Writing exercise

2. Counselling may be used to cope with the challenges of ‘change’.

I shall examine how ‘change’ and the challenges that it presents may be measured against the model defined by Maslow. I shall use as my subject the character of Rose from my screenplay ‘Leave To Remain’. Though she is fictional, I believe that by approaching her dilemmas in a ‘counselling’ way, more specifically in a psychodynamic way, I can understand her character motivations better.

Abraham Maslow identified a hierarchy of needs. Starting with physiological needs then ascending with safety needs, social needs, self-esteem and at the top, self-actualisation or realisation of potential. In the same way that a character’s narrative arc could be measured.

In a script it is vital to understand a character’s motivations, a concept integral to the psychodynamic model of counselling which is concerned with unconscious or external factors in human development and early childhood experiences. The script shows in flashback Rose’s early childhood. Her parents are killed by a fundamentalist Christian sect, God’s Acre, when she is four years old and she is placed into a God’s Acre orphanage. She is encouraged to befriend other children with a view to betraying their anti-religious tendencies.

Fast forward to the young adult Rose. She is still an agent for God’s Acre in the dystopian England of 2015. Rose’s life is at the most basic level of physiological need. She has a place to live (the burnt-out basement of a once-radical bookshop), which she shares with her secret lover, a Resistance fighter. It’s a hand-to-mouth existence. God’s Acre think of her as expendable. Rose unconsciously plays one side off against the other in order to survive and maintain her precarious physiological situation. She resists change. Rose’s machinations fail, her lover is captured and she abandons their child, not an unexpected outcome for Rose as her parents’ death effectively abandoned her.

The new trauma unlocks memories of the past. Rose decides she must find and free her lover, reclaim her child and in so doing begins slowly to move up the hierarchy of need as she changes. Forced into action by having even the physiological needs taken away, change is inevitable as she literally runs out of options. The unfolding of the narrative is itself a metaphor for psychodynamic counselling as Rose examines her past life in the light of her desperate circumstances.

As Maslow’s model might be critiqued for its simplicity and idealism, this too might be seen as a mirror to how a story is created, in that life is not perfect but that art can be and so in the course of the story, Rose ascends through the hierarchy and ultimately realises her own potential by joining sides openly with the Resistance in the North and assuming some authority because of her immersion in God’s Acre and her knowledge of the vulnerabilities of the organisation. Rose copes with the challenges of ‘change’ by connecting her own early experiences with the choices she herself makes and consciously acts to bring about a different outcome.