same predicament that I was in vis-à-vis environmental ethics a decade ago: I don't really know how that is to be achieved.
That small additional embarrassment notwithstanding, it does seem to me that there is nothing inherently wrong with the six conditions other than the assertion that they are necessary and sufficient. If we are willing to renounce the latter claim, then they remain a perfectly good recipe for acquiring, practicing, and teaching the way of being which is central to person-centered practice. I say this with conviction as someone who strives to ground his therapeutic practice in the three core, or counsellor, conditions, and who bases his teaching of future person-centered counsellors on the acquisition of a core-conditional way of relating to others. I also say it with conviction because—conveniently for my environmental agenda—these conditions map beautifully onto a nonhuman locus of attention. In other words, it is possible to offer a version of the person-centered relationship to the nonhuman world and all of its parts.
Does that seem self-evident, obvious, and
in no need of further demonstration? I know that other person-centered
practitioners do hold similar views, and you may be someone who would prefer to
jump ahead and skip the next section. Otherwise, here is a brief accounting in
support of my claim.
A Very Catholic Recipe For Relationship
I shall briefly consider each of the six
conditions described by Carl Rogers, but not in their original order.
The unconditional positive regard, or UPR,
the prizing or love which a therapist offers their client, maps onto trees,
cats, mountains...without difficulty. It is easy to love a tree; sometimes, it
is easier than loving human beings, I find.
Empathy, too, is not that difficult to
extend to most living things. Cats have feelings, purposes, furry cat–shoes to
step into. This may be called "anthropomorphizing", but it is a
respectable ethological tactic these days. What is more, empathising with
representatives of another species is not unique to human beings. The
primatologist Frans de Waal (2005) has recently described how a female bonobo
(think "pygmy chimpanzee"—a slimmer cousin of the chimps befriended
by Jane Goodall) picked up a downed starling, climbed a tree in order to
release the bird to its element, and, when the starling failed to escape the
bonobo's enclosure, sat beside it for the rest of the day until the starling recovered
sufficient strength to fly away.[2]
Trees may seem a bit harder to empathise with, but I think most gardeners know empathy for their floral friends. Mountains? Speaking personally, I feel things for mountains that are sometimes overwhelming—I do mean the mountains themselves and not the "something other" which I spoke of earlier—and the well–being of a beloved mountain is of great importance to me. I know I’m not alone, and I can even call recent developments in neuroscience to my aid. It seems the experience of empathy is associated with observable brain activity and a kind of neurological mirroring. For example, if I see you drop a big rock on your foot, things will happen in parts of my brain that mirror what is happening in those parts of your brain. Not everything that is going on for you will be mirrored, that is why I don't literally feel your pain; what I will experience are the emotions, expectations, and other less direct feelings associated with a big rock landing on one's foot.
Some researchers even think that human brains have evolved areas dedicated to empathic identification. In other words, humans—and to a lesser degree several other kinds of mammal—are hardwired for empathy, and in humans the consequences of this are surprising. Brain scanning has demonstrated that "empathic activity" occurs when, for example, we observe a big rock dropping on a cow's hoof, or—wait for it!—we see a big rock rolling down a mountainside and slamming into another big rock. It seems that humans are not just wired for empathy; we are so well wired for empathy that we can empathize with inanimate objects.
This does not mean we cannot and should not
sometimes employ the psychological "shields" which allow us to
utilize objects for our own purposes—that would be absurd—and if this was a
more philosophical discussion, I would have to ask hard questions about how
such use sits with a more environmentally focused morality. My point, here, is
simply that humans are innately empathic creatures and that our empathic
ability is not limited to our own kind.
UPR, empathy…that’s two out of the three core or counsellor conditions. The third one is that the therapist be
congruent, or genuine and authentic, within the counselling relationship. Can
genuineness and authenticity be offered to a nonhuman? With creatures enjoying
a high degree of sentience I think the answer must be Of course it can. The case is harder to make when the other party
to the relationship is not sentient; however, there are two stages to
congruence to take into account. First, there is openness to one’s own
experiencing, a kind of inner honesty and acceptance. Second, there is
congruent relating and being in the world. The first stage is about how one
relates to one’s self, and the second stage is about relating to others. Even
if one cannot easily be said to be in congruent relationship with a mountain, one can be congruently oneself upon the mountain and act
towards the mountain from a place of
personal congruence. The more I reflect upon this, the more it seems
potentially very important to the way we treat the nonhuman world: How much damage is done in a state of
incongruence? Finally, let us not forget that the three counsellor
conditions are inseparable in
practice: one cannot be empathic and acceptant while holding back on
congruence.
I am now going to turn the traditional account of the counsellor conditions on its head for a few paragraphs. Those conditions are intended to contribute to a therapeutic environment for human beings. They are acquired and offered for the sake of the client, but—as person-centered practitioners know so well—they powerfully affect the person offering them. Speaking personally, I find that the consequent changes in me run in two directions. I am more acceptant, a little less ego–laden, gentler, more perceptive, more empathic, more desirous that whatever is gets its moment in the sun, its chance to flourish. I am also more angry, more enraged by the suffering and damage which humankind is causing to itself and everything around it. Both these tendencies, if generalized, will help safeguard Earth from human foolishness, and it begins to seem to me that offering a version of the counsellor conditions to the nonhuman world is not only possible, doing so will tend to promote personal change of just the kind which is needed to ground a more Earth friendly morality.
I have now described how three of the
conditions—the counsellor or core conditions—might apply to a nonhuman locus of
attention. That leaves three to go.
Contact, psychological contact, was the
first of the remaining three. The therapist needs to work at that, and I can
find no harm and much good in a genuine attempt to be in contact with the
nonhuman. I don’t mean that we should get silly; we just need to notice the way
the leaves move, the paws go down; put ourselves in the way of experiencing
rain against the cheek; be open to the other, the nonhuman other, in a way
analogous to the openness of a counsellor to their client.
Condition number two was that the client be
anxious, vulnerable, incongruent. Does it
map at all? In a way, I think it does. Earth and everything on it is
vulnerable, much more vulnerable than humans ever imagined until recently. It
might lead to much good if we were more aware of that.
The really tough condition is the last one:
“the client perceives, at least to a
minimal degree…the unconditional positive
regard…and the empathic
understanding of the therapist.” With highly sentient creatures, both are
possible, and I don’t mean only those creatures which have evolved alongside us
as dogs and cats have. Try walking in the bush here in
Can vegetative lives somehow experience or
otherwise be affected by our intent, our feelings towards them? There is some
positive evidence—try routinely saying ugly, negative things to a plant, and
see what happens—and science is interested in this. [3] As for the rest of creation, the rocks and that stuff, how much do
we really know?
Logical And Extra-Logical Conclusions
The intricacy of the
last two sections has almost but not entirely removed me from my experience at
Whatever else any
particular person-centered therapist does or doesn't do, and whatever else they
do or don't offer to their clients, they do offer relationship grounded in
their own heartfelt attempt to offer the counsellor conditions. Whatever is
actually going on in therapy that promotes healing—and let us be honest, nobody
really understands, not yet—experiencing this kind of relationship is
frequently and in itself transformative for the client. More to the point I
want to make here, offering this kind
of relationship is even more frequently transformative for the therapist: we
come to value, prize, and even love our clients, and even someone as capable of
misanthropy as I am, finds themselves looking upon humankind with at least a
warm compassion.
What our troubled
relationship with our lovely blue-green planet and only home requires is
precisely this kind of transformation in our individual ways of relating to it.
In other words, if we would each seek to offer an open-centered version of the
counsellor conditions to everything else around us, and if we each tried to
predicate all our relationships upon
the six conditions, then my guess is that large and rapid changes would occur.
Carl Rogers famously saw his recipe for human relationship as having relevance
beyond the counselling room; I propose that it has relevance far beyond
human-human interactions.
Of course, few if any
of us can manage to offer this kind of relationship to anyone or anything on a
24 hours/7 days per week basis. Therefore, we have morality to guide us and
restrain us, and we also have morality as a practice which encourages us in
what—in our more enlightened moments—we believe to be the best direction.
Seeking to relate to other humans and
to all the rest—the nonhuman, the
created order—on the basis of the person-centred recipe looks to me a pretty
fine basis for such a moral practice. It also looks like precisely the kind of
transformative and moral practice which I needed to be able to reference a
decade or so ago.
At this point, I'm
tempted to stop. If what I'm saying is not uncontroversial, it still remains
resolutely secular and rational. Given a little tightening up here and there it
involves nothing that a respectable environmental ethicist might not put his
name to. However, if I do stop here, I am disowning whatever was with me at
It has been said that
practicing counselling the person-centered way is a spiritual practice, and I
think that I understand that in two ways:
·
Any
attempt to lessen one's own attachment to the vantage point which is
"I" and to enter into relationship with one's own needs mostly set
aside in favor of another's can be conceived as a spiritual endeavor. It moves
a person in the direction of a kind of relatedness whose endpoint is the
experience of real joining and blending, or to put it another way, perhaps,
whose endpoint is temporary release from the illusion of separateness.
Understood in this way, spiritual practice can involve a "spirituality"
which need not invoke anything "otherworldly" or
"mystical".
·
Unfortunately, though, I seem
to understand person-centered relationship as a spiritual practice in a further
and more troubling way. I find that if I really seek to be core-conditionally
present with another, and if I really try to be congruent and open to my
experience, then "something else" usually makes itself known to my
awareness, and it feels just like that of which I was so movingly aware as I
stood at the foot of
I have no idea what to
call this "something else" nor how to conceptualize it, but neither
do I have any doubt that it is entirely trustworthy. I also harbour the hypothesis
that many religions and religious practices have grown up around precisely this
"something else", and religions and religious practices are, of
course, mostly obdurately human-centered affairs. If my experience at
References
Cohen, Philip (2004) "Humans are
hardwired to feel others' pain". New
Scientist online news service
Moore, Judy and
Campbell Purton (eds) (2006) Spirituality
and Counselling: Experiential and Theoretical Perspectives. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS
Books.
Mountford, Clive
Perraton (2006a) "Open-Centered Ecosophy: Or How to do environmentally
interesting things with Dr. Rogers’ therapeutic conditions".
Mountford, Clive
Perraton (2006b) "Dr. Rogers and The Moral Umbrella: Open-Centered
Ecosophy". Self & Society Volume 33 Number 5 March-April 2006.
Phillips, Helen (2002) “Not just a pretty face”. New Scientist, issue 2353,
Phillips, Helen (2004) “Is empathy an animal quality?”. New Scientist, issue 2444,
Purton,
Purton,
Rothenburg, David ed. (1989) Ecology, community and lifestyle.
Rogers, Carl (1959) “A Theory Of Therapy,
Personality, And Interpersonal Relationships As Developed In The Client-Centred
Framework”. S. Koch ed. (1959) Psychology:
A Study of a Science vol.3.
de Waal, Frans (2005)"The empathic
ape". New Scientist, issue 2509,