Women’s experiences of counsellors
When women experience abuse in their intimate relationships, one of the first places they turn for help is counselling. Women believe that counsellors have been trained to spot abuse and support women in navigating the challenging waters of sharing a home and perhaps children with a man who is misusing his power in the relationship.
But women find, time and time again, that counsellors are unable to see abuse.
They misname the problem as a family of origin issue or a communication problem or some other “relationship” concern. In speaking to many counsellors over the years, we (Jill and Karen) have found that counsellors are not taught about abuse in committed relationships. And so, in a very real way, counsellors are inattentive to abuse and have been taught a paradigm that is based on unhelpful assumptions like both parties want the same things and both parties can bring about change in the relationship.
For many years, we have been gathering data about what we have come to call “the harms of help”. The idea of this is that well meaning professionals inadvertently cause harm to women when they do not apply the correct understanding of the cause and impact of abuse.
For many years we have highlighted the harms that Child Protection Workers, Shelter Workers, Drug and Alcohol Workers, Police, and Family Court cause women and their children when the wrong sort of model is applied. We have known for a long time that many of our systemic responses to women are flawed and hurtful.
This past summer, we turned our attention to counsellors. Over the years, we have heard stories from women of counsellors who offered advice that was hurtful and sometimes even dangerous.
We knew there was an issue with the way counsellors are trained, in regards to this issue and how common counselling tools are used inappropriately in the context of abuse.
But we had not had a chance to really fully hear from women about that. We set about interviewing women about their experiences of counselling. In the beginning, we didn’t even know what questions we needed to ask and so we started with two Focus Groups that helped to hone our questions.
Below you will see the questions we asked and the answers women gave us. Women were keen to share their experiences in the hopes that other women might have different outcomes. In the end, we interviewed sixty women. The results were shocking.
How many counsellors/therapists did you see before one described what was happening in your relationship as abuse?
With the counsellors who did not recognize abuse, did you feel your safety was taken seriously?
Did unhelpful or misinformed counselling contribute to you staying in your relationship longer than you might have?
If yes, how much longer?
We know that this is a qualitative study and not quantitative and so we need to be cautious about our conclusions but it seems the data points to at least three key things of note. First, counsellors are not adequately trained in identifying abuse. Only 8.3% of women found that the first counsellor they saw was able to identify abuse, with many women working with multiple counsellors before the key issue was identified. Second, overwhelmingly, women’s safety is not being considered in the context of counselling. And third, one of the reasons women stay in abusive relationships is because of the inappropriate counselling they receive.
When women reach out to counsellors in the hopes of making sense of their experience they are given ideas and advice that confuse them and ultimately cause them to stay longer with the abuser. We know that the dominant discourse in society is that women stay with abusers because of deficits in the woman: they make poor decisions, lack boundaries etc. Women taught us decades ago that these myths are not true and that women stay for many reasons, most completely outside their control. Women have valid reasons for staying, like fear of poverty or homelessness, a requirement to share custody 50/50 with the abuser, lack of services etc. We think it is important to note what women are teaching us here. Inappropriate counselling is compromising women’s safety and causing women to stay with their abusers longer. This should be a wake up call to all counsellors and schools of counselling to learn about abuse and the appropriate ways to support women experiencing abuse.
As well as simply asking women multiple choice questions we also asked them to answer three fuller questions. The questions were
- What was the least helpful/most helpful thing a counsellor said or did?
- What was the impact of the unhelpful/helpful thing?
- What do you wish your counsellor knew?
Women gave us hundreds of quotes in regards to these three questions. The quotes were powerful and some of them took our breath away. We will share only a handful of those quotes here and we will cluster them around two key issues brought forward with this research.
Counsellors not identifying abuse:
“I engaged probably more than 12 counselors in a ten-year span. They all focused on me working harder in the relationship.”
“I had a counselor 11 years ago ask me if I thought my partner was capable of feeling empathy and that’s as far as she went with it. When I think back on that session, I wonder if she had just mentioned the word abuse or given me just one little crumb more, maybe I could have saved my kids from all of this.”
“At one point I asked the counsellor what I should do when things get physical? And she said call 911 and that was great and validated that it warranted getting that kind of help. But she never, at any time told me that what he was doing was not okay. She was willing to continue to see us as a couple. “
“I think what stands out the most for me right now is all the work I did with my therapist around lowering my expectations and really getting clear about where I was being unfair and unsupportive of my partner. And the ways in which my communication needed to be improved.”
Counsellors not attending to safety:
“Our counsellor knew there were physical assaults happening. She was leading a marriage retreat and she encouraged us to go. On the retreat he got angry and broke the window in our hotel room with his head. I went down, got help and she came up. She encouraged me to stay at the retreat with him. I think she should have encouraged me to go to the police and go home. That still enrages me to this day.”
“I had just had a baby and had not lost the weight from that. My partner was watching really violent porn. I was really disturbed about that and told the counselor. My partner said the issue was really that he no longer found me attractive. The counsellor told me to start drinking my coffee black instead of with sugar so I could lose weight. She totally missed how violent this porn was and how scared I was. It was rape porn.”
“I was talking about my husband sexually assaulting me and the counsellor said, ‘well, you must have done something to make him think that it was on the table’. I was devastated. My husband sexually assaulted me all the time and I needed it to stop but she gave him a green light.”
“I had a small child and I was pregnant with my second. I described to my counsellor how my husband would tower over me when I was sitting on the couch and shout down at me. I would sit there frozen or I would just be nice to him in the hopes that he would stop. I asked my counsellor if there was anything else I could do. She said, “well, you just need to stand up and look him straight in the eye and make him back down”. I was almost 9 months pregnant! I thought, “You are insane. I am telling you I am terrified and you are telling me to stand up to him.”
“When I was trying to figure out how to separate safely, a counselor told me to explore what I contributed to the marital problems and to read ‘Co-dependent No More.’ ”
Imagine if a woman, who finds a lump in her breast, had to see 3, 6 or 9 doctors before one might order a mammogram. Or imagine if those doctors were cavalier about the woman’s well-being, suggesting that her reaction to the lump in her breast is really the problem and not the lump itself. Or imagine a doctor reassuring the woman that the lump actually had good intentions and just needed care and affirmation. Imagine if this misinformation and confusing responses led a woman to ignore the lump as it destroyed more and more healthy tissue. Abuse is cancer to a relationship. It gradually and, painfully destroys what has the potential to be health, wholeness and well-being.
We plan to continue listening to women. There is a lot they have to teach us. In coming months, we hope to turn our attention to women’s experiences of family mediators and family evaluators. These are professionals who are positioned to help support women and children’s safety but, it seems, are working from a deeply flawed paradigm and perhaps doing more harm than good.
