The Gist of the Practice
What makes this counselling practice different?
The slogan of my practice is an homage to my "grandmentor" (the mentor of my mentor), Andrew Feldmar. It means this counselling practice belongs to a lineage of psychiatrists and psychotherapists who, recognising the limits of medication and treatment, wanted to complement the aims of healthcare with a practice of ethics. If medication dulls the senses to help with extreme pain and treatment lulls the senses to provide relief, ethics enhances and refines them. Counselling, and certain forms of psychotherapy, can enhances, refines, and thereby liberates, a sense of courage – from Latin, cor, meaning "heart".
Why courage?
Aristotle defined courage as the transcendent virtue. He did not mean it is first on a grand list of virtues. Courage gets all the other virtues going. Without courage, there is no truth. Without courage, there is no humour, no friendship, and certainly no love, for we are never more vulnerable than we are when we love someone.
How does counselling differ from friendship?
The practice's flow of care differs from “reciprocal flow” in relationships between family, friends, and beloveds.
Reciprocal flow describes a pattern of nourishment. The earth nourishes trees and trees nourish the soil. Bees collect nectar from flowering plants to feed their kin and the plants grow because they are pollinated. Animals breathe in oxygen produced by plants and plants eat what animals breathe out. Entire ecosystems rely on the constant giving-and-receiving cycles of reciprocal flow. Human beings, both animal and person, also rely on reciprocal flow but it can go awry and leave people in a bad way. Counselling can help people in such situations.
The care of counselling is not reciprocal. Two people’s attention is devoted to one person’s well-being – the guest's. While it relies on the usual rhythms of conversation – telling and listening, leading and following, exploring and noticing, calling and responding, coming and going – it’s all in the name of care.
How does this practice work with suffering?
In a caring flow, we come back to our senses. We begin to actually hear how we think about ourselves, others, and our lives. We get in touch with what we feel and get a sense of who or what we are out of touch with. This rhythm of care can make one feel lighter. If it does not always make us feel better, it will make us better at feeling. Since feeling is prior to cognition, better at thinking too.
Is this practice more like medicine or art?
When the material is a matter of disease, virus, cancer, and so on, medicine is a life-saving intervention that gets rid of the material so we can heal. When the material is a matter of the heart, we can't get rid of it without hurting ourselves. Still, we can work with it. Ethics is a bearing with, and caring for, the raw material of that trouble – be it confusion, frustration, or desolation. The bigger the feeling, the larger the material. Perhaps as large as a mountain. Fellow mountaineers, from ancient to present times, have discovered that flowers live inside these mountains. The mystical flowers live where it’s dark and deep. Down there, they are huge. They look like winged dragons, spouting fire. And they are also very beautiful.
We have to face these mountains ourselves but we can't do it alone. That's where counselling comes in.
The Plot of Counselling
The Beginning:
Entraining
The early period helps entrain the counsellor -- they are brought into step or rhythm with another person’s life. The guest leads and the counsellor follows. To keep the rhythm going, it helps to meet every week or two initially.
The Middle:
A space where anything can be said
After a while, the difference between what's fake and what's true become more distinct. We can shoot light through the wool pulled over our eyes, through the grey clouds of a mourning, through the dark that inspires so much fear, through the mimesis of desire that misguides us, and the walls of denial, get to our own hearts, our guts, our source of inner knowledge.
Speaking and listening is an embodied practice. To describe exactly what our lives are like, why we can’t seem to go on, what our human condition means, what we want, what we fear, what we like, and what we feel, is somatic. The trick is to get to the details, which requires patience, seriousness, and walking a tightrope over memory and speculation, instinct and possibility, feeling and denial. If you fall, there's someone to pick you back up.
This means that counselling is a healing practice as well as an empowering one. Our powers to think and act expand. Baruch Spinoza, a famous philosopher in his time, defined these moments as “joy” – one of the most important pleasures of counselling and psychotherapy.
The End:
Finding a way again
The metaphors of mountains and flowers describe how the flow of care can shape our trouble into a true story. True stories contain epiphanies – manifestations of value.
Epiphanies are to human life what the earth is to trees, or oxygen to animals. You know it when you feel it. This is what the practice aims for.
About Alex
I was born and raised in Durban and moved to Cape Town to study. I grew up in a troubled family, and became passionate about the kind of care such trouble needs.
I studied the science, philosophy, and history of psychology and psychotherapy at the University of Cape Town and University College London for seven years – I have Master’s degrees from both universities. After being exposed to the ways that cornerstone practices, like psychiatry and psychotherapy, mis- or under-describe the moral life of human beings, I understood that the language of care that I wasn't looking for required taking a road less travelled.
While on the way, I found who I was looking for: a philosopher who practiced ethics not as an abstract area of study but as a means to live and love well, to ask the big questions, and be responsible. After two years of counselling, I apprenticed with them and then studied philosophy and the arts of the word while working part-time.
I have practiced as a counsellor in Cape Town since 2020. Currently, alongside running the practice, I’m pursuing a PhD in philosophy and I also write poetry. I live in Gardens with my beloved and venture among different and dear communities trying to take better care of themselves, each other, and the places in which we live.
Practical Questions
