AILEEN LITTLE meets a woman who has been at the forefront of counselling for 43 years

FOR MARGARET Jarvie, the hard part of her job is not to rely on her memory: ``Many clients leave me with an issue I myself need to resolve with my supervisor,'' she says. ``I might say to him `I recognised what the client was saying to be similar to something I once went through myself'. I must never project my own experience.''

Margaret, a Motherwell-born mother of two, has been at the forefront of Scotland's counselling service for 43 years. Within the orbit of her profession, the term supervisor means one who gives counsel to the counsellor - a kind of mother/father confessor on whom counsellors off-load all the effects of absorbing other people's pain.

Jarvie often acts as a supervisor herself - among others, to counsellors currently setting up in the Hebrides. She has been appointed consultant to the new Western Isles Counselling and Family Mediation Services. Island life, it seems, generates a unique set of problems. ``Confidentiality is tricky. On Barra, for instance, there are two counsellors who probably know everybody. Knowing a past history, counsellors are tempted to form an opinion.'' Further complications arise because Sunday training on Lewis is forbidden. Recent research has revealed polarisation of drinking between excess and abstenance at all ages.

But stress is Jarvie's speciality. Since 1988, she has been employed by the Bank of Scotland to counsel employees involved in bank raids: the aim is to move fast to prevent the onset of post traumatic stress.

Nowadays raid victims take up the offer of one-to-one counselling, if needed, without hesitation. It was not always so. ``Staff wrongly assumed it went on their record - counselling still has connotations of weakness. But post-traumatic stress is a normal reaction to an abnormal event.'' Trust is also a feature of Jarvie's contract of nine years with Hewlett Packard. Staff are at liberty to ring her any time to meet off the premises and as often as they like - all at the company's expense. Problems arising from bereavement, difficult teenagers, and marital breakdown are the norm. Jarvie is impressed by the firm's progressive attitude and respect for confidentiality.

Jarvie's schedule is jam-packed: one weekend in 13 she manages to escape to her cottage near Brora. The rest of the year, she contributes to the training of human resource managers at the Scottish Office and works with senior officers at Saughton Prison. She is an external assessor for the Confederation of Scottish Counselling Agencies. She acts as external examiner for Glasgow University, a post she has also held at Durham, Raigmore Hospital, and at the Central School of Counselling and Therapy in London. And, since retirement from Moray House, where she was course leader for guidance and counselling for 24 years, she has set up her own Edinburgh-based business employing eight counsellors, each in private practice.

Counsellors say they work with people rather than issues. But, across the board, Jarvie acknowledges there is a basic pattern to her modus operandi. In every case she establishes a relationship based on empathy and concern. Then there evolves the process where a slice of life is isolated and closely examined.

But in terms of post-traumatic stress, does it all do any good? By putting harrowing experiences under the microscope are we delaying nature's own healing process? And to what extent does every counselling session rip off the scar which is beginning to form over a wound? Jarvie responds by putting forward the basic tenets of her philosophy. ``If you force yourself to push an incident to the back of your mind, it's my belief it will surface again as unfinished business - maybe as a marital break-up or you could be on a shorter fuse.''

Jarvie is equally unequivocal about another fact - that you don't need personal experience of a problem to empathise with it. On the contrary, as role-models and befrienders, reformed addicts are first-rate, she says - but hopeless for counselling. The more parallel one's own life, the more risk of projecting a personal history. Jarvie's antedote to outpourings of raw emotion is her aforementioned supervisor. And jogging. And the support of a husband of 43 years with whom she pioneered marriage guidance in Scotland. She gets a definite buzz from her work, but it's nothing to do with do-gooding. ``I don't believe in altruism. I only do things I get some reward from.''

Most of all Jarvie is relieved that measures are at last to be introduced to address questionable standards in some counselling practitioners - a UK register of accredited counsellors will be available next year. Too many people, she says, employ a counselling approach then call themselves counsellors. Real skills, like miracles, take a little longer.