College counselling: making sense of confusion and pain by listening

Perhaps you are acquainted with the beautiful large granite stone, which stands to the right of the entrance to Glendalough, ancient monastery and centre of learning in Co Wicklow. Perhaps you have even touched the stone. It is said that, during the time of the monks, travellers who arrived at this spot within the walls of the monastery had reached a place of sanctuary.

I work in another place of learning and in another era. This time the place of learning is a modern university and my role is that of counsellor. How important is the notion of sanctuary in today’s world for students and young people who are in distress? Can a university be, or have within it, a place of sanctuary?

The notion of sanctuary implies an ethic of care and compassion. Does and should such an ethic inform education? Why does the despair and darkness many students experience matter, and how can such distress inform the search for truth and wisdom which must surely lie at the heart of all good education?

Students arrive for counselling in ever increasing numbers. It would seem that, in a world where there is so much virtual cyber connection, many young people feel overwhelmingly anxious and disconnected. Low self-esteem and poor body image abound. You must look good, the prevailing ethos says. Young women must be thin, young men should have a rugby player physique, even if they don’t play rugby. You must be successful academically. You must always do your best and excel. Being average is unacceptable.

You must be successful socially too. You must have close friends and a meaningful and intimate romantic relationship. You must be interesting and entertaining.

This positive state of being should be reflected on your Facebook page, an interface which is deemed vital if you are to remain in contact with your peers.

Hiding sadness

Meanwhile, it may be that you feel the need to conceal serious family or financial problems. You may have suffered bereavement, trauma or abuse. Worse still, you may feel terrible and can discern no obvious reason why you feel this way.

Within our society, happiness is seen as a sign of success. If you feel sad, well, there must be something wrong with you, right? You’d better hide your sadness, but you can’t, so you isolate yourself.

Now you find it hard to get out of bed in the morning; you can’t find the motivation to work; you are falling behind on your college assignments.

You have missed quite a few lectures and failed the odd exam and are in danger of dropping out. Drink is becoming a bit of a problem. You mustn’t let anyone know, of course. Everyone else appears to be making a go of things, so why can’t you?

I sit with students who experience darkness. There are different shades of darkness. For some it is short lived. For others it is deep-rooted and overwhelming, even life-threatening.

What is it like for a counsellor to sit and listen profoundly for an hour at a time to a person who feels deep despair? How can this process assist those who seek help?

First, the counsellor needs to have a good understanding of psychological theory and wisdom, developed by those working in the field over many years; what we might call the science of psychology. Then a counsellor needs to listen.

Profound listening, it seems to me, is akin to art. Counselling necessitates a particular type of listening, one which is contingent on good human relationship and which is informed by particular ethical and human values such as the imperative “to love the life in all creatures great and small”, as Séamus Heaney says when evoking the compassion of Saint Kevin of Glendalough.

The longer I work in the area of profound listening, the more I realise just what a delicate and humbling task this is. When you listen as a counsellor, you are invited to draw deeply into a person’s vulnerability, into your own vulnerability. What a privilege that is.

It requires being present to your own darkness and despair and being present in the moment with another. It necessitates a high level of self-awareness and concentration; an emptying of the self so that you can meet difference in the other. You may have to let go of the beliefs that sustain you and be open to acquiring new ones.

You gingerly pick at threads in the conversation – the meaning of a word, the tone of the voice, an emotion on the face. You listen to, and try to understand, the silence which surrounds the spoken word, so that you may draw near to the unspeakable.

I am reminded of that most intimate and beautiful of paintings by Johannes Vermeer, The Lacemaker – a small work painted with the same delicacy and attention to detail as that needed by its subject, the lacemaker, to perform her task.

Listening

As a counsellor you are listening to the client, who in turn is listening to you and who is finely attuned to how you are receiving their vulnerability and truth. They hear who you are more often than what you say. Your listening requires tenderness and stillness, an ability to discern both the often murderous experience of the client’s reality and the beauty of the human being who sits before you.

WB Yeats describes the power of such listening:

We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.

Why is such profound and tender listening of value? Listening in this way is an act of faith, like the listening underlying the endeavour of art, poetry, literature, psychology, philosophy, science and mathematics. It imagines the possibility of some kind of truth or goodness or beauty or order. It is an act of human solidarity. Now I, as client, don’t feel so alone in my despair. We are listening together. Together we try to make sense of the confusion and pain.

The wounds may still be there, but I can now live with them a little more easily. Now I can imagine myself with more compassion; I can imagine my distress and myself differently.

It may be possible creatively to transform and to reimagine my darkness and maybe even to understand, to question and resist the forces within the family or within society which caused the despair in the first place. The imagination is unlocked and so I can, and want to, learn new things and find new meanings.

Berkeley tragedy

One of the most harrowing events in recent times in University College Dublin was the Berkeley tragedy, which claimed the lives of so many young people, and left others injured and traumatised. It was extraordinary how staff and students came together in human solidarity, supporting each other and the families and friends of those affected and bereaved.

The large O'Reilly Hall was filled to capacity for the memorial service on a sad autumn afternoon. There was utter silence in the packed hall. Then the Ad Astra scholars started to play the most beautiful and plaintive music. I will never forget that poignant moment during the service when the classmates of those who died presented the books of condolence to the parents of the bereaved.

For some time, these students simply held the grieving parents in their arms. This embrace symbolises for me all that is good in UCD and represents the hope for the future, what Heaney calls ‘the comet’s pulsing rose”.

The darkness informs. It prompts us to ask often uncomfortable questions of ourselves, and about the values which inform our lives, our institutions and our society.

A university which has at its core the value of compassion, where there is sanctuary for the most vulnerable in its midst, which fosters imagination and debate at every level, will live up to its potential promise to be a beacon of light in a complex and difficult world.

Caroline Ward is a counsellor in the Student Health Centre at University College Dublin.