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With the upcoming presidential elections and ongoing world crises, college counseling centers are experiencing increased pressure from students and administrators to provide support for students. In most cases, support can mean offering students workshops on distress tolerance or emotional regulation, providing spaces for mindfulness and relaxation activities, and facilitating other broad forms of psychological wellness. Implicit in these offerings is the fact that the counseling center supports all students along the political spectrum.
Providing safe and confidential spaces for all students, regardless of political views, race, ethnicity, identity and so forth, is of course axiomatic and foundational to our centers. It is for this reason that our centers are staffed by therapists who, regardless of their own political leanings and identities, work effectively with students with whom they share similarities and differences. Indeed, for many, if not most of us, our abilities to work with sameness and difference are core parts of our professional identities and something we take a lot of pride in.
In this regard, we approach the work holding an ethics of care. One way of viewing this comes from the psychoanalyst Donna Orange. Inspired by the hermeneutics of the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, Orange describes our professional ethics as caring for the suffering stranger. She urges that we approach our patients as strangers, individuals we do not know and so meet with curiosity and empathy. Orange argues that this involves considering the stranger’s suffering in an open-minded and noncynical way. We should believe that they have done the best they can in their life but are struggling, nonetheless. From this perspective, differences become ways of enlivening both the stranger as well as the therapist.
Interestingly, within college counseling, over the past few decades we have become increasingly aware that holding an open-minded view, while important, is not enough for many of our underrepresented minority students. Simply saying that our centers are “safe” does not in fact make us safe. As a result, we have adopted specific micro-actions to try to demonstrate safety. For instance, we put pride flags in visible places or include lines at the end of our email signatures stating, “Black lives matter,” “science is real” and so forth. While of course signaling in this way is no guarantee of safety, it has become a conventional way of indicating that we are thinking about the conditions of safety.
With this has come a concurrent critique: If we signal that we are safe to some, then are we simultaneously signaling that we are not safe to others? Does posting an emoji of a pride flag at the end of one’s signature convey safety to our LGBTQ population and risk to our religious students, who may think and feel differently? And if so, does this not contradict the foundations of the counseling center as a space for all students? The countervailing trend then is a push to declare that the college counseling center is a neutral space and so does not take sides in ongoing cultural issues.
From my perspective, these concerns misrepresent the role of the counseling center and create a straw man out of the idea of neutrality. Beginning with the latter, as insights from clinical psychology have long made clear, neutrality is a false concept. As therapists, we are never neutral, just like we are never blank slates. We bring into the counseling space all our selves, identities, personalities, attitudes and so forth. These inform our perspectives, views, interventions and ways we relate to self and other. Moreover, as we are in dynamic relationships with our patients and our student populations, our stances are co-constructed in ways that also do not allow for neutrality. Just as signaling can be interpreted in two ways, so too, can not signaling.
So, if we are not neutral, what are we? I would argue, following Orange, that counseling centers are places to find the suffering stranger outside of us and within us. This means that we as counselors are open-minded, reflective and thoughtful. It means that we consider how our nonneutrality impacts ourselves and our communities and work to ensure that even when there may be disagreement or difference that we are willing to consider and learn from other perspectives. Moreover, it means that in our nonneutrality, we acknowledge that some may feel more included and excluded at various points in time. Even while we work to lower barriers to some, we acknowledge that this may raise barriers to others. This is not seen as excluding others but rather a fundamental part of the process of creating accessibility to the counseling center.
This general process—of developing a sensibility of curiosity around difference and a willingness to embrace discomfort—seems relevant not only to counselors but also to student affairs staff, faculty and others in student-facing roles. Just as we ask our students and student patients to tolerate the anxieties that can come from not knowing or encountering different worldviews, we do the same. Departing from concepts of neutrality does not mean losing our ethics of care. Indeed, it is precisely the opposite. When we hold on to a false concept of neutrality, we sort the world in black-and-white ways. It is when we can acknowledge where we stand that we are able to move into more nuanced ways of viewing the self and other. It is here then that we can provide services and, more importantly, support students.