Doing it for the kids
On Saturday a bunch of therapists met to talk about money. Not symbolic money, not fantasies about money, but actual money – a discussion organised by the largest network of therapists in the UK Counsellors Together UK (CTUK) for #NationalCounsellorsDay2024. The absence of circular sound bites and podium posturing due to the fact that CTUK is run by a working class woman. Add to that the deepening inequalities we’re seeing on both sides of the therapeutic relationship in terms of race, gender, caring responsibilities and class, you have good reasons why if you’re a therapist you should just join CTUK today.
There’s nothing more political than talking about money. Or divisive. Whatever the election results, we’re still left with a long fight over wages, across the whole mental health sector. It might be that there are more mental health jobs in the pipeline but whether they pay enough to avoid your therapist having to use a foodbank is yet to be determined. Getting paid any money at all is something that most therapists fail to do at some point because of the professional architecture that relies on the systemic wage theft. Working for free for training and accreditation a professional cannibalism that requires the routine exploitation and non-payment of wages as a matter of institutional survival.
Tucked away behind the scenes without any recognition or, often, respect are those of us who try to organise different workplace realities not in the abstract but in the real. Another reason why you should join CTUK – because in the ABCs of organizing like attracts like where being with therapists who need to actually earn a crust is a good place to start in securing a living wage.
Debating the political in the week before an election is a perverse yes/no game underpinned by a profound nervousness around actual facts. Intentional lack of actual data about money – who has it and who doesn’t. Online chats and ‘debates’ peppered with the obligatory whaddabouts and appeals to depersonalizing personal experience, the pressure to show a ‘balanced’ perspective levelling every position to just another opinion. The press repeat of public debates where everything comes down to who says it rather than what is said.
It means that the socially mediated words of some young radical fella unincumbered with actual lived experience or caring responsibilities can talk about my inequalities and lack of voice without any shame or comeback. Like many menopausal women who work in mental health my energy is depleted by the professional privilege and Noah’s-Arkism that underpins the professional podium heroics that pile in to defend the status quo. In this pre-election week where speaking your truth replaces speaking truthfully I start googling ‘going off grid’ and ‘living in a tree’.
In contrast experienced activists are usually pretty sober about the risks any of us take in expressing radical thought. I’m too old to think that just because someone says they’re all about solidarity that they’re actually doing it for the kids. It’s one of the reasons why I always vote for someone whose claims to leadership are visibly ambivalent because for me that’s a good thing. I don’t support anyone in the professional or political spheres who gives in to the political psychopathics that we apparently demand of our leaders.
Thinking, even in kinder times, has never been a risk free occupation. But one of the side benefits of being an older mum to a baby of the lockdown era is that my experience of life requires that I take it on the chin that really caring is both unseen and undervalued within this political pantomime. This knowledge gives me permission to conserve my energy for whatever happens in the every-day fallout of the elections. To prepare for the realities of living in a divided country, and the levels of hate that we have allowed into our homes. And teach my son how to survive it long enough to define his future, completely and utterly without me and my generation holding him back.
Like many people I walk the line of the madness involved in being told how to understand my own experience by people who couldn’t make it through a week of my life. And when that affects me it affects my son and that’s not worth it to me. This intention allows me to show some humility when I’m speaking actual words about the future because what I now know is that as soon as I’m defending the past, my son’s future gets over-looked.
It is in this context that this week I am voting for whoever I think will represent my son’s future interests. Not mine.
To watch the videos of National Counsellors Day 2024, including Surviving Work talking about Professional Cannibalism you can go here.
To become a CTUK member click here.