On the previous page I described the basic framework of my approach. On this page I speak about my journey to becoming a philosopher, a counsellor, and so a philosophical counsellor. This page began as a brief set of facts about me as a professional, but has since grown into a broader essay. From a marketing perspective this is a very bad approach, but I am not trying maximise client numbers or income, and I offer this writing for people who are interested in what I say here, and who are willing to take their time. Of course, you do not need to read this in order to see me, and it is not some kind of filter or test, rather I have allowed myself to give voice to certain things I want to explore and say, and I hope some people will appreciate that. A fundamental reason that I write as I do, is that while I am formally trained in academic philosophy, yet my approach is different to the typical academic focus on theory. I practice philosophy as thinking which comes out of living, and which in turn enriches and guides living. In such philosophy our individuality matters greatly, and so also, therefore, does our lived experience, and so I share personal examples, even though I am somewhat uncomfortable about how they and that might be interpreted, and despite my antipathy for the superficiality and corruptions of our personality worshipping, confessional culture. It is the same with my therapeutic training, which is not the manualised, schematic approach of clinical psychology or psychiatry, rather I am trained in psychotherapy from across the existential, humanistic, Jungian, psychoanalytic and other movements. Such philosophy, and such therapy, certainly work with universal or general elements of our existence, but they are equally focused on the individual and lived experience as a primary reality. In writing we say things, and we show things, and this distinction applies here, for part of what I am offering is a distinctive vision of philosophy and therapy (though I do not pretend to have invented anything, rather I am a lifelong student). I have brought all that I have learned together, into a practice called philosophical counselling. In writing as I have, I am attempting to give the reader a taste of that philosophical counselling, in the sense that I want to convey a vision of what life can mean and can be, which is woven into the work I do with people, and which is an expression of some of our finest philosophy and psychotherapy.

I grew up in the Mallee--a rural childhood in the harsh but evocative landscape of north-western Victoria. I come from a family of people who left school early and did physical work. In the heat and dust of that environment it was easy to feel the cruelty of life, but in the silence of that heat there was a sense also of something else. My memories as a young child include staring often at the horizon, which fades and shimmers in that place, and which seemed an evocation. So too, the magnitude of the sky. Even the falling-down timber houses and rusting farm equipment seemed to glow with a hint of more. There was a feeling of reality as containing depth. That was a depth of stories: a sense, at the periphery of the mind's vision, just out of focus, of being surrounded by other lives, births, deaths, loves, and pains, folded up in the unconscious memory of place. But it was also existential: existence itself had a feeling. In that heat, light, and silence, it was as though the landscape held up things, each in turn, in a kind of question: not only what it is, but that it is. Aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder. Later in life I would work with people for whom philosophy began in suffering. In whatever way it begins, philosophy is an apprehension of, and orientation to, others as a whole, life as a whole, the world as a whole, and so to meaning and value, to what gives us strength and makes life worthwhile. 

I dropped out of high-school early and left home at seventeen, setting out on my own. One day while living in Melbourne I wandered into an old church and took home a book on Christian mysticism. The infolding of that chance event was that I travelled to Italy and entered a monastery, perched on a mountainside outside of Florence. I have a print of a 500 year old painting of the building, which includes my bedroom window. Here was the beginning of a lifelong journey exploring meaning, value and consciousness, both in a variety of religious and spiritual forms, as well as in secular and more rational forms. Italy was a challenging but wonderful experience. My first night found me alone in a monastic cell, looking out a small window at a blizzard of snow, whirling in the blackness of a void where the mountainside fell away. There was no heating, and the window of the room was cracked such that ice covered the inside glass. I warmed my hands by the light globe. As dawn broke to the sounds of Gregorian chant, I looked out the chapel window across a Tuscan valley, the sun glowing across a patchwork of green and white fields far below, in a place where Dante once walked. 

The monastery had passed through the hands of various religious orders, including English nuns who had left behind their books. These included all the known works of ancient Greek tragedy, and I became gripped. Tragedy is a genre, but it is also a recognition of truth: of what we might call a tragic vision of life. In those archetypal stories of moral blindness, vulnerability, and suffering, I encountered an unflinching vision of the chance cruelty of life, but one which was suffused with compassion for such affliction. Already I had recognised that, to an important degree, "character is fate": that we have much more power than we realise, and that our actions have far deeper consequences than we realise. Later I would find my perception expanded in this regard, through the work of Carl Jung. Yet I had also seen that life appears to be highly unpredictable and tragic, given utterly to chance, so that despite our best efforts everything can be stripped from us. Jung may see this differently, but it amounts to the same thing in terms of our blindness and potential for suffering. Not only that, but human malevolence is also very real, and a persistent force in our daily social world. For example, I spent my teen years under a muscular, narcissistic and abusive step-father in a fibro house in a tiny dusty town, and had experienced how some people find gratification in the oppression and abasement of others. Looking back, I was searching this literature not only because I was gripped by its tragic vision--gripped by truth, both in itself, and practically, as something I (and all of us) have to navigate. I was gripped because I wanted guidance in how to live with such realities.

That may sound strange given that I was in a Catholic monastery, with its own transformative story of suffering, grace, and salvation, but I would later come to recognise that I have a twin nature: one deeply oriented toward spirituality and religion, and another which is deeply secular and humanist. In this respect I am a child of the West, as so many of us are, and this fact would become very important in the work I do today. For the struggles of many people today are--without them realising it--the living out of a thousand-year process. I am speaking of that which the atheist philosopher Nietzsche recognised when he spoke of the death of God as a calamity. What is that "thousand year process"? To use the categories of a certain theoretical historian, the West (like any civilisation) has a lifespan which can be divided into two periods: the first period called culture, which is energetic, upward striving, creative, expanding, and artistic and religious, followed by the second period called civilisation, which is the triumphant achievement of the former striving, the high point, but also its ossification and so eventual decline and death. A civilisation's strength no longer lies in its earlier creative life-force, but rather in its now established power and wealth. Civilisation is powerful, safe, stable, and cosmopolitan, as well as bureaucratic, technocratic, legalistic, and so on. This later period in the life of the West is called modernity. Whereas the pre-modern West saw the essence of the world as life, modernity sees its essence as mechanical. The concept of life is of a mystery which is in a sense beyond us--beyond our intellects. We cannot fully know and control it, rather we must pay attention, contemplating and describing, and creatively working with what we see. Some people are, at the conscious level, completely given over to the modern perception of life: the mechanical view, scientism, rationalism, technocracy. They often view alternative ways of seeing with condescension and even contempt, as naive or irrational or badly motivated. Others, especially those who have lived in pre-modern worldviews such as I did within Catholicism for those few years, or who are artistic and have let that shape their understanding of the world, or who have studied our culture and feel the pull of elements of the earlier culture, will feel divided. Ultimately, all of us feel divided, (although we do different things with that--including with respect to our unconscious defenses which may simply suppress any feelings of uncertainty of any sort). Our rational, conscious life is not the whole of us; far from it. We are our whole life. For example, just as we carry the full history of evolution within us, we are the history from which we have emerged, both at the individual level but also the cultural and civilisational level. I am the West, and you probably are too. In the West, as no doubt in the case of every civilisation, there is as I have said a profound tension between culture and civilisation, both in the society, and in its individuals. Hence, whether at a conscious level or an unconscious level--and definitely moreso the latter--we are pulled between apparent contraries: between culture and civilisation, between a feeling for the profundity of the contents of the pre-modern versus the power and comforting clarity of modernity, for example between feeling and rationalism, between desire and pragmatism, between mechanisms versus life, and so faith versus reason, a religious instinct versus atheism, and between the sense of meaning as real, versus the loss of that in the modern rationalism which leads to nihilism.

Nietzsche saw some of these things. Nietzsche was an atheist, but he was not a triumphant atheist. Instead, Nietzsche viewed himself as a prophet of a calamity which had already happened: the death of God, which is modernity. Nietzsche asserted that God had died--that famous phrase came from his pen--but he saw that others did not recognise what this meant: the collapse of all the values, including even those which most Western atheists hold as sacrosanct, such as human rights. As a "prophet" so to speak--an analyst of where this would lead--Nietzsche foresaw that the death of God would lead in two directions: on the one hand even more technocratic nihilism, such as we have today in our bureaucratic and therapeutic culture, and with talk of a coming age of "techno-feudalism," and on the other hand the rise of totalitarian ideologies such as we saw in Communism and Fascism, as well as whatever it is that seems to be arising in our own time. Nietzsche sought a third way: the conscious invention and creation of new values. Meaning and value as the product of rational, free, individualistic choice and the heroic will. Have you noticed that every second person now boasts to you that they do not follow the crowd, that they think for themselves, that they are different; that is the simplistic and egostistical version of what Nietzsche suggested, which was embraced as an ideology by philosophers and psychologists throughout the twentieth century, who shaped large aspects of the general culture. Much of existential philosophy and existential therapy are attempts to develop Nietzsche's third way, but it is a path which fails. For we want the real. We are not satisfied with inventing a story and then choosing merely to believe it; at least, those who thirst for truth are not satisfied with that, even if such self-hypnosis is nonetheless common to all of us in terms of the problem of our egotism and psychological defenses. Nietzsche's answer is rationalist, and so inadequate. There is however a fourth way. We find it in philosophers such as Plato, and the many students of his right up to our day (some of which are among my greatest influences: Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, Raimond Gaita). We find it also in psychologists such as Carl Jung, with his understanding of the richness and primacy of the psyche and the unconscious. People seek meaning and value, but we have passed through modernity and that view goes deep in us. We cannot go back into pre-modernity, though some people engage in partial forms of that (the enthusiasm in recent years for traditional, mystical forms of Christianity is an example of this). Both Plato and Jung combine the mystical and the rational, the artistic and religious impulse that is the domain of the unconscious--the parts of us that like an iceberg are much larger than our conscious life--with consciousness, reason, science (or description--descriptive investigation of the material world), and so forth. Meaning and value are not rationally created, at least not insofar as they are something we thirst for and which can truly nourish our lives, rather they are discovered, encountered. We are fundamentally creative beings, we create the world, but that creative power is a reflection of how we work with the real that we encounter. The philosophy of Plato, and of psychologists and psychotherapists such Jung, is that work. 

But I am getting ahead of myself, to how I see the world after a quarter of a century of such searching. I had no idea that I was on a path of broad training which would enable me, as one small person among so many, many others doing some form of this work, to articulating and helping people to live with the conflict and distress of living in our time, which is of course an embodied and particular form: people who despair, who struggle, who are afraid, who are angry, who are being swallowed by their defensive ego, people who are fragmenting, people who are suicidal. The epidemic of "mental illness" (itself a technocratic term and way of seeing) is in large part what happens in late modernity. Stepping back to that young time, however, a year later I had left the monastery and was back in Australia. I am a bit of a free spirit, which did not suit the timetabled and obediant life of a monk, and more than that, I am what I have just described, and have never been able to give myself over to one worldview. So there I was in Melbourne again, working in a factory and wondering what was next. This time it was a bookstore into which I wandered. I took home a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, the classic work of Stoic philosophy. That led me to the other stoics, especially Epictetus. These philosophers of antiquity faced the same world of those Greek tragedians. Epictetus was born a slave, and it is rumoured that his physical disability was a result of abuse by his master, who owned him as we own any material object. Stoicism offered powerful guidance for how to live with the problems of chance, tragedy, malevolence, vulnerability, and suffering, and it remains powerful for us today. I soon discovered many other philosophers besides, especially Plato and his working out of what life can look like when it is an unconditional commitment to the values of truth, beauty, and goodness, and Aristotle with his profound analyses of the nature of wisdom, virtue, and character, and how to cultivate them, and so how to cultivate their consequences in terms of meaning, strength, happiness, and flourishing. Philosophy is conversation spanning three millennia, which provides guidance for seeing life with depth, and for coping with hardship and suffering, and for cultivating goodness in ourselves and in life, and for creating greater flourishing and happiness. You may be able to tell that I have a significant respect for the limitations of reason and consciousness, but at the same time I do not devalue these, indeed I place a high value on reason, and an even higher value on consciousness (which is bigger than reason). Again, I resiste the reduction of one in favour of the other; life is the interplay of the two, we must honour both and let them influence each other. I became absorbed by the riches of this tradition of reflection and conversation called philosophy. I became absorbed also, by the richer, deeper orientation to life which it called for, demanded, constituted, and cultivated. So I applied to The University of Melbourne, where I studied philosophy. Eventually I taught philosophy there and at another university, for almost a decade.

The word "philosophy" is a conjunction of two ancient Greek words which together translate as the love of wisdom, or the pursuit of wisdom; two phrases which I will use throughout this discussion, and which should be taken to be synonymous with the word philosophy. As the love and pursuit of wisdom, philosophy is an activity. It is only in a secondary sense that philosophy is a set of ideas or conclusions. People today often think of philosophy as the love of theory, as the construction and defense of theory, for it is often reduced to that in the universities. Academic philosophy has become a rational technology, the technical application of theory and logic. Of course it has: that is modernity. This is why I make a distinction between the two: academic philosophy is for academics, but philosophy as the love and pursuit of wisdom is for everybody. The latter is not some novelty, rather it is much closer to ancient Greek philosophy than the former. Philosophy is for everybody, because we all have to make a life, and in particular a human life rather than that of a cow. People differ in their intellectual capacities (though it is absolutely possible to develop your intelligence--it is no different to learning a musical instrument, which is a product of hard work more than talent). At the same time, everybody has intelligence, at least insofar as they are conscious and not significantly disabled, and their intelligence is vital for the creation of who they are and the depth and quality of their life. We all need to look, to see, to reflect, and to change ourselves accordingly, insofar as we care to live a life that is in some sense genuinely true and good. We should not, however, think of wisdom as determined by intelligence alone, or picture it as a heirarchy that is determined and measured according to I.Q., with "dumb people" at the bottom and really clever people at the top. That is a very wrong picture. Wisdom does not work like that. For one thing, intelligence is dependent on the will, and wisdom even more so is radically dependent on the ethical quality of the will. Another word for the will, or volition, is the heart. 

I am saying all this because many people feel insecure regarding their intelligence. Those who instinctively defend themselves from anxiety and insecurity by putting things down, will tell false stories that devalue intelligence. In psychoanalysis this is called "the ego and its defenses," the meaning of which is pretty obvious. Other people under-estimate the power of their own intelligence, and over-estimate the importance of intelligence itself, and so their capacity for cultivating wisdom, which means their capacity for philosophy. Both people equate wisdom with intelligence, which is only part of the story, a half truth which is very much also a false belief. There are difficulties in unpacking this issue while trying to be brief, because I work with an ancient and medieval coneption of intelligence, which is far, far richer and "wholistic" than the modern, mechanical picture. To explicate a more true concept of intelligence would involve discussions of such things as the various "faculties of consciousness," and of the intellect as both intellectus and ratio which are in need of balance. Instead, I will use metaphors to open up our thinking in that direction. As opposed to the narrow and impoverished notions of the clinical psychologist's regarding cognition, emotion, and behaviour, I will speak instead of the head, heart, and hands, which implies the same essential reality but also much more. I will do this to show what wisdom is, and also how we are all capable of it, and so how philosophy is an activity for all of us, albeit in different ways. Wisdom requires the head, and people have different talents when it comes to the head. Yet wisdom relies equally on the heart. Or moreso on the heart. Wisdom involves and draws on our whole being: the head, heart, and hands. For example, while we might recognise a truth at an intellectual level, for it to become wisdom it must enter into and shape our heart and hands--it must be active across all three domains. At the same time, we should be wary of assuming a top-down causality from head to heart and hands. G. K. Chesterton wrote that "the mad man is not the one who has lost his reason, but the one who has lost everything but his reason." We could substitute for the insane mad man other problematic types, such as the naricissist. Wisdom relies very much on that which is more than reason. In the language of the virtues, while wisdom requires reason, it requires also and equally many other virtues such as perserverence, creativity, humility, courage, compassion, love, and so forth. Some of these virtues are more of the head (Aristotle called them "intellectual virtues") while others are moreso of the heart or hands (Aristotle called them "character virtues").

Contuing with my point, we must not forget the hands, and their equality with the head and the heart. Any thinking which does not labour under the realities and demands of lived experience, of our concrete life which we must practically navigate, and which is full of dangers, is at risk of becoming fantasy, and often a distorting fantasy. Life teaches us. Hard necessity teaches us. People who face less necessity often become less wise, unless they are willing to voluntarily pay attention to and so let themselves by shaped by necessity. What all this means is that wisdom is for everybody, not only because we all need to apply our heads, regardless of our limitations in that respect, but also because the heart is equally important, as are the hands. Some people set these three up as in competition, sometimes out of a misunderstaning (a failure to pay attention), but more often because of their "ego and its defenses." The intellectually-talented person makes wisdom all about the head, which implies that they are better than others, while the artistic or overly-emotional type makes it all about the heart, or the tradie makes it all about the hands, all as an attempt to devalue others and so raise up the self, give value to oneself. This is what it has been explicitly said for at least three thousand years that "humility is the beginning of wisdom." We each have something of worth here, we each have a pathway which reflects our particular nature. We will never achieve a full balance between the head, heart and hands, because people typically do not succeed in areas to which we are not fitted by nature. At the same time, while accepting our limitations and focusing on our natural strengths, we should also seek some expansion, which means aiming at a greater unity within ourselves between the head, heart, and hands. This is important because, for the head to be more fully itself as something good and powerful, it needs more of the presence of the heart, and likewise more of the hands. The same is true in turn with each of these: the hands are more powerful when there is more head and heart in them. My father is a tradesman who has read very few books, but there is a real intelligence in his work, and real heart too: his work expresses empathy and generosity for those he does work for, and is an expression of character. His work embodies wisdom: the good, the true, and the articulation and embodiment of that. 

The point is that wisdom requires the involvement of our whole being, which I have conceptualised through the notions of the head, heart, and hands. My point is also that, with respect to these three things, different people have different strengths (and weaknesses), and so people bring different strengths to the kinds and forms and degrees of wisdom that they embody. Philosophy is the articulation of these, and it takes many forms, in the sense that reflection which aims at what is good and true takes many forms. Philosophy is this conversation. 

Philosophy is the love of wisdom. I have emphasised the wisdom aspect of the love of wisdom, but the other term needs equal attention: love. Plato made the primary importance of this clear in his book Symposium. Philosophy is the love of wisdom, which means that philosophy is the love that we find in such things as the pursuit of wisdom. We can just as rightly say that philosophy is the love of life, the love of the world, the love of truth, the love of goodness, the love of justice, the love of creation and adventure, the love of beauty, the love of other human beings in their irreducible particularity. This is why the Stoics focused on amor fati, which means the love of reality, a love which is cultivated despite its explicit awareness of all that is terrible in the world--those elements which psychologically and naturally arouse fear and loathing. In this respect, our psychology often drags us down, whereas philosophy is the attempt to rise. I have a dozen newspaper articles about my maternal great-grandparents involving shootings, stabbings, and beatings. One such article is about my great-grandmother being raped, while the next is of her on trial, for she later found that man and beat him almost to death with a club studded with nails. In another report, a different man entered her kitchen and, thanks to his anxiety and so bad aim, shot her friend--a botched attempt at murdering my great-grandmother in revenge for her beating him unconscious with a frying pan. He fled, but she chased this homocidal man down the street and wrestled the gun from him. This is one of numerous startling stories reported in the papers, the tip of an iceberg representing only those actions which brought her before the courts. My other maternal great-grandmother was no different; she dated Squizzy Taylor, and violently killed one of her six husbands (after he shot at her and missed). Fortunately this mayhem did not continue. One of the most important yet often unsung achievements in a life occurs when a person decides that the familial chaos or abuse ends with them, that they will suffer it but not pass it on. As a counsellor I have many times witnessed the failure in parents to do this, yet in my work--and repeatedly in my personal life regarding those around me--I have witnessed people make great inner sacrifices for the sake of such a gift. In both cases the children--my Nan and Pop--had been removed from that drunken chaos and placed in orhpanages. It was there that they met each other. Together they escaped that life of violence to give something different to their children. Yet their lives were in turn to be very difficult and indeed tragic. My Pop, a wonderfully artistic and musical man, had his mind destroyed by the trauma of war, and died in 1964 in a mental hospital aged 42. Above my fire place is his painting of The Wreck of the Hesperus, symbolic enough in itself, but the ropes are missing because he died before he could finish. He said that he painted this as a gift for me, although my mother was only a child at the time. Afterwards, Nan struggled to feed her children and herself and became visibly malnourished. Faced with the prospect of losing her own children to the State due to poverty, and unwilling to turn to crime or worse, she had to give up her kids to family in the country so that she work in a factory in Melbourne. Of course, that was the beginning of a further story, which left one of my aunts profoundly damaged.

Some people say that suffering makes us stronger. Often that happens, and suffering is vital to our growth, but that claim is far from necessarily true, for there is a limit to our strength. Suffering can and often does make us worse. Aside from the problem of the limitations of our strength, such outcomes are also decided by the spirit in which we respond. It is very common to react in a way that is psychologically protective but which also makes us worse as people. For example, we instinctively cope with the suffering by passing it on, whether outwardly by passive-aggression (or simply, aggression), or through inner aggression, such as an inward devaluation of others in our imagination, or by taking revenge on the world as a whole in outward or inward ways. There is much resentment and bitterness flowing through and between people. My Nan, around whom I grew up, suffered greatly and yet had an acceptance of life that amounted to a deep wisdom. That was more than resignation of the sort which gives up, and which avoids bitterness only because it has lost the will to fight. Rather, Nan's wisdom was written through with a decency and empathy which was on display in how she related to those around her--family, friends, and strangers. There was a fundamental goodness in my Nan, despite all that pain which would have distorted her, had she let it. The source of this goodness was, I have no doubt, love. That love combined with her acceptance which was a willingness to look squarely at life. Today, it is axiomatic of our (now broadly therapeutic) culture that a person is healed or helped through being the object of love. There is of course much truth in that, but also much blindness. I would add that equally, indeed moreso, a person is healed and helped through being helped to love. I am not making this claim in order to suggest that suffering can be solved by some single, simple panacea--"Love is all you need"--for, like reality in general, suffering can be a very complicated thing, plus we must be wary of becoming blindly, unjustly moralistic when it comes to causes and motives and human suffering. We must remember that tragic vision, that truth and lucidity expressed by the ancient Greeks. However, the Greek tragedians in their lucidity understood that the cruel chance of the world which can strike anybody down, no matter how wise or good they are, often interplays with flaws the in our psyche: "the tragic flaw." I have counselled thousands of people, many of whom have been afflicted through no reasonable fault of their own, but the thing which most traps people in their suffering is self-absorption, and the way that degenerates into resentful egotism. Genuine love--love that is morally and psychologically lucid--is its opposite and antidote. Here is the profound capacity of human beings. It is a capacity for transcendence, in the proper sense of the word which means to be oriented to something higher even as we are in the midst of things. This is what makes life worthwhile, despite the suffering. It is what gives genuine meaning. It is what genuinely transorms life for the better. Of course, what I am saying goes well beyond a purely romantic notion of love.
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The above story of my family is echoed in a different way on my father's side. My childhood memory of my great-grandfather--my grandmother's father--is limited to his worn hands at which I must have stared, for various parts were missing due to a lifetime on the riverbank sawmills. In my workshop I have, framed, a long newspaper interview with him aged in his 90s, about his life and about what he made of life. His grandson--my father--was cut from the same cloth and would drop out of school at 14 to manage the farm, to maintain the threadbare livelihood of a family which included his 12 siblings, for his father (my grandfather) was an unreliable and violent alcoholic. Even during my childhood, in the place where we lived, people could work very hard as my father did and yet struggle. There were times when we had no food in the house. (My earliest memory takes place in Dad's ute--Mum was chronically unwell so despite my age Dad would take me to work--and of watching Dad chase and shoot an emu for our dinner). Later, when we moved to southern Tasmania, my father could not find work and so took a job for a questionable individual, felling trees on their land and cutting it for firewood, while standing in fifteen inches of snow. The pay was $50 a day: $150 in today's money. Dad speaks of how life-threatening the tree-felling was, and of how cold the work was, but he adds that it was his duty to provide. My father has always had a tendency to moralism, which hurt me as a child and which contributed to my tendency to depression which haunted me during my 20s and 30s. Yet, while he has never said such a thing, and I do not know whether he reflects on this and whether he sees it this way, yet I understood as a child and I recognise now, that the essence of my father's life has been thus: in the face of growing up with a violent, selfish, alcoholic father, who caused him so much pain and hurt, both for his own sake and through his love for his mother and siblings, my father decided without the benefit of the philosophers I encountered or any other spiritual help, to orient himself to the best understanding of what a good man is that he could see, and to drive persistently toward that in the way he lived. I imagine that this decision must have been forming him even as a 14 year old boy, leaving school to support his family. It has its shadow side in that moralism, but its core essence and larger part was love. When I bought that book of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and encountered philosophy, the first chapter of the journal constituted a Stoic exercise of reflecting on what one has received and learned from those they grew up around. "From my father I learned this, from my mother I learned that, I am grateful to have been taught this by my tutor...." From my father I learned the meaning of goodness. And of truthfulness, and personal responsibility, and of determination and fortitude, and that there are things which are far more important than the avoidance of suffering, and of compassion for our vulnerability, and of humility and love, and of what life can be when lived by such values. I learned about our inward capacity for meaning and happiness even despite the hardship and sometimes cruelty that is an inescapable part of life. I learned about acceptance for oneself, despite our incapacities and the wounds we carry from life, and despite our moral and emotional failings which haunt us, and despite the ties that bind us in opposing directions. I learned this because I witnessed it in my father, as well as other people in my life. And I learned it through conversation, especially that which was reflection aimed at what is true and good. That is, conversation as the pursuit of wisdom. Questions such as what is true, what is good, and what is meaningful were not idle follies, and working alongside my father as a child on most weekends and holidays stacking timber or bricks into his truck, I remember long conversations which taught me this vision of life.

The conversations I just described are philosophy. My Nan and I, and my father and I, were doing philosophy, even if Nan only read Mills and Boons and my father did not reat at all. To enter a university felt like a miracle--I still cannot get over it--for it was such a gift to spend my days reading the great philosophers, and speaking with so many insightful and passionate people. I did very well academically, and in time was teaching at a couple of universities. I was a philosopher in my bones, this was to be my life's work. However, there was a problem. I lacked any passion for an academic career. For that would have meant immersing myself in a context where the technocratic, rationalist approach to philosophy dominated. That domination was not accidental, rather it represented a deep attachment among the mainsteam of academics. I did not want to spend my life debating with people who were attached to reducing us to machines, the world to mechanisms, and philosophical reflection to a souless technology of reason. Nor did I view conversation with a philosopher as superior to conversation with any other person, so long as the other was a person of depth, or who strove earnestly to look deeper. For philosophy is honest and searching attention to life, which means that the good stuff is to be found in conversation with people from many walks of life. I had come to philosophy for the pursuit of wisdom, not for the love of theory. Also, while I did philosophy for my own sake, I felt also that the point of it involved more than that. In a sense which is also enriching and rewarding for the self, it is important to recognise that your life is not about you. This is how I felt about philosophy and being a philosopher. Of course, this is the original view, found in Socrates, and in Plato's myth of the cave. 

I used to advise my classes that I would be at a certain cafe at a certain hour drinking coffee, and if they had questions in any way related to philosophy, that they were welcome to to stop by. These would turn into group discussions. They began with the course material: "I'm having trouble understanding what author means when they write that [---]." However, like myself many of these students hoped for more from philosophy than merely an education in theory, and that shaped the direction of such conversations. Why philosophise about art, for example, unless you care about art, and perhaps love it and find it essential. Then the philosophy becomes personal, and profoundly so, even as it is simultaneously the effort of stepping outside your self. These students rightly wanted to explore their vital questions about life and existence, questions which directly impacted on their experience of the world, and their way of being, and the potential direction of their young lives. Is there a meaning to life? Does God exist? What is truly good? Should I strive for such goodness, and to what degree--am I being played for a fool? Many academic philosophers view such questions as naive, in favour of their theoretical concerns with language and logic, or their Marxist critique of structures. Even those philosophers who worked in a much better and deeper way, and from whom I drew so much, nonetheless maintained an academic distance. As an undergraduate I used to walk with one of my lecturers back to his offer after the lectures, and I used this precious time to press him with my questions about ethics or the philosophy of Wittgenstein. This man, who is one of the best philosophers I have personally encountered, and deeply kind, was highly generous with his time. However, I once posed a question about a personal struggle, which was valid in the context for it was deeply philosophical in nature, and he kindly but frankly shut me down. "I cannot help you with that kind of thing." I imagine that, had this happened a decade later, he might have added: "There is a free counselling service in the university, you can speak to a psychologist about this." For my part, I had studied philosophy with regard to the same kinds of concerns as those students who now gathered around me. And as a philosopher I wanted to help people with the same kinds of questions I had taken to that lecturer. These were questions that were philosophical, and which required conversation with a person who (whatever their profession) was capable of such conversation, of thinking well, and without reducing everything to some picture, such as that of psychiatry or, say, of a mechanistic social science. We need good philosophical conversation, and not as an academic practice, and not as mere entertainment (infotainment), but as a central need regarding the things which are central to our lives. As a philospher I wanted to help people enrich their understanding of themselves and of the world, and of suffering, meaning, and happiness, and I wanted to help people cultivate all that is best in their head and heart and hands, and to embody the things which make life worthwhile, especially with respect to the person's individual talents and path and contribution to life, and I wanted to engage in the kinds of conversation which clarify meaning and value and which increase their presence. Looking at what my career should be, I wanted to dedicate my time and energy, my life and my work, to such conversations as I was sharing with those students, rather than spending my time writing for other academics or disagreeing with them. The question was how to do this, in a world where one needs to pay the bills. 

Fortunately, those were the years which saw the rise of "applied philosophy." People were busy loving or hating Alain de Botton, philosophers were entering high schools and prisons to teach, people were gathering at "philosophy cafes" to discuss love and death, and during the following decade Stoicism would explode in general popularity, while a video website called Youtube would enable new voices to step forth (for ill and for good). In this context I became aware of another relatively new movement: philosophical counselling. 

I explored the few books available at the university library at that time, on philosophical counselling (that was before the internet became the resource it now is). I noticed two distinct problems which I wanted to avoid. Among some of the authors I found a pervasive tendency to devalue mainstream therapy by means of straw man arguments, as if this gave validity to the idea of philosophical counselling (i.e. psychological therapy is rubbish, which means that philosophical counselling is good). Then when it came to the description of the actual practice of philosophical counselling, not only did it appear to be merely a dumbed-down form of academic philosophy (of that hypothetical mindset, focused on trading in theories) but the theories and ideas were offered like supermarket items: "You are depressed? Here is what Nietzsche said about that, and what Kierkegaard said. Choose whichever of these worldviews appeals more to you, and adopt it as your view of life, so that it may serve as a cure to your depression." This ceases to be philosophy, and is instead the reduction of thought to its instrumental value: what matters is not truth, but how you feel when you hold this idea. But philosophy is the search for truth. And we search for truth because we thirst for and love truth. This, more than any instrumental justification, or any metaphysical claim about us, is the value which truth has: our love and thirst for it, which is seen for example in its necessity to the kind of life we consider worthwhile and meaningful. This love and thirst takes many forms in our lives, which show themselves in the struggles that people take to a counsellor or a good friend. Does my partner love me for myself? Are they faithful?--I want to know, even if the truth makes life very hard. Am I basically a decent person, or am I a blind and deluded narcisisst? Some people appear not to care about these questions (though such people are much, much less common than we anxiously, despairing, unjustly, and self-indulgently like to imagine when we picture other people in general) and many people draw conclusions from the fact of such a lack of care, which do not actually follow. Forget about whether others care about truth, the question that matters is whether you care about it. You cannot live somebody else's life, but you must live yours. You must contend with all the demands, outward but also inward, that you encounter in being human. Philosophy, and so philosophical counselling, is help in the pursuit of truth. Of course it is help in the pursuit of more than that: goodness, wisdom, happiness, but the pursuit of truth cannot be jettisoned, and when it is then it is no longer philosophy.

Those writers on philosophical counselling were correct that philosophy can be therapeutic--indeed that is what philosophy originally was, and it is what I encountered and valued in it when I first read the Stoics--but this is different to reducing philosophy to the therapeutic, in the sense of reducing it to its psychological effects. In the latter case, philosophical counselling becomes merely another form of cognitive therapy or CBT. Here was a curious pairing in the literature on philosophical counselling: psychological therapy is apparently rubbish and we need instead a philosophical therapy, however philosophical counselling turns out to be merely one more form of psychological therapy. Some philosophers did better than that, and developed a form of philosophical counselling which is training in and the application of reason, with respect to the client's specific concerns. However, that is merely the reduction of philosophy to critical thinking, and potentially of the human being to a reasoning thing. Reason matters--it matters greatly, and I am profoundly concerned about the increasing lack of regard for truth and reason which defines our degenerating times--but we are much more than reason. To repeat G.K. Chesteron's words which so often come to my mind: "The mad man is not the one who had lost his reason, but the one who has lost everything but his reason." There is much more to us, and to our good, and to our best, than reason. There is much more to wisdom than reason. So also, there is much more to philosophy than reason. Reason is one virtue among others, and some of those others are its equal. Socrates made this clear, as did Plato and Aristotle, as did the existentialists of the twentieth century. So I was left with a sense that I would need to develop my own conception of philosophical counselling which was expressive of the far richer, and more lived, sense of what philosophy is, and which was the foundation of my commitment to it. Philosophy is thinking which comes out of living, and which feeds back into it. Such philosophy had greatly deepened my life, and enabled me to find and create a far deeper happiness than I could have found merely through the resources of modernity and our mainstream culture.

The work of developing my own conception of philosophical counselling would require further exploration of what philosophy is, with respect to what a therapeutic form of an irreducible form of philosophy might be. It would also require a deeper exploration of the category I call "the psychological," and that invited an an exploration of mainstream therapy itself. With regard to the philosophy, I pursued a masters degree which was ostensibly about one topic--an analysis of philosophical themes in a certain philosophical memoir--but the real topic and purpose of the thesis was implicit, known only to me: I was engaging in the development of philosophical thinking that was radically engaged with the particular, in ways that would be transferrable to philosophical counselling, which is to say: in ways which could help people in their pursuit of meaning, goodness, and happiness. It was akin to what Roger Scruton called narrative philosophy. With respect to the exploration of psychological therapy, I was fortunate at that time to suffer a bout of depression. I say "fortunate" in hindsight, because this led me to enter therapy with a good therapist, where I was able to learn about mainstream therapy from the perspective of experiencing it. There were problems here, too, however. The great virtue of mainstream therapy lies in its psychological focus, and all that has arisen in a century of narrowing the focus in that way. The great vice of mainstream therapy is precisely this same focus. For the reduction of one's focus to a psychological lens has much pragmatic value, but it often breaks the banks of its proper boundaries as a pragmatic view, to become an ideology. That is called psychological reductivism, or "psychologism." Our conscious life is reduced to the psychological, and specifically the psychological as a structure of mechanisms, as it is constructed by modernity's scientistic pictures. This is not surprising: mainstream psychology is an expression of modernity. Modernity is the religion of our age ("post" modernity is merely late-stage modernity, when it throws the acid even on itself). Modernity is the age of science, which is good, but also of scientism and Science TM, which are bad. It is "the age of reason" which is good, but also of rationalism, which is bad. It is the age of technology which is good, but of technocracy which is bad. In each case we move from a helpful practice, to a totalitarian ideology. Modernity assumes that it is the master and judge of reality. A fundamentalist religionist takes religious metaphors and treats them as the literal descriptive and explanatory truth of everything, to which everything can be reduced, and modernity as an ideology does the same thing with scientific metaphors and tools. This is what many people came to recognise in the "new atheists," and it remains a problem among certain loud voices in the contemporary Stoicism movement.

The reductive totalitarian ideology of modernity, and the fact that psychological therapy is an invention of modernity--it is what we do after the death of God, when the priests have disappeared--is why psychiatrists, clinical psychologists. and the many other "clinical health professionals" favour the concept of a "disorder" to understand mental suffering. For that modernity's mechanical or "machine" conception of the human, who is either ordered and so "functioning" properly, or is disordered in one of its mechanisms. The therapist goes to work on these mechanisms, just as the mechanic gets to work on your fuel injection system. The problems lie inside the machine, although in time this becomes the individual as machine within society as a bigger machine, so that "the insightful" view takes account also of that. As with meaning and value, consciousness disappears on this picture, it is a mere epiphenomenon, an illusion. However, my depression was not a disorder. My depression was a response to reality. It was a response to existing in a world whose nature and meaning were shaped by the experience of life under an abusive step-father in that fibro house in that tiny, dusty town, with all that such an experience meant in terms of the world as cruel and abandoning. More than that, the depression was one of those "crunch time" experiences which while so painful, and potentially damaging, can also be the context of our growth, where so many past things, and present problems, came together. As an experience of existential despair in the full sense--for example a struggle of the heart--my depression was a philosophical problem at its very root: a problem of what is true, and where goodness is to be found. The fact that my depression naturally had a psychological corollary--it manifested in also in a range of psychological and behavioural symptoms--did not justify a reduction of the depression to my psychology. As I have tried to show, that is a significant failure to think clearly about these matters. 

Leaving aside the mechanical dogma of modernity, let us take a different view, one more oriented to the mysterious concept and realities of life which I spoke of above. The philosopher Simone Weil wrote that "All human beings are absolutely identical in so far as they can be thought of as consisting of a centre, which is an unquenchable desire for good, surrounded by an accretion of psychical and bodily matter." She added that "At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him." I invite you to suspend your commitment to the mechanistic picture of modernity for a moment, and to imagine that in fact we as a people have not penetrated reality, that we may know many things, but that fundamentally we do not really know what reality is, or what or who we are. Neither do we really understand consciousness; for one thing, we cannot step outside of consciousness to reduce or explain it, for every attempt to do so is itself an act of consciousness. Imagine, therefore, that we are inexplicable beings and that a description of experience is often the best we can achieve. Consider that Weil is offering such a description, of the kind that cuts to the essence. You thirst for goodness, in whatever form (love, meaning, peace, adventure, freedom from all that makes life terrible, and the presence of all that makes like worthwhile and good), and that there is this expectation in you that evil and not good will be done to you, and so you are constantly shocked and so afraid or depressed or angered or self-numbing. When I say "goodness" or "the good" I am using it as the broad category of all that is desirable and in some way good for us, from healthy pleasure to the highest forms of love. To thirst for the good is to desire all things which, at least in the moment, embody that good. A roof over your head is one such example. It makes sense in this picture to say something like: consciousness in its very essence is ethically oriented, although I prefer the language of Weil: to be a human being is to thirst for goodness above all. This does not mean that we always do good, though it may suggest that those who do evil believe in some sense that they are right, that it is good to do as they do. All of this is a very different view which invites a very different way of seeing people and their struggles. This is my way of seeing and understanding. I help people in their thirst for the good. I understand their depression as the obstruction of that which they thirst for, that which they need, which is a subset of "the good" which is to say: of the things we all need and thirst for. The task of therapy needs to be the pursuit of these missing goods, whether we consider them in more practical terms--I want to find a partner, or become able to work again--or more abstract, for example the wisdom to live meaningfully and in time productively with the death of our child. These are not psychological problems at their heart, they are problems of the pursuit of the good, of working with reality and the fullness of our own being. 

The technocratic and reductive form of mainstream therapy shows itself most in that which is called "clinical therapy." This is the therapy of the psychiatrist, the clinical psychologist, and the clinical social worker. Humanistic therapy arose as a more human alternative to that machine view of us, however like Romanticism and existentialism as reactions to modernity and The Enlightenment, they assume the reductive picture and so reinforce it, even as they rebel against it. Humanistic therapy reduces us to emotional processes or to "the body," and attacks reason, which amounts ultimately to the same essential reductivism but hidden in hippy clothing. Yet, when we look past all these ideologies we find so much good therapy being done. Partly this is because there is much more to our humanity than is conceived of in our rationalist theories. The richer humanity of the therapist shines through, despite the mechanical narrowness of their training. That may be an implicit and intuitive phenomenon, or the therapist may be explicitly, intellectually alive to the sense of a bigger reality. The other reason so much good therapy is being done regardless, is because much of therapy amounts to specific insights and practices that make a great difference, and which can be detached from any ideology in which they may have grown. Alongside this, these ideologies are not so problematic when they are brought down to earth, and treated as relative and valuable stories which shed a certain light. In terms of the suffering, wonder, and hope which had brought me to philosophy, therapy was more narrow and superficial than what true philosophy is capable of, but nonetheless therapy is a true gold mine for helping with these same concerns. This is what I think of when I speak of therapy: all these insights, practices, and even specific pictures (psychoanalytic, cognitive-behavioural, et cetera), which help people to increase their insight and motivation, and to grow and improve psychologically as well as in other areas of their life. I said above that exposure therapy is useless without the spirit of courage, the enactment of courage in the heart and mind of the person, and yet the therapy provides a proven technological framework in which to enact that courage. Philosophy, which is the act of courage (I will suggest in the next paragraph that to "do" philosophy is to "step into" a certain way of being), is not in contradiction or competition with therapy, which is a framework and means for achieving many of the goals of philosophy. 

Philosophy and (psychological) therapy are different. Philosophy as the love of wisdom, is different to therapy as psychological analysis and improvement. Philosophy is the cultivation of who you are (or how you are) as a conscious being, while therapy is the cultivation of a part of you: the psychological part or structure of your being, just as personal training is the cultivation of the bodily part of your being. To oversimplify in a way which is nonetheless importantly true, philosophy works with who you are, while psychological therapy works on something you have. To do philosophy is to step into a certain way of being, while to do psychological therapy is to work on an element within your being. (It is important to note here that when I speak of "psychology," I am using the word in its general sense, and not in the sense of a particular (medicalised) profession called Psychology. Furthermore, I acknowledge that if I were reading what I have written from the perspective of another philosopher--one who wanted merely to criticise--I could tear holes in what I have said, for I have left much un-argued because this is not a thesis, plus many of my distinctions regard common real-world tendencies rather than necessary or universal patterns or distinctions.) In contrast to those books on philosophical counselling, I could see that there was no real incompatibility or competition between philosophy and therapy, at least when it came to philosophy as I define and practice it, and therapy as a non-ideological, non-reductive practice. It struck me that my philosophical counselling might combine both philosophy and therapy, to offer the best of both in one practice. 

The philosophical aspect of my philosophical counselling would be philosophy as I have described it: the Stoic work of resilience, the Aristotelian work of cultivating wisdom, virtue, and character and the more happy and flourishing life which follows from that, and the Platonic (i.e. Plato) work of exploring and cultivating truth, goodness, and beauty in its myriad forms, some of which are vital to each of us. Of course there is more to philosophy than these people. For example, a couple of years after my loss of Christian belief I had engaged in two years of rather intensive Buddhist practice and study, which included meditating for two hours every morning, and which also involved so much study of the subject that I eventually wrote an Honours thesis arguing for an internal coherence between Platonism and Buddhism, in the mode of the perennial philosophy movement, and all of this had taught me much. I had found my own way to Greek tragedy, and then Stoicism, and then Plato and Aristotle, but my university studies introduced me to many other philosophers who would become essential to my work as a philosophical counsellor. These included Ludwig Wittgenstein and the philosophers in his train, and the existential-phenomenologists following on from Martin Heidegger, and especially the modern "platonists" such as Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and the Australians Raimond Gaita and Christopher Cordner.

Wittgenstein releases us from bewitchment by language and theory, for example the way that modernity bewitches us. This matters, because modernity as reductive is nihilistic, which means that our whole culture is becoming ever more nihilistic: technically clever and safe, inwardly dead. Here in late modernity, that nihilism is becoming felt as a painful weight within people's hearts and minds, in ways that are ever more explicit. Our intellects, trained from birth to be bewitched by this reductive, nihilistic, totalitarian ideology, lack the tools to find our way out. Wittgenstein "shows the fly the way out of the fly bottle." We need to move beyond this ideology (which includes moving beyond "post" modernity, which is merely late-stage modernity when it throws the acid even on itself), but this involve untangling our mental knots. These knots keep us from seeing what is actually there, and so from being with it, and being nourished by it. Philosophy in the light of Wittgenstein is thinking which clears away our bewitchment and places us again in the midst of life, including all that is good to which we had become blind. 

Phenomenology is a discipline for exploring and understanding our consciousness. In therapy it does a similar work to psychoanalysis: providing us with insight into our minds, and so providing ways of working with that, or at least providing the information needed so that we can use other therapeutic tools to work with that. However, while psychoanalysis looks through the lens of its theory, which is sometimes very helpful and sometimes quite distorting, phenomenology is the work of more purely seeing what is actually there: the phenomena as it manifests itself. Phenomenology eschews theory and so the hypothetical mindset I referred to, and is instead a discipline of radical description. Of note, when we pay open-minded attention to what is actually there, we discover that consciousness is ethical as I suggested: perception is structured primarly by meaning(s) and value(s), through which we see and move and have our being. Phenomenology maps our conscious life, and it reveals meaning and value. It is insight, and it is contact with that which makes life meaningful.

The work of Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and the Australians Raimond Gaita and Christopher Cordner, is one attention, in the form of making explicit the implicit forms of meaning and value which run through our lives. I quoted Weil above; she was in many ways an unbalanced person, and this affects her philosophy, however she is also possibly the more insightful thinker I have come across, cutting so often to the essence of our lives. I said also that here, in late modernity, we feel the weight of modernity's nihilism inside us. Such emptiness leads to pathologies in many directions, whether in the form(s) of despair, or fear, or addiction, or anger, or shut-down, or narcissism, or other forms. Insofar as our problems are rooted in nihilism, or in other essential problems of value and meaning, in these philosophers we find an antidote, not as a set of doctrines, but as a way of thinking which can reveal things, if we too engage in it.

Such are the various philosophers and approaches which would become vital to my philosophical counselling, and there are more besides. With respect to the element of counselling or psychotherapy which I would combine with philosophy to make philosophical counselling, I had no interest in the clinical form of mental health therapy which dominates today, which is based on the medicalised concepts of psychiatry and of behavioural psychology, which is a somewhat direct expression of modernity, and so which too often becomes an expression and mere exercise of the rituals of scientism, rationalism, and technocracy. Rather, I decided to study Counselling. Counselling is different to psychology or psychiatry or any other clinical way of working with "mental health." In the main, counselling is humanistic rather than clinical. Life is not a disease to cure, a disorder to correct, but rather a mystery to live. The focus is not on a psychiatric schema of pathologies, but rather on exploration and working with the problems of life as challenges of living, as features of the human condition, to be faced with all that is best in our head, heart, and hands. Such counselling involves only those core practices which are therapeutic in their essence, without appeal to an ideology. There are no assessments or diagnoses or appeals "the research," which is to say to whatever is currently fashionable in "expert" circles and so treated as authoritative. Rather, when a client comes to me, I invite them to tell me their story, usually focused on their current concerns, and I listen to this, but I am also paying attention to what it is like to be them, subjectively, and how they are in the world--their way of being--including those dimensions of their being to which they are blind, and those elements of their subjectivity to which they may have blinded themselves. I am paying attention the forms of meaning and value in this person's life, and the strengths and problems involved, and the possibilities these point to. I am educated in many classical elements of psychotherapy and so I am reading the client's psyche, but unlike the therapist who is paying attention to "what makes them tick," my greater concern is what makes them alive. What are the motive forces within them, the flames which can be fanned, which we will fan in terms of the good they seek, and the unseen good which they might, or perhaps ought to, seek. That seeking may involve an array of therapeutic techniques, though fundamentally my counselling is transformation through seeing, through paying attention. As the existential therapist Viktor Frankl wrote, "The person who can find a why, can find a how." Frankl drew this conclusion from his years as a prisoner in the Nazi death camps. 

While clinical psychology is a three-way relationship: (1) you, (2) the psychologist, and (3) third parties such as the mental health system, peak bodies and their commercial or tribal interests, the courts, employers, insurance bodies, other "experts," and the like, some of whom are likely to have a stake in your therapy in ways that define the therapy, often in radical ways. By contrast, counselling as I am trained and practice it is purely between you and I. You attend insofar as you find it valuable, and stop attending when it is not: counselling stands or falls on the actual helpfulness of the therapy. My only third party commitment is to professional and ethical values, and legal constraints.

My point here is to show what counselling is. It is not to malign clinical therapy. Just as science is good and scientism bad, scientism being what happens when science ceases to be a tool and becomes a totalitarian ideology. So clinical therapy is good, but problematic and even bad when it becomes a totalitarian ideology: the only view, or a view which in some respect arbitrarily over-rides other important views. Sometimes I am all that a client needs for their therapeutic needs, at that point in time. At other times I suggest they also see a clinical therapist, for there can be great benefit in that scientific, technological, behavioural way of working on problems, which is based on careful empirical research. Sometimes I am wrong for a client, whose being has become so chaotic and even dangerous that they need reductively psychological, technical therapy for the time being. Life is more a both/and situation than an either/or one, and what is good and how that is balanced may change often depending on other factors. If I discuss clinical therapy quite a bit, it is because of the increasingly totalitarian force it has in therapy, and it is because I have to work hard at times not to be confused with a clinical therapist, a confusion which in more extreme cases can be very problematic. Therapists encounter the extremes, and so have to guard against omissions.

​The decision to study counselling became step one of a plan which would unfold across almost two decades. Step two would involve working professionally in mainstream counselling roles, becoming competent in the ways of the mainstream counsellor. Step three, the final step, would bring it all together, stepping purely into the role of a philosophical counsellor, probably in private practice. My philosophical counselling would be the work of philosophy in its many dimensions as I have described it above, while bringing mainstream therapeutic knowledge and skill into the same work. Clients would receive both, for the sake of finding strength in life, and improving the quality and success of their lives, while growing as human beings.

I studied counselling, eventually to masters level. Across fifteen years I worked in counselling organisations which included: a suicide prevention service focused both on crisis intervention (I spent a lot of time talking people back from bridges); a service focused on rural and isolated men and their relationships; an Australian Defense Force and a combat veteran's counselling service; a bereavement-after-suicide service; and workplace counselling (EAP) providing mainstream counselling to employees, and interpersonal and motivational coaching to mangers. During  these years I was also a voracious learner, taking deep dives into many mainstream approaches to counselling and psychotherapy, both by doing further (informal) study and applying that in my work, and by entering such therapies as a client to experience them from the inside. This included various humanistic forms of therapy--I always come back to the deceptively simple but profound work of Carl Rogers. It included also the informal study of psychoanalytic or psychodynamic therapy, and two periods spent in therapy with two different kinds of analytic therapist. The psychoanalytic mindset can be conceited and even cultish, among other problems, indeed my experience with the second analytic therapist became an experience of an abusive therapist, which despite its personal harm to me it was professionally helpful, for such therapists are real, and I see some clients who have experienced that. Yet the fundamental insights into our unconscious--or at least unseen--defenses and how they shape our inner and outer lives are incredibly helpful. Many confusing social interactions became much, much clearer, and I was able to understand much in myself, and later on much in my clients. Indeed, while I am not an analytic therapist but rather am "humanistically" oriented, I use numerous analytic perspective and tools in my work, reading the "unconscious" aspects of my clients alongside paying attention to many other dimensions. I explored many other therapeutic approaches besides, as well as other fields of helping such as personal coaching, and positive psychology which is social science research into how things go well in life. While my counsellor training, and so skills and orientation, are not clinical, I worked shoulder-to-shoulder with many psychologists and clinical social workers and gained much insight into their concepts and ways of working, which has enriched my understanding even as I eschew the clinical/medical model.

In 2012 I began a private practice as a space to focus on existential therapy, which is a philosophically-oriented form of psychotherapy (hence the URL of this website). This enabled me to enter deeply into the work of people like Emmy van Deurzen, Irvin Yalom, and Viktor Frankl. I did that part-time, while also working in the above organisations, and while continuing to teach university philosophy for some years (eventually I had to let that go for the sake of time). I also wrote and presented on philosophical perspectives on therapeutic issues at both conferences and on a popular blog, which led to multiple offers of academic teaching in counselling, and more importantly created a flow of clients for that existential approach. Existential therapy did not become my final professional focus, for I find it narrow in certain ways, for example it is too much an expression of the questionable ideological assumptions of modernity which are, in the end, nihilistic. A therapy focused on meaning and value, but which assumes modernity and so its nihilism, is a cure which risks deepening the disease even as it helps. Here, in late modernity (often called "post" modernity, which is simply that stage where modernity throws the acid even on itself) many people feel that nihilism of modernity as a weight within them. As a philosopher I present a way out of the arbitrary, blind nihilism of modernity as a lived ideology, and so my work goes well beyond the existentialism of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, existential therapy greatly enriched how I work today, especially through its emphasis on phenomenology which is a vital discipline for recognising the implicit and making it explicit. 

​These days I am on the other side of this long project, and now work purely in private practice as a philosophical counsellor. This experiment of almost twenty years, of exlporing and combining both therapy and philosophy, has taught me that philosophy is more powerful than therapy when it comes to many of our personal problems, especially when philosophy is practiced through the framework of counselling. For it engages our head and heart, which is the real engine of skill, strength, change and goodness in our lives. It is deeper because it is a change in how we are toward the world and in the world, whereas psychological therapy works on a part of our being. At the same time, psychological therapy is incredibly helpful for everybody (similar to how improvements in strength and fitness and health can be somewhat life-changing). Therapy is also a part of Socrates' liberating challenge to know thyself. With some clients my work is almost purely philosophical, while with others there is as much psychological work as there is philosophical work. 

That's enough about me. After twenty years in the inner-city, I moved back to the country, buying a cottage by a forest on the western edge of central Victoria, to be back in that landscape that I love. During Covid I left behind my Carlton counselling office, and today now see people purely by phone and video. Outside of work I perform regularly as a musician (jazz drummer) and restore and tour on old motorcycles.