Faith sensitive counselling

Faith Sensitive Counselling

Simple, spiritual and achievable: Michael Lilley describes My Time- an award-winning, practical approach within a multi-faith community

My Time is a culturally and faith sensitive counselling practice based in Birmingham that reached the grand age of 5 in November 2007. Last year, the organisation recently received the award of Innovation in Psychotherapy 2007 by the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy. My Time’s team is a world-wide collection of individuals that span over 13 countries of origin (Eritrean, UK Afro-Caribbean, UK Pakistani, UK Bangladeshi, UK Indian, UK English, Zimbabwean, UK Bosnian, Turkish, Yemini, UK Chinese, Italian, and Polish) and  five faiths (Sikh, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu). Within these faiths there were several sub-groups for example the team members from Christian and Muslim background, worshiped in different sectors of the religion. My Time itself was housed within an Anglo-Catholic Church of England Church that rents out space within its main building and former vicarage to organisations that provide services to the community. These include My Time, Birmingham Churches Together, West Midlands Churches Regional Forum, Restore (a Christian based befriending service for asylum seekers), and ASIRT (Asylum Seekers Immigration Resource Team).

 My Time has an office and reception area, a training room, 4 counselling rooms, and access to a kitchen and garden. My Time’s activities range from one to one counselling, self-esteem and confidence building programmes, research into community engagement and diversity, research into affects of depression and anxiety, talking and non-talking therapies that overcome cultural and language barriers, family work and training other professionals in a range of specialists subjects including horticultural and art therapies, facilitating groups, working with food and mood, and cultural counselling. My Time has developed specific skills in trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, working with multi-ethnic communities, family coaching/therapy, and gender specific programmes. There is a drop in service specifically for asylum seekers and refugees in partnership with ASIRT and My Time has developed a specialist trauma team that can communicate and work in over 15 different languages.

As a therapeutic practice operating from a Christian church that is based within an area that is predominately Muslim, the words faith sensitive counselling have a resonance and meaning in reality. All Saint’s Church is a Victorian building that was known as the Cathedral of the backstreets and historically always had to operate within a backdrop of poverty, exclusion, and immigration. I often describe Small Heath as the Ellis Island (the historic immigrant staging post of the USA) of Birmingham.  Historically, Birmingham is a city created by immigration as it was only a village 300 years ago. The industrial revolution established it as the UK centre for industry and engineering. Migrants from all over the UK descended on it looking for work and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the Irish arrive, later African Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi. All arrived at what is called the Digbeth (home of the coach station) and many found there first home in Small Heath near the Birmingham City Football Ground (the blues). Since 1990, the new communities include Somali, Polish, Yemini, Iranian, Iraqi, Bosnian, and Eritrean. Reportedly there are over 120 countries of origin in Birmingham’s residents with the heart of Birmingham, 70% of its population originating from BME communities. By 2020, this 70% will be the whole or the estimated 2 million population, making the city the first truly multi-cultural city of Europe.

The humanistic mission of My Time practice is to develop a model of therapy that can cross cultural and faith divides and bring people together. The therapeutic methods do not only empower the individual but provides a human building block for a truly socially integrated society. The concept of the “I” and “we” cultures embracing an “us” culture that truly brings police officers together with asylum seekers, former coal miners with a Pakistani women’s food group, and Birmingham City Football fans with a local children’s centre. In My Time’s practical down to earth way this is being achieved in Small Heath. Clients range from all social classes, faiths, religions, culture and age. The important factor is that you are a human being experiencing depression, anxiety and low self-esteem. The starting point is how you see the world and how the counsellor / group facilitator can connect with you in your journey, taking into account your desires, reality and the environment / culture you live within. To understand this vision, My Time’s team needs to encompass a true representative mix of the population and be able to explore and reflect the insight of the individual and the community’s beginnings. We have learnt from each other and often have informal group reflection sessions, where a white middle class man can have a discussion with a UK Muslim woman (who wears the veil) on Muslim divorce procedures and the emotional affects and how as a white middle class man can I support the couple I am counselling, who are struggling with the real UK 21^st century issues of being a third generation Muslim in a western country with different values from their parents and grandparents. This is not obtained from academic lectures or text books. It comes from real engagement. This takes me on to tell the story of the spiritual journey that took me from my roots to be a founding member My Time, and the interesting sponsorship that enabled the philosophy of My Time to be developed as this underpins our cores concept of:

Mind= Body = Environment=Spirituality (Inner Spirit)

My Time is the name of a faith sensitive counselling service that was established in 2002, from research commissioned by St. Peter’s Saltley Trust and West Midlands Churches Regional Forum. The Saltley Trust was established in 1980 after the sale of St.Peter’s Theological College in Birmingham. The Trust is a multi-domination Christian community educational trust that actively sponsors and commissions reflective action research that engages spirituality and theology within the context of societal issues facing ordinary people. Faith schools are attended by about 40% of the children living within the West Midlands and faith centres (churches, mosques, temples) are often the mainstay of community activity. The Trust in 1999 in partnership with the West Midlands Churches Further Education Council chaired by the late Right Reverend John Allan, Bishop of Aston, funded research into how churches within the West Midlands would engage in the life long learning debate and the Government’s new programme of community strategic partnership. This led to the reflection on what was the common denominator of a theology that crossed all places of worship and faith.

The trust employed me as one of the researchers on a 20 month contract. I had been on a personal journey for some years as community development worker, single parent dad of 3 children, youth worker and mature student studying psychology, criminology, primary education, and counselling. My spiritual journey had led me to the question of how does the individual in the lowest period of depression, anxiety and sorrow find the inner resolve to start the journey out of this despair and onto a road of hope. I also reflected on how communities suffering depression, collectively, started to develop a sense of belonging in society as a whole and create a new vision. Over the years, I have worked on bleak council estates and worked amongst communities in the UK racked with low self-esteem, social deprivation, generational poverty, and little or no aspiration. Government initiatives had come in one door with new build, training, Japanese car plants, and ministerial visits and after some years left out of the same door. Governments changed, and the same process happened again. Although some benefited, many were left in the same disillusioned state and with the same problems. Often, when funding ran out, the only continuing constant in these poor areas was the place of worship, whether it was Christian, Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist. This spiritual place often catered for the most excluded whether a single parent group, asylum seekers, people experiencing mental illness, and the homeless.  My counselling study travels had taken me through the humanistic works of Brian Thorne, and Richard Nelson-Jones who both explored the spirituality of being a human being. My approach to counselling is greatly influenced by Shoma Morita, who was a practicing psychiatrist in Japan at the early part of the twentieth century. As a Zen Buddhist he combined his scientific assessment with a human spiritual therapy that used nature, creativity, and socialisation as the route way for the anxiety stricken individual to rebuild their lives with a sense of meaning and purpose based on the celebration of life as opposed to material gain.

By 1999, I was managing a holistic based community centre that was housed within a Staffordshire former coal miner’s housing estate. The pit had closed in 1992, and there was a high level of people on incapacity benefit and unemployment. The centre was next to a church and the centre in partnership with the congregation had established a range of activities from counselling, self-esteem groups, photography club, single parent support group, contact centre, youth club, adult education and information, advice and guidance. This led me to explore the concept of a counselling centre that provided progression routes for depressed and anxious individuals with low self-esteem to work with others on building futures for “I” and for “we”. A future that was sustainable, one that had meaning, and enabled the individual and the community to persevere and become resilient so that when future “disasters” struck they could re-energise and problem solve and move forward. The centre had a strong philosophy that came from the family centre movement as promoted by Toynbee Hall and the works of Professor Bob Holman. I was moving to a faith based psycho-social –educational model that encompassed one to one counselling alongside social and learning based therapeutic group work. These activities housed within a holistic environment of easy access to social based support groups and organisations that would enable the “I” and the “we” to develop and then in turn help others, a real self-generating model.

The action research I undertook initially in the rural area of South Staffordshire enabled me to develop a partnership with faith groups, a housing association, local authority, and local GPs in developing a holistic cognitive-humanistic self-esteem programme for 50 women experiencing depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem living in coal mining villages and farms particularly affected by Foot and Mouth. The programme over 2 years showed that this form of partnership had the dual effect of supporting the individual within a community context and generated wider community initiatives. This research was published and it was decided to consider whether the methodology would be relevant in other cultures and for men and women. Thus My Time started its life within inner city Birmingham but still works in rural as well as urban areas. The deep rooted gift given by St.Peter’s Saltley Trust’s sponsorship was the concept of a theological reflective practice within a therapeutic setting by a multi-faith reflective practice that saw all human beings as human beings, that a world wide perspective enables our practice to be colourful, vibrant and full of different solutions and possibilities. It enables the “I” to embrace my world-wide compatriots into a truly revolutionary “we” and celebrate the words that a stranger is not a stranger but a future friend. This is the common denominator within all faiths and spirituality, the concept of the hand to the stranger, the welcome and the sharing of communion. It is simple and it is spiritual and it is possible, it is hope.