Burnt Out Activist
The sun is slanted across the garden with that wintery sheen, and I’m listening to Observations of a Deviant Anti-Fascist from his corner of the world to mine. There is a connection out there, intangible, but inexorable, the solidarity of radical activists doing everything they can, from myself writing about therapy, to David M utilising the power of psychedelic music. All I can think about is what I am providing the world. What can I do to help?
After my sickness, I had not considered that my IDs would be out of date. So that I can start my free, 100 hours of labour to complete my training as a counsellor, I need to join the NCS (in preference to BACP, who seem to be behaving highly unethically at present), but to join the NCS I require a DBS check, and to be checked out, I need some form of identification. I am currently twiddling my thumbs in anticipation of my passport arriving (the first passport I will ever own) so I can start this process, and hopefully (and swiftly) finish my training to fully realise Ollamh Counselling.
Alongside this however, I had intended to write a series of articles, part-funded through Patreon, before going live for free in the interests of accessibility. I had written many, queued them up, and hit a snag on what was to be my next piece: Sex Work and Privacy. After the events of OnlyFans exploiting the labour of sex workers to boost the profile of the company, turning next to more expected capitalistic models, I thought it would be prudent to write on such a subject:— I struggled initially with how to balance the piece, simply on a literary level, and then the world continually threw further maddening horrors at me: Wayne Couzens; Tigray Genocides; England’s constant transphobia, the worst across the globe, where transgender individuals can seek asylum due to the danger our country poses —it is overwhelming. And each time I tried to sit and write that next Trigger Warnings article, I found myself struggling to grasp what corner of the terror I wanted to analyse next. And not through the lens of an activist, but that of a therapist.
Therapy is not the most radical of spaces. Even comrades who preach a certain form of radicalism fall into the regular traps of liberal philosophising. Therapists have a privilege unique to themselves, that they are bastions of good will, and are educated in the methodologies of empathy; this acts as a palliative to their behaviours. They don’t need to be a ‘violent anarchist’, because they get paid £25hr to be empathetic 1:1. What I mean to say, is that the counsellors office is a safe haven, where the therapist has no need for more radical expressions because they feel they have already done enough. In this regard, I had attempted to write my articles with a certain liberal vocabulary. I wanted to translate the intensity of radical activism into a format a liberal therapist could understand. But I found that tempering the language results in a loss of meaning. There are only so many ways you can express a disdain at the evils of our nation in a kinder, softer way, before it ceases to mean what you intended in the first place. The softening is part of the problem.
I have a passion for making this world a kinder place. I went into counselling in the hopes of bringing back some kindness to my life, to find an ikigai of empathy. I instead found a profession comprised ostensibly of Tories. I instead found a profession that wished to deny racism even existed. And I took it upon myself to find a language between the devil & the deep blue sea, to form a bridge between those therapists who do sincere work and the anarchist philosophers of the modern age who have the foundational principles to shake England into something just a little bit kinder. I think of Blake, and his Emanation of the Giant Albion, and how it shifted into Jerusalem, and how that shifted into further nationalism. We think of England as fighting the Nazi terror; in fact, we’ve never really let go of our imperialist, dogmatically colonial roots. We are tethered to it, inextricably. Even the notion of 1:1 counselling — although beneficial — is built on a Westernised conception of the private.
I feel at a loss as to how to formulate this bridge between the two halves of me. The softer, hyper-empathetic therapist who must sit with the discomfort of those with atrocious philosophies, and the angry anarchic activist who longs to do some good in this world. Anger is often regarded as a negativity. But no emotion — the therapist teaches — is good or ill; it how we utilise it. I wanted my essays to be softer, a quiet guiding hand for those lost, and my anarchism to be a kick in the jaw of the fascist. Bridging this divide, I believe, is impossible.
The activist does not possess the privilege of acting slowly. They do not have the time to ask politely, for in that space of seconds, the police may have swarmed their vigil, arrested their kin, or — as we have so solemnly learnt — far worse. This shift of the values of the police is not new however. Black voices have been telling us of the evils of the police since their inception, since before The Bow Street Runners. This is why the activist appears crass, or rude, because these notions of “rude” come from a White Imperialism, because they have tried the softly, softly approach hundreds of times before. When I write my essays without the word “fuck” or with sympathy to the oppressor, I am buying into a very old system of coloniality. But, if I am to use this language, I can only reach an audience already accepting of these values and ideas. The bridge, therefore, must find a way of bringing people who are unaware of the colonial principles of politicised therapy (which is, in truth, all therapy) into that foray. To do that, I need to use the softer language of the liberal. But we are not going to “nice” our way out of oppression.
I have found myself burnt out by this contradiction. I found myself anxious applying for my passport. I find myself anxious I’ll see a policeman walk past me in my hometown, and I’m neither a woman, nor black. I am a radical, angry counsellor. And I struggle to adhere to the softer, kinder language that my profession prefers. I find it hard to reach out to my colleagues on the subjects of decoloniality, #ACAB, and intersectional solidarity, when they switch off when the language is too harsh. Therapists enjoy being good people on their own terms, and not the terms of the oppressed.
This is not to say that therapists are unempathetic ghouls. For every account of someone being mistreated by IAPT (or the like), there are countless voices trying to shift the paradigm to the other end of the political spectrum (if there is such a thing). As a profession educated in the ways of a radical empathy, I have hope that this white, placid ideology will fade, and be replaced with a tougher activism in the face of the evils of the world. I do not see it yet, hence the burn out, but I hope it is coming, in one form or another.
I write this, mostly, to indicate that my patreon account may not be as month-to-month has I had hoped, but that any donations would be appreciated. I am disabled (although the government deem me otherwise, for I can make a sandwich), and running a house on benefits that could be stripped from me at any moment. And I ask for support whilst simultaneously saying that I am struggling to find the words, and that I may not be providing anything in return for a while. You can see why I may feel burnt out.
Know that my activism and my therapeutic work extends beyond these screens however. I am just struggling to see the wood for the trees, or the forest, or the way the sun is slanting between the leaves onto my Mother’s Garden, as I listen to radical music, from across the sea —
Peace, love, and all good happiness,
Nathan Dean, Ollamh Counselling