Counselling in rural Scotland: care,proximity and trust

People living in small rural communities tend to interact with each other in multiple aspects of their lives and are generally less anonymous to one another than those living in urban places. This density of social connectedness tends to militate against the boundaries normally associated with professionalised forms of care. This article explores how these tensions are negotiated by people who have developed local counselling services in two rural areas in Scotland. Counselling is becoming increasingly widely used as a response to a variety of forms of distress and is argued to constitute a modern urban and feminised form of care. However, notwithstanding its urban origins and associations, people in some rural places in Scotland have successfully arranged for training to be delivered locally to men as well as women. Nevertheless they recognise that for many rural residents, counselling continues to be alien and viewed with suspicion. They describe how they protect the identities of service-users using locational and social network strategies. They also discuss the issues that flow from the challenges of providing well-boundaried relationships. In so doing they point to an inverse relationship between social proximity and trust, thereby supplementing existing accounts of the disadvantages of social proximity in rural places.