Relationship, Authenticity, and Love

Caring for the Soul in Counselling:
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Relationship, Authenticity, and Love

“Therapy happens between two souls when they meet honestly and sincerely.”
-Vassavada

If there is one essential element for nurturing souls in counselling, it is found in the therapeutic relationship (Ottens & Klein, 2005). This is because caring for the soul, of course, involves caring—and caring is not possible without relationship. Caring is a relationship.
 
In this way, a good relationship will do the work for us—what we do or say as therapists is not as important (Ottens & Klein, 2005; Vasavada, 2019). Relationship is the “third thing,” the “superordinate factor” that, with our openness and participation, comes to act on our behalf (Vasavada, 2019).
 
Much of the methodological underpinnings of caring for soul that you will find elsewhere in this blog are not possible without a strong relational base. This, again, is because they are care-oriented, as in adopting a care vs. cure mentality; the ability to trust the process rather than rush to fix; and the ability for a client to vulnerably explore their imagination and felt sense in front of another.

Therapeutic relationship is important to all counselling modalities—it is a critically important common factor. Relationship is so important to the common factors and to soul care that it has even been suggested that the common factors that determine the success of all therapeutic modalities are synonymous with soul-nurturing (Ottens & Klein, 2005).
 
Authenticity
 
In soul care, a therapeutic relationship requires that the therapist also show up with soul—this is how a deeper connection is created (Dickson, 2019)—"therapy happens between two souls when they meet honestly and sincerely” (Vasavada, 2019, p. 87). When we are talking about the healing relationship in therapy, we are talking about soul-to-soul contact (Leijssen, 2008).
 
Showing up with soul requires the authentic participation of the therapist in the counselling process (Green, 2020). This is a balancing act—how to show up authentically without taking up too much space or endangering necessary ethical boundaries—but it is absolutely essential to a soul-to-soul relationship. It’s a “vulnerability with purpose,” presenting your “full-but-considered” humanness to clients (Green, 2020, p. 8). Only in this way can we be two souls in the room together.
 
Presence
 
Another way to frame this authenticity is as therapeutic presence. A certain level of presence is required on the part of the therapist to cultivate a soulful environment in which the client’s own soul can flourish (Hammer, 2019). This can be called an “ensouled presence” (Green, 2020, p. 8), an “inner holding environment” or a “treasured place of interiority” (Hammer, 2019, p. 140-141). By cultivating this soulful place inside themself and showing up in sessions from that place, the therapist can help lead the creation of a soul-nurturing therapeutic relationship.
 
Collaboration
 
A good therapeutic relationship, and a soul-nurturing relationship, is collaborative (Ottens & Klein, 2005). It is essential to soul care—which aims to care for the essence of the client—for the client to participate collaboratively in the therapeutic process. Only in this way can their own soul inform the shape of a soul-nurturing therapy.
 
Love
 
Above and beyond relationship, soul care requires love. The therapist must love the client’s soul (Moore, 2021). The therapist’s ability to give love—not to say it, but to feel it—is essential (Quillman, 2020). Loving our clients means seeing the seeds of what they can grow to be (Moore, 2021). It means feeling with them through the tragic events they have gone through (Moore, 2021).  It means sensing the latent promise and possibilities within them (Moore, 2021). The love of their soul is the fulfillment of our vocation (Moore, 2021).
 
The need for love in soul care goes beyond infusing the counselling relationship. The “experience of loving and feeling loved” is the essential ground from which a clients experience of themselves as a soul can begin to emerge (Quillman, 2020, p. 26). Much of the work of therapy, in general, is discovering and working with the client’s injuries to love through close relationship with the therapist, by softening the defences the client has established to protect their soul from abandonment and annihilation (Quillman, 2020). “If we do not find a way to meet and to eventually soften ‘the barriers to love,’ we cannot find our way to a core self” (Quillman, 2020, p. 25). In therapy, we are agreeing to meet, together, what love has so far failed to touch (Quillman, 2020).
 
As a therapist, in those moments when you feel like you don’t know what to do, instead of jumping to intervention, you can “stay with” the client’s soul by instead asking yourself “how do I love this person right now?” As a client you can do the same, in or out of the therapy room—when you feel yourself leaning into “fix myself” energy, you can ask, how do I love myself right now?
 
The soul responds to love; needs loving, caring relationship—whether with self or with therapist—to emerge.

References

​Dickson, H. (2019). Sex work, motherhood, ad stigma. Sexual & Relationship Therapy, 34(3), 332–334.
 
Green, D. (2020). Mortification meanderings: Contemplating “vulnerability with purpose” in arts therapy education. Arts in Psychotherapy, 68, N.PAG.
 
Hammer, D. (2019). Cultivating soulfulness in psychotherapy. Spirituality in Clinical Practice, 6(2), 139-143.
 
Leijssen, M. (2008). Encountering the Sacred: Person-centered therapy as a spiritual practice. Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies, 7(3), 218–225.
 
Moore, T. (2021). Soul therapy. HarperCollins.
 
Ottens, A. J., & Klein, J. F. (2005). Common factors: Where the soul of counseling and psychotherapy resides. Journal of Humanistic Counseling, Education & Development, 44(1), 32–45.
 
Quillman, T. (2020). Neuroscience and the therapist’s love for the patient: Intersubjective space, the embodied imagination, and transformation. Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health, 22(1), 1–29.
 
Vasavada, A. (2019). Fee-Less Practice and Soul Work. Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, 13(2), 82–89.