Advocacy and therapy

I'm usually keen to distinguish advocacy from other disciplines, especially advice, mentoring, mediation, and the model of support work that underlies so many professional roles.

Some other roles, notably interpreting and befriending, are still different but have a more interesting and closer interplay with advocacy work.

Recently however I've realised that advocacy falls wholly within the realm of therapy, and we should see it as part of an 'art of healing'.

Some quick notes to begin to explain and explore this:

• There are lots of modern therapies (whose practitioners can guard the boundaries jealously) but the art of healing has been practised for millennia;
• Healing isn't just based on specific medical symptoms - it's wider than 'curing' for example. In it's more holistic sense it's more about re-adapting people to their environment (and sometimes trying to adapt the environment for people);
• The idea of 'just therapy' developed by the Family Centre in New Zealand makes these observations, but also describes therapy as helping people to place new and more positive meaning structures on their experiences, to replace problem-centred meanings that can make life seem so difficult;
• There is an analogue here with the description I wrote about Helping someone not to get angry, and with many other advocacy interventions: people feel they can't communicate with services, or people are not listening to them, but working with an advocate helps them to develop communication skills and strategies that can overcome these difficulties, so they can get services and live more easily.

I think there's a lot of interesting potential in exploring the links between therapy and advocacy further. I know some other people have got some ideas in this direction too. Watch this space.