Clients‟ experience of counselling within a narrative framework

FIGHTING / AVOIDING CONTAINMENT - FIGHTING / AVOIDING FREEDOM 
POLARITY 
Fighting and avoiding containment and freedom is both a fight to change and not to change. To 
give up a familiar and known way of dressing the self for an unknown, different and individual 
way of dressing, tends to cause battles.  
 

---

314 
FIGHTING / AVOIDING CONTAINMENT 
 
This is a place that could be described as not knowing where or how to be, as the fear of losing 
familiar ways of being, encroaches on the desire to be dependent on the counsellor. The part of 
the client which needs care, chooses to come for counselling, but the independent part of the 
client is threatened by the possibility of becoming reliant on the counsellor. Fighting or avoiding 
containment is a necessary aspect of the process of movement. It is rather like the bad tempered 
baby who needs the reassurance of mother‟s presence, even as he tries to hit her. If containment 
has not been experienced, except for example as an unknown absence then perhaps the 
avoidance of containment is a fight against the unknown. The containment offered by the 
counsellor may also feel intrusive (Stern, 1985) as if the counsellor is breaking through the 
client‟s defences. Fighting the containment of the counsellor may be part of the process of 
experiencing containment which develops the awareness of the self (Carstairs,1992) that enables 
the client to move towards separation.
FIGHTING / AVOIDING FREEDOM 
The freedom to be an individual, separate from others (as opposed to merged), is an isolating, 
and frightening way to be when first experienced. Just the separateness of the counsellor may 
highlight a sense of this aloneness for the client. The counsellor may seem distant, deaf or 
emotionally absent to the client because of his/her capacity to be separate. Freedom may be 
experienced as loss or emptiness in that to think one‟s own thoughts without relying on 
previously learned beliefs or attitudes may feel very isolating. Fighting / avoiding freedom can 
be seen as the intense reaction to the fear of isolation, but the movement created by that fear has 
a volatile intensity which may enable growth.
As with the other categories, fighting and avoiding containment and freedom are a necessary part 
of the client‟s journey. The fight may be passive and/or aggressive, but if a client wishes to 
change, then this upheaval of movement will provide the friction necessary to engender that new 
life.