I have lived in the in-between most of my life. My early childhood was chaotic; I experienced what I now feel comfortable labelling as ‘chronic instability’. I have come to realise that this has shaped my relationship with certainty. I have also come to realise that I struggle to see life in black and white. For me, this doesn’t mean that I can’t make decisions or that I don’t know what I think. It means that I tend to notice the complexity underneath what can initially look like a straightforward situation. As I work through understanding my now confirmed neurodivergent brain, I am beginning to understand that part of this is because I have always taken in everything and then had to work really hard to filter and channel it afterwards.
The same thing that can be overwhelming and exhausting can also be a strength in my work. Being able to see everything from multiple perspectives leads to empathy, compassion and understanding. I remember in my early counselling training days noticing that sitting in silence and unresolved emotions came easier to me. While I still felt stuck or confused, unsure if I was actually doing the right thing, I was a tad slower than others to jump to rescuing, directing and fixing.
I also remember learning the counselling code of ethics. At first, and please tell me I’m not the only one, I thought it was a guide that tells you exactly what to do when a problem arose. Then I had a supervisor explain it in simple, helpful language: that an ethical dilemma is when you need to decide between two competing values. It is a situation where you need to navigate tension and uncertainty. It is a dilemma because it is a difficult choice, not because the answer is obvious.
This framing was so helpful for me. It gave me a way of understanding that uncertainty wasn’t necessarily something that needed to be resolved. Sometimes the work was to understand the competing values, decide which needed to take precedence, and then work out how to honour the other. Then when I had my own student to supervise, they came to me with a dilemma, and I was able to step them through this process. Looking back, I wonder: what if I had relieved that student of their uncertainty and just told them what to do? How would they have felt about themselves, and how would they have approached the next ethical dilemma?
Sometimes I think it is easy to look at colleagues who seem to always know what to do, who have a clear answer at the ready, and confuse their certainty with competence. You can still be incredibly competent and feel unsure, and you can be very certain and be very wrong.
When I think about the kind of people I want to supervise, this is what I keep leaning towards. I want to work with people who live in tension and the in-between places. People whose work doesn’t always offer a clear answer, who are navigating competing values, new ground or complicated professional identities.
People who are straddling two roles and managing dual relationships, people working in roles that don’t easily fit into the standard counsellor or social work box, those who are passionate about the work but feel the environment doesn’t fully fit with their values, those who are trying to work out who they are as a professional, and those who are working through how to safely be authentically themselves.
People who aren’t looking for the easy answers and want someone to sit with them as they navigate their way through.
Tracey Wakefield 