| Summary: | This dissertation offers a critical account of the process I have used to change and reconstruct my counselling practice. Viewed through the lens of modernity heroin addiction resembles a storm of personal and social problems that drives the redemptive qualities of personal growth out of the reach of individuals. Conventional approaches to treatment perceive heroin addicts to be problematic individuals whose behaviour and other social and cultural issues are diminished in importance by their overwhelming need to satisfy their dependency. Within such notions treatment interventions, including counselling, are predominantly conceived in terms of a biomedical model that focuses upon discipline and control. The dissertation recognises that such approaches leave little space for individual acts of meaning. The dissertation critically and creatively explores the issue of drug addiction from the perspective of my work as a counsellor. I will discuss my feelings, emotions and thoughts to reflect how I might use lived experience to change how I counsel individuals addicted to heroin. Living and working in Stockton I have developed a strong awareness and understanding of its history and social spaces. It is an area in gradual decline characterised by social inequality and deprivation. The dissertation examines the consequences for my practice of counselling in such a context of social disadvantage. The meanings embedded in the everyday life of heroin addicts provide an opportunity for me to appreciate the kind of life being lived but also allow me to develop a different way of counselling that seeks to redress the damage done by social inequalities and addiction to heroin. I will argue that the traditional values of client-centred counselling autonomy-fidelity, justice, non-malfeasance and beneficence-need be rejected and replaced by an approach that encourages emancipatory social change. The dissertation draws upon a Goethean approach to science that encourages the use of imagination to gain an understanding of experience and provides the basis for a different way of knowing. Such a way of knowing is expressed through the use of photographic images interwoven with written text; together these narratives seek to throw open the conventional organization of counselling in order to contest the unequal social distribution of resources.
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