Interview with Jef Saunders

Counselor and Therapeutic Artist at Pegasus Therapeutics

This interview originally appeared in a CAMA newsletter.

 

As a first career Jef wanted to become a veterinarian. However, during his teen years something changed, “I noticed that many of my friends came to me to talk about problems they were having, so my interest shifted from animals to people.  In retrospect I realize that I was actually counseling my peers”. When Jef left school he still had this interest in the medical field and so went to work at the London Hospital in the department of experimental surgery as a student technician, switching two years later to St. Bartholemew’s. At these two leading teaching hospitals in the U.K Jef found an incredible mentorship through many of these doctors who shared their knowledge with him.  After this it seemed a natural shift to a medical publishing firm as an editorial and production assistant working on The British Veterinarian Journal and The International Journal of Psychoanalysis  as well as medical books. “It was wonderful to get paid for working on things I was so interested in.”  Through this work he developed an interest in the psychological work of Jung and others.

At this point there was an abrupt departure from these interests when Jef went to teacher’s college for three years.  He did not pursue teaching however but “disappeared” for fourteen years into a high-pressure business career.   At 39 Jef felt he wanted to do something useful and at the same time the stress for him of working in the business world was taking its toll on his body.  To loosen his body Jef went for some massage sessions and became interested in how as his body relaxed his emotions also loosened.  This led to a professional training in massage and he worked as a masseur finding that on the table people ‘let go’ and started talking about what was coming up for them.   Around this same time he met Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and was inspired by her work and took Life, Death and Transition workshops with her which eventually led to becoming Chairman of her organization, Shanti Nilaya in the U.K. and through her met Dr. Greg Furth.   Dr. Furth, who was a wonderful teacher and mentor for Jef,, had trained as a Jungian Psychoanalyst and had a PhD in Humanistic Psychology.  Through him Jef took trainings in the UK and Holland in counseling, psychodrama and interpretive work with spontaneous drawings.  At this time, Jef  lived in the large anthroposophical community of Forest Row where he developed his private practice.

During this period Jef expanded his work into the training field working on the Group Leaders program at the Ford Motor Company. In addition he became an associate counselor for Personal Performance Consultants, the largest employee assistance provider in the U.K..

In 1997 Jef met Regine Kurek from Arscura, who was in England working at Tobias.  They developed a personal relationship as well as a collaborative creative working relationship.  Jef came to Canada with the idea of teaching counseling skills at Arscura but first felt he had to take the ‘Art for Life’ course.  He describes feeling “an electric shock” four weeks after stepping into the artistic process when he realized that he was being offered an “initiatory path” into the anthroposophical path of soul and spirit  and knew this was what he had been searching for.  This was a revelation into a new way of working for Jef.

“My job as counselor is to facilitate a process that assists the other person.”  In his one-on-one work Jef chose to meld the art and the counseling, and let go of using the art as interpretive realizing that the art itself gave people a language. “ There is something very soul filled about the anthroposophical approach to artistic therapy.  The soul is so responsive to artistic work and it is responsive in a kind of conscious way. We live in consciousness soul age so what is the rightful approach for a therapist to enable the patient or the client to become conscious of their inner processes of the soul?   My job is to open a space to awaken something in the other.  As a therapist my job is creativity.  I am trying to create that point in the lemniscate between the inner and outer, that point where you cross over, that moment where, for a moment, you are in two places and you are leaving something behind and you are moving into something new and that is a magical moment a place of creation, of freedom.  Ninety-nine per cent of the people I see come feeling they are un-free or trapped in some way.  So I try to create that space for their own creation to appear, to allow their essential being to shine through.”

An exciting aspect of Jef’s work is with couples. The use of art enables couples to break free of their habitual patterns and arguments. This work has arisen out of a collaborative partnership with his wife Regine and their joint interest in finding new artistic exercises that allow people to relate better with each other.

Finally his closing statement which he believes is most important:  “As a therapist I believe my job is to work myself out of a job as soon as possible because then people are out there practicing and doing the work themselves.”

Interviewed by Vibeke Ball and Dr. Veronica Koopmans

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