This whole website, from the url to the name of my new Counselling firm, is lousy with the word there. And now, when you schedule an appointment at my booking website, you'll notice that the sessions are listed as There-apy rather than Therapy. What, you might ask yourself, is the story with all this there-ness?
There is the plainest of words. It is likely one of the first words a person learns, because it is the most rudimentary ways of expressing what you desire, where you want to go, and where you might currently be. In fact, we might say that a baby learns the power of there before their capacity to use to language by learning to point to the thing they want.
There-ness is with us from our earliest days, but there is also one of the most important words in a philosophical tradition that is foundational to the way I think about therapy. But it is, actually, much more than that: it is foundational to the way I think about the very nature of what it means to be a person. That tradition has an imposing name, existential phenomenology. And that tradition is led by an imposing figure, Martin Heidegger (Wikipedia entry, Stanford encyclopedia of philosphy).
One of my great hopes with this new practice and new site/writing platform is to be able to express my ideas about existentialism and phenomenology and the Heideggerian tradition to clients and prospective clients. I would also like to be able to contribute to the scholarly discussions in the context of Counselling Psychology and History of Philosophy.
Good luck to me 😅!
What kind of Being is a human being?
There's no pointing in beating around the bush: if one wants to be of assistance to clients in a Counselling context, one needs to have an understanding of the kind of Being a human being is. This is where there comes in, because our Germanic friend, Martin Heidegger, gives us a definition. He says that a human being is the kind of Being called a Dasein.
Do not be alarmed! This is not a word most of us would have ever come across, because it is not an English word. Dasein is a German compound word:
Da = there
Sein = Being
Dasein is regularly left untranslated in English, but when it is, it is commonly translated as Being-there or Being-in-the-world. You'll notice already something that regularly shows up in my writing and shows up in the url of this site and the way I name my therapeutic sessions, i.e. as hyphenates: there-apy. Fun with language!
The definitions above—Being-there or Being-in-the-world—both suggest a kind of locatedness. For my own part, I like to translate Dasein in a slightly different way: as there-Being. This is not a common way to translate Dasein, and no doubt German scholars and Philosophers might disagree, but... there we are.
I like the definition there-Being, because it shifts the emphasis in a way that fits with what I have learned about people over the many thousands of hours I have spent with them in a professional therapeutic setting. And it fits with what I have learned about the struggles those of us with adhd have, namely the feeling of lostness, of not being able to locate where there is, or of mistaking another's person perspective or vantage—their there—for our own. People with adhd are often looking out at the world from behind the eyes of others, and you'll be unsurprised to learn that this causes an enormous amount of confusion and dislocation.
The emphasis is important, because if we translate Dasein as Being-there, it is as if we are saying, "look... it's a Being who is there," or "look... it is someone existing over there." In those ways of translating Dasein, the compoundedness of the German word is largely lost. But when we translate Dasein as there-Being, it maintains its fundamentally compound structure and answers the question, "what kind of a being is a human being?" A human being is the kind of being characterized as a there-Being. A human being is a there-Being, and when we cannot locate where there is... we become a Being who can primarily be characterized as a lost-Being.
Ok... this is getting pretty heavy. Time for a comedy break from the 1974 masterpiece, Young Frankenstein that keeps coming to mind as I work through all this there-ness.
Now... back to our regularly scheduled program:
There-apy: a therapeutic wayfinding approach
Being a Being who is characterized by their lostness, that is a lost-Being, is my conception of the foundational problem of psychology. I want to pause on this, because it is the cornerstone of my approach to working with clients, and it is a radical departure from the two main traditions under which psychotherapy has developed: psychodynamic (led by Freud) and behaviourist (led by Skinner). There is much more to say about this, but for the time being, let me simply say that I am against most psychodynamic approaches—most pointedly, psychoanalysis, and behaviourism.
It is reductive to say, but... I'll say it anyway and expand on these ideas in later writing: psychoanalysis misunderstands what a person is and behaviourism... well... behaviourism seems to be actively hostile to thinking very deeply about a what a person is at all. As the name suggests, behaviourism is interested in behaviour and not much else.
What part does adhd play?
For those who are familiar with my writing and clinical practice, you'll be pretty surprised that I made it this far without saying much about adhd, but working with adhd clients has been critical in the development of my understanding of people as there-Beings, the fundamental problem of Counselling Psychology as lostness, and the ways in which I can work with clients towards self-understanding, working at acceptance, developing resiliency, and ultimately a sense of ease and contentment.
Adhd is fundamentally a condition characterized by lostness.
- sensory sensitivity - e.g. lost in sound
- anxiety - lost in projections of the future
- people pleasing - lost in the desires of others (the imagined or perceived desires of others)
- oppositionalism - lost in the knee-jerk opposition to others' desires (the imagined or perceived desires of others)
- perfectionism - lost in unattainable standards
- black and white thinking - lost in binary oppositions
- RSD - lost in hurt, abandonment, criticism, rejection, etc.
- time blindness - lost in time
- lack of spatial awareness (clumsiness) - lack of proprioception (lost from the standpoint of where your body is vis a vis objects in space)
- lack of directionality - lost in space
- restlessness - lost in space, i.e. looking for something
- interrupting others - lost in conversation
- losing things - this one explains itself
- distractedness - lost in the world
- trauma - lost in the injuries of the past
I could go on, but you get the point.
Join me for a session in person or online to start on the path to discovering where your there is.