The other evening I had my supervision. Supervision is a requirement for most counsellors and counsellors in training. It is my space for exploring my client work in an open and - this is particularly important - non judgemental way. It is more about going into my feelings around what I've done than about some kind of assessment of the actions I have taken.

Recently I've had a number of conversations about other professions - teachers and nurses mainly - who are charged with equally complex caring roles, but who rarely have access to this kind of supportive over-view. For them, more often than not, supervision becomes about criticism and target reaching. This can't be healthy for the practitioner, nor for the adults and children who come into contact with them.

At the Lapidus training day it was hypothesised that some of the difficulties we, as writers, encounter from staff when we go into educational or health settings, may stem from this lack of nourishing back-up. The "something different" that we offer becomes, at best, a bother, or, at worst, a threat. Yet without the means for looking at themselves, the practitioners do not even know where their responses are coming from.

Freud said that we are mostly guided by our unconscious. I have an image of us all as icebergs, the conscious part is the tip above the waves, but it is the stuff below the water line which really causes the damage.

I attended a Lapidus training day last week. I had hesitated over going, it all felt too much on top of everything else, but I'm very glad I did.

Lapidus - creative words for health and wellbeing - is a national organisation. It brings together people from many different grooves of life who are interested in creative writing as a conduit for self-reflection and personal growth and within health settings. Its meetings are always a vibrant mix of health professionals, educationalists and writers, all passionate about writing and the importance of creativity in our lives. It's a place for me to go to be inspired, re-sourced. I had forgotten that.

I had also forgotten about Julia Cameron's "writing dates" (from her The Artist's Way), days out with the sole purpose of replenishing our creative store. Time has been a big issue for me recently, the feeling of being overwhelmed by work and commitments. Now I have blocked off one day in the week for my writing and creative work all the way through to September, I suddenly see space, and opportunities to keep some writing dates.

I'm also a little disconcerted. For over six months my life has been ruled by where I had to be next, the choice of, well I could go there or there, or just stay right here with a cup of tea, leaves me unbound and free-falling. And I kind of like that.

www.lapidus.org.uk

I got a call the other day from a health professional asking whether I had any guidance for him because he was thinking of offering creative writing as an activity for his clients. My first question to him was: do you write? Well, no, I dabble a bit, nothing I would want to share, was his reply.

Am I being too precious here in thinking that in order to encourage others to write creatively, we must first immerse our selves into that world? And if we are proposing others share their work, we must be up for that too?

For me, therapeutic creative writing, much like counselling, is not something to be done unto others. It's an exploration, I as guide, facilitator, however you want to frame it, invite others on. I am in the midst of that journey, in the swamps and on top of the mountains, not looking in from the sidelines. When my caller asked me if there were any worksheets I could send him, I nearly cried. Did Picasso get asked for worksheets? Now, perhaps, I am being too precious.

"And Some There Be"
On the road to Cap del Pinar
a plaque reads: "Victorious engineers 1939",
to those who
dug, blasted, pinned, tarmacked,
built this precipitous way.
And I thought
how often do we commemorate
the men and women who
quietly, gloriously,
create, not destroy.
The triumphant cleaner,
the undefeated carer,
the conquering call centre clerk,
the broadbacked brickie?

And lest we forget
there's a carved stone
in a plaza in Paris
which honours those
society brands as failures
for whom poverty is
the only prize.

I wonder whether
in amongst the celebrity, the influential and the hero,
there's room for the mediocre,
for the does their best,
for the not quite good enough?

Where indeed stands
the marble memorial
to the ordinary,

to the majority of us?

I did read Listening In by Kevin Chandler while I was on holiday, and I enjoyed it. The portrayal of the therapist was authentic, engaging and pleasingly witty. I recognised the dilemmas and the way clients , and the process of counselling itself, can get under your skin.

It also made me think about the two novels I have written which sit (unpublished) on my book shelf. I have actually produced five novels, but only these last two are up to what I would consider publishable standards. I am re-reading them, which I haven't done since they were written in 2002 and 2005. And they compare favourably to Listening In. If it deserves a publisher's stamp of approval, then so do mine.

This is not easy for me to write, nor for me to hold onto. It sounds arrogant, boastful. Yet is it so wrong of me to say that I can create characters, a plot line, a setting, which hold up well over 60,000 words? And to feel just a little aggrieved that no publisher has been interested in this?

There was one TV programme which, I think, caught the essence of therapy and therapists. That was Help, the comedy series with Paul Whitehouse and Chris Langham. It sunk without trace, of course, when Langham was sent to prison for ten months for downloading child porn.

Langham's acts upset me. It brought into sharp focus once again, that those who abuse, and those who look at child porn (who must know the abuse behind it), are ordinary - often troubled - guys (yes I know women abuse children sexually, but the vast majority is perpetrated by men). Langham has done his time, should he be rehabilitated? How would I feel watching his wonderful portrayal of the dilemmas of a therapist now?

An article in the most recent (April 2009) Therapy Today perked my interest. 'Turning Tricks' by Kevin Chandler suggests commonalities between therapy and prostitution. It reminded me of a poem I wrote a number of years ago about my own therapy which some people thought was about visiting a prostitute.

A Stranger Kind of Intimacy
You said you would walk with me
yet you never held my hand
you said yes
this is a kind of love
an intimacy
yet you never gave me complements or flowers
you watched me cry
and never reached to comfort me
you held me together
without ever touching me
i told you all i had to tell
yet i never knew you
and finally as i lay naked
exposed
while you sat in your suit and tie
you said your time is up for this week
yet you never even kissed me goodbye.

I sent the poem to Kevin and he was kind enough to reply, saying he'd been moved by it. I am always surprised when people say they are moved by my poetry. It is a wonderful thing to be able to move others and I am blown away that my cold words on the cold page are capable of doing that.

Kevin has written a novel "of therapy and real life" called Listening In. I have got it to read and shall be intrigued to see whether (and how) he manages to represent the world of the therapist in a dramatic and authentic way. I'm usually disappointed by the films and TV programmes I've seen featuring therapists which have gone for the drama at the expense of authenticity.

Listening In is available from http://www.accentpress.co.uk/.