On the page about Philosophical Counselling I described how I came to this practice. Here I go into more detail about my background for those who want a sense of who I am as an individual and philosopher.
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 dropped out of school early and did physical work. As with elements of the social life, in the heat and the dust of that environment it was easy to feel the cruelty of life, but in the silence of that heat there was also a sense of something else. One of my strongest young memories is of staring often at the horizon, which shimmers in that place, and which seemed like an evocation, a promise and possibility. 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 feeling for other lives, births, deaths, loves and pains, buried in the material memory of place. My childhood was storied by older people who had lived through The Depression. Deeper, though, was a feeling for existence itself. 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 also that it is. Existence itself is something to wonder at, to be alive to. Aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder. Later in life I would spend my days helping people for whom philosophy began in suffering. It begins in both. This time in which we live--late modernity--is shaped by an absolute ideology of reductivism, scientism, rationalism, technocracy; it is a flat-land that denies depth and value, especially when viewed from the concrete and cold steel of the cities. Philosophy can show us something more. It is a form of attention to what actually is, a contemplation and an articulation of that.
I dropped out of high-school and left home at seventeen, setting out on my own. Partly this was to escape an adolescence in an abusive fibro home in a tiny town. It was also because of a love for music. I moved to Melbourne where I made a living as a musician for a couple of years, however existential and spiritual questions took hold of me. One day I wandered into an bluestone church in the city and took home a book on Christian mysticism. This blew my mind, and led to me spending a year in a Catholic monastery on a mountainside in Italy. Afterwards I returned to Australia and worked in a factory, during which time I happened to buy a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations: a book of Stoic philosophy. This encounter with Stoicism led me to Plato, Aristotle, the other Stoics, the Neoplatonists, the medievals such as Aquinas, and so forth. Here was wisdom and guidance for living meaningfully in a confusing world. So I got myself into The University of Melbourne, where I studied and eventually taught philosophy.
Ancient philosophy is very different to what you may have encountered in a university course. I grew up among people for whom character was a vital concern. Of course, this concern could be in judgemental, but just as often it was humble and kind, a concern for being a decent person in a community of such people. I continue today to assert those basic values: the thing which matters most is to try to be a decent human being. Philosophy's concern with wisdom and virtue can be found in all times and places, for a desire for the good is a natural thirst of human beings, and so it long pre-existed philosophy. At the same time, ancient or classical philosophy gave voice to this tradition of character, of wisdom and virtue, to the point of creating a framework on which we have relied now for two and a half thousand years. Philosophy becomes guidance and training in becoming a better human being, which with luck can mean becoming a happier and more flourishing human being. This tradition, which is today called virtue ethics, has gone through many transformations down the millennia, through the differing perspectives of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Neoplatonists, through the Christian revolution which emphasised the lowly, and the primacy of love, to Enlightenment contributions, for example empirical psychology and its various movements such as today's Positive Psychology, to secular Platonist (i.e. students of Plato) such as Iris Murdoch or Australia's Raimond Gaita. Throughout, this tradition contains the same vital core: the pursuit of wisdom and virtue, of truth and goodness. If that sounds a little vague it is intentional: the world is a kaleidoscope of truth, and of goodness, there are myriad forms of life, but there is also this element of concern flowing through human beings. This concern is what the word philosophy itself means: it is ancient Greek and translates as the love of wisdom or pursuit of wisdom. True philosophy is not about cleverness, or the mere love of theory, or prestige; it is the concern of any person who is able to reflect on life, and who seeks to live in a spirit of truth and goodness, and to gain the various benefits that flow from that, such as I discussed here. I did well at the university, academically-speaking, and I loved teaching, but the philosophy I have just described is very different to academic philosophy. While I am a philospher "in my bones," to my core, I realised that my path was not an academic career, that there was something different I needed to do.
During those years I saw a counsellor for a bout of depression and found it beneficial. My only complaint--not their fault--was my sense that what I really needed was a form of help which combined the insights of both therapy and philosophy. That is, my depression was in some ways mechanically psychological, for example having to do with adolescent and childhood trauma, but it was in large part philosophical, an emotional expression of a collapse at that time in my sense of personal worth, and of life's meaning and worth. The latter problem was real. In the superficiality and arrogance of our technocratic culture we assume to reduce all such things to psychological problems. But this was not a psychological projection, it was a struggle with reality. Even the trauma from my adolescence, with an abusive step-father in that tiny dusty town, was only secondarily psychological; primarily it was a confrontation with evil, which has psychological and bodily effects. Evil is not a substance, rather it is by definition the negation of the good, for example of the worth of a person. It says, you do not matter, and I will treat you in a way which teaches you that. I may do this because I am simply callously blind, which Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil," or I may do it because I am malevolent, even to the point of taking pleasure in your abasement and pain. Through the experience of such facts of life, and of the consequent depression and of therapy, I became aware of a general need for a form of counselling which combined the psychological and the philosophical, which could help us through psychological work, but with the clarity to see how important but limited that is, and to recognise the deeper kinds of help and work that we need. We need counsel which can help us contemplate, and also cultivate, the meaning and value, the truth and goodness, in whatever form it takes, that is a "need of the soul," a nourishment of human life, the absence of which leads to a breakdown in who and what we are. As Viktor Frankl observed during his years as a concentration camp prisoner, the person who can find a why, can find a how, even in the worst contexts. We need whys, and they need to be true.
All of this was in my mind during the same years which saw the rise of "applied philosophy." People were busy loving or hating Alain de Botton, philosophers were entering primary 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 popularity, and Youtube would enable new voices to step forth (for ill and for good). The scholar Pierre Hadot had alerted us to the fact that ancient philosophy was very different to the philosophy of modernity and of the university, that it was rather "a guide to life," to personal transformation. In this context I became aware of another new movement, Philosophical Counselling. I very quickly realised that I had found my vocation. Unfortunately, the Philosophical Counselling described in the few available books struck me as overly intellectual, and liberal in that corrupt sense that treats everything like supermarket items, including philosophical ideas. There was no truth, only preference, even if that preference was self-absorbed. Not only that, but some of the major authors in the movement seemed to have little understanding or respect for mainstream therapy, indeed they seemed to be naively and arrogantly dismissive. I decided that if I was to pursue this path properly, I would have to study counselling properly, so as to practice it with adequate sophistication and depth. Otherwise, as I have since seen, the philosophy could not be done with depth. I decided to study counselling to masters level, and to spend some years as a counsellor in organisations--that turned into fifteen years--dealing with the many issues and gaining mainstream competencies. I developed a real passion for counselling and psychotherapy in their own right, and for helping people in those mainstream ways, for example in my work with suicide and bereavement, but the ultimate goal was to offer Philosophical Counselling in private practice. This was a project which has unfolded across two decades. I am now on the other side of that long project, where after wearing many therapeutic hats and gaining a breadth and depth of therapeutic experience, I now work purely and distinctly as a Philosophical Counsellor, offering my service in private practice.
Counselling qualifications are only the entry point; I was told, and can now attest, that it is in doing the work that you learn this art (and it is a craft and an art, not a science, even though it draws on science too). Indeed, I would now say that the first decade of counselling is merely an apprenticeship. I spent a decade and a half working 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) as well as family therapy to minimise such risks; a men's counselling service, with a special focus on rural and isolated men and on relationship counselling; 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 managers. During these years I was also a voracious learner; I took deep dives into the many mainstream approaches to counselling and psychotherapy 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. In 2012 I began my private practice as a space to focus, at that time, on Existential Therapy, a philosophically-oriented form of mainstream therapy. 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, there was simply not enough time in my week). I wrote and presented on philosophical perspectives on therapeutic issues at both conferences and on a popular blog, which led to offers of academic teaching in counselling, and more importantly created a flow of clients for this approach. These days I work purely in private practice, offering the Philosophical Counselling which was my original vision.
I see only a part-time load of clients, which works given where and how I live. I work full-time, however, in the sense that I view my vocation and role as that of a philosopher, which is to say that outside of client hours I spend my time constantly studying and learning. For fifteen years that included much therapeutic reading, but these days I have returned to a focus on philosophy and the humanities, to the broader work of making sense. This is what I give to my clients: a lifetime of sustained, searching attention to reality, to human life, which I am ever expanding through reading and through living.
That's enough about me. Some years ago I left the city and my city office and moved back to the country, buying a cottage by a forest on the western edge of central Victoria, from where I now see people by phone and video. I balance this with performing regularly as a musician (jazz drummer) and restoring and riding old motorcycles.
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 dropped out of school early and did physical work. As with elements of the social life, in the heat and the dust of that environment it was easy to feel the cruelty of life, but in the silence of that heat there was also a sense of something else. One of my strongest young memories is of staring often at the horizon, which shimmers in that place, and which seemed like an evocation, a promise and possibility. 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 feeling for other lives, births, deaths, loves and pains, buried in the material memory of place. My childhood was storied by older people who had lived through The Depression. Deeper, though, was a feeling for existence itself. 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 also that it is. Existence itself is something to wonder at, to be alive to. Aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder. Later in life I would spend my days helping people for whom philosophy began in suffering. It begins in both. This time in which we live--late modernity--is shaped by an absolute ideology of reductivism, scientism, rationalism, technocracy; it is a flat-land that denies depth and value, especially when viewed from the concrete and cold steel of the cities. Philosophy can show us something more. It is a form of attention to what actually is, a contemplation and an articulation of that.
I dropped out of high-school and left home at seventeen, setting out on my own. Partly this was to escape an adolescence in an abusive fibro home in a tiny town. It was also because of a love for music. I moved to Melbourne where I made a living as a musician for a couple of years, however existential and spiritual questions took hold of me. One day I wandered into an bluestone church in the city and took home a book on Christian mysticism. This blew my mind, and led to me spending a year in a Catholic monastery on a mountainside in Italy. Afterwards I returned to Australia and worked in a factory, during which time I happened to buy a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations: a book of Stoic philosophy. This encounter with Stoicism led me to Plato, Aristotle, the other Stoics, the Neoplatonists, the medievals such as Aquinas, and so forth. Here was wisdom and guidance for living meaningfully in a confusing world. So I got myself into The University of Melbourne, where I studied and eventually taught philosophy.
Ancient philosophy is very different to what you may have encountered in a university course. I grew up among people for whom character was a vital concern. Of course, this concern could be in judgemental, but just as often it was humble and kind, a concern for being a decent person in a community of such people. I continue today to assert those basic values: the thing which matters most is to try to be a decent human being. Philosophy's concern with wisdom and virtue can be found in all times and places, for a desire for the good is a natural thirst of human beings, and so it long pre-existed philosophy. At the same time, ancient or classical philosophy gave voice to this tradition of character, of wisdom and virtue, to the point of creating a framework on which we have relied now for two and a half thousand years. Philosophy becomes guidance and training in becoming a better human being, which with luck can mean becoming a happier and more flourishing human being. This tradition, which is today called virtue ethics, has gone through many transformations down the millennia, through the differing perspectives of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Neoplatonists, through the Christian revolution which emphasised the lowly, and the primacy of love, to Enlightenment contributions, for example empirical psychology and its various movements such as today's Positive Psychology, to secular Platonist (i.e. students of Plato) such as Iris Murdoch or Australia's Raimond Gaita. Throughout, this tradition contains the same vital core: the pursuit of wisdom and virtue, of truth and goodness. If that sounds a little vague it is intentional: the world is a kaleidoscope of truth, and of goodness, there are myriad forms of life, but there is also this element of concern flowing through human beings. This concern is what the word philosophy itself means: it is ancient Greek and translates as the love of wisdom or pursuit of wisdom. True philosophy is not about cleverness, or the mere love of theory, or prestige; it is the concern of any person who is able to reflect on life, and who seeks to live in a spirit of truth and goodness, and to gain the various benefits that flow from that, such as I discussed here. I did well at the university, academically-speaking, and I loved teaching, but the philosophy I have just described is very different to academic philosophy. While I am a philospher "in my bones," to my core, I realised that my path was not an academic career, that there was something different I needed to do.
During those years I saw a counsellor for a bout of depression and found it beneficial. My only complaint--not their fault--was my sense that what I really needed was a form of help which combined the insights of both therapy and philosophy. That is, my depression was in some ways mechanically psychological, for example having to do with adolescent and childhood trauma, but it was in large part philosophical, an emotional expression of a collapse at that time in my sense of personal worth, and of life's meaning and worth. The latter problem was real. In the superficiality and arrogance of our technocratic culture we assume to reduce all such things to psychological problems. But this was not a psychological projection, it was a struggle with reality. Even the trauma from my adolescence, with an abusive step-father in that tiny dusty town, was only secondarily psychological; primarily it was a confrontation with evil, which has psychological and bodily effects. Evil is not a substance, rather it is by definition the negation of the good, for example of the worth of a person. It says, you do not matter, and I will treat you in a way which teaches you that. I may do this because I am simply callously blind, which Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil," or I may do it because I am malevolent, even to the point of taking pleasure in your abasement and pain. Through the experience of such facts of life, and of the consequent depression and of therapy, I became aware of a general need for a form of counselling which combined the psychological and the philosophical, which could help us through psychological work, but with the clarity to see how important but limited that is, and to recognise the deeper kinds of help and work that we need. We need counsel which can help us contemplate, and also cultivate, the meaning and value, the truth and goodness, in whatever form it takes, that is a "need of the soul," a nourishment of human life, the absence of which leads to a breakdown in who and what we are. As Viktor Frankl observed during his years as a concentration camp prisoner, the person who can find a why, can find a how, even in the worst contexts. We need whys, and they need to be true.
All of this was in my mind during the same years which saw the rise of "applied philosophy." People were busy loving or hating Alain de Botton, philosophers were entering primary 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 popularity, and Youtube would enable new voices to step forth (for ill and for good). The scholar Pierre Hadot had alerted us to the fact that ancient philosophy was very different to the philosophy of modernity and of the university, that it was rather "a guide to life," to personal transformation. In this context I became aware of another new movement, Philosophical Counselling. I very quickly realised that I had found my vocation. Unfortunately, the Philosophical Counselling described in the few available books struck me as overly intellectual, and liberal in that corrupt sense that treats everything like supermarket items, including philosophical ideas. There was no truth, only preference, even if that preference was self-absorbed. Not only that, but some of the major authors in the movement seemed to have little understanding or respect for mainstream therapy, indeed they seemed to be naively and arrogantly dismissive. I decided that if I was to pursue this path properly, I would have to study counselling properly, so as to practice it with adequate sophistication and depth. Otherwise, as I have since seen, the philosophy could not be done with depth. I decided to study counselling to masters level, and to spend some years as a counsellor in organisations--that turned into fifteen years--dealing with the many issues and gaining mainstream competencies. I developed a real passion for counselling and psychotherapy in their own right, and for helping people in those mainstream ways, for example in my work with suicide and bereavement, but the ultimate goal was to offer Philosophical Counselling in private practice. This was a project which has unfolded across two decades. I am now on the other side of that long project, where after wearing many therapeutic hats and gaining a breadth and depth of therapeutic experience, I now work purely and distinctly as a Philosophical Counsellor, offering my service in private practice.
Counselling qualifications are only the entry point; I was told, and can now attest, that it is in doing the work that you learn this art (and it is a craft and an art, not a science, even though it draws on science too). Indeed, I would now say that the first decade of counselling is merely an apprenticeship. I spent a decade and a half working 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) as well as family therapy to minimise such risks; a men's counselling service, with a special focus on rural and isolated men and on relationship counselling; 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 managers. During these years I was also a voracious learner; I took deep dives into the many mainstream approaches to counselling and psychotherapy 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. In 2012 I began my private practice as a space to focus, at that time, on Existential Therapy, a philosophically-oriented form of mainstream therapy. 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, there was simply not enough time in my week). I wrote and presented on philosophical perspectives on therapeutic issues at both conferences and on a popular blog, which led to offers of academic teaching in counselling, and more importantly created a flow of clients for this approach. These days I work purely in private practice, offering the Philosophical Counselling which was my original vision.
I see only a part-time load of clients, which works given where and how I live. I work full-time, however, in the sense that I view my vocation and role as that of a philosopher, which is to say that outside of client hours I spend my time constantly studying and learning. For fifteen years that included much therapeutic reading, but these days I have returned to a focus on philosophy and the humanities, to the broader work of making sense. This is what I give to my clients: a lifetime of sustained, searching attention to reality, to human life, which I am ever expanding through reading and through living.
That's enough about me. Some years ago I left the city and my city office and moved back to the country, buying a cottage by a forest on the western edge of central Victoria, from where I now see people by phone and video. I balance this with performing regularly as a musician (jazz drummer) and restoring and riding old motorcycles.