Clients‟ experience of counselling within a narrative framework

UNCONTAINED – UNFREE POLARITY 
 
This polarity, like the overall polarity is also a paradox in that it is a polarity without movement 
which may be termed stagnant opposition because of lack of movement. Perhaps it could be 
compared to being frozen with fear, or even an emotional paralysis that binds the client in the 
trauma of a past event. It may be understood as no movement and no feeling in that when feeling 
is cut off or denied movement is not possible. 
UNCONTAINED 
Uncontained could be understood as having the same meaning as freedom but the apparent 
similarity between uncontained and freedom is not so simple. Freedom, by its very nature 
suggests choice, but in an uncontained place there is no choice in that choice cannot be 
experienced. Uncontained, rather than being the same as freedom, is a place of no movement, 
for there is neither containment nor freedom at this fixed point where nothing shifts. However if 
this lack of internal movement can be brought into awareness through the containment and / or 
freedom provided by the therapy, then movement becomes a possibility as freedom comes into 
focus. 
 
UNFREE 
Unfree is the fixed polarity of uncontained. Each exist together in the same place both 
superimposed and in opposition which is the bind that holds the client in a place of no 
reflections, and no movement. But again if this fixed point can be experienced and brought into 
awareness within the safe containment and / or the freedom of the therapy it becomes a place 
from where movement may be viewed and tested.
It is perhaps somewhere along the continuum of this polarity that the capacity to be alone begins 
its growth within the individual. Aloneness may be experienced as a negative or unwanted state 
(Jacobs,1986), but as the experience of aloneness or isolation is felt within the therapeutic 
relationship it can be examined within the containment and freedom provided by the counsellor 
and be discovered in altered form as it comes to be realised in conscious knowing (Etherington, 

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2000).