Introduction
Like jazz musicians, counsellors and psychotherapists improvise. Reflective Writing in Counselling and Psychotherapy does not provide navigation equipment with precise instructions or a musical score, but each chapter offers writing activities to improve your own sense of direction and ability to improvise. The exercises introduce the links between self-awareness and being able to tell your story in different ways in counselling and psychotherapy and expressive and reflective writing.
Who is this Book for? Introducing Philip, Anita and Jo
The book has been written for practitioners, supervisors, teachers and students in counselling and psychotherapy. You may be an experienced practitioner who is looking for new ways to continue personal and professional development using writing: you may be new to counselling, coaching or psychotherapy and have started initial training; you may be involved in some further study for continuing professional development. At some stage you have been asked to keep a reflective journal and would like to know more about how to do that writing most successfully and enjoyably. We follow three fictional characters through the chapters that follow; all are in various stages of therapeutic training in the UK.
PHILIP I can understand why we have to keep a personal journal during this course, but I don’t really know how. I’ve decided I’m going to join a person-centred group for the personal therapy requirement. I went out and bought a new writing book for this reflective journal, small enough to fit into a pocket, with white paper and no lines.
ANITA Sitting there in the lecture theatre I thought to myself, ‘No way’. Keep a personal journal? Me? I don’t think so. They are also encouraging us to go to the student counselling service. I know it’s free, and I know it would give me an experience of sitting in the client’s seat – but what would I talk about?
JO Hmmm, keeping this journal is a bit like blogging, except I don’t write it on the Internet. I asked if I could use online counselling for the personal therapy requirement on the course but they said no. I’ll find out if there is a narrative therapist or somebody solution focused I could go and see locally. Writing this personal journal feels exposing – like a snail coming out of its shell, I feel too pale and vulnerable and want to protect my privacy.
What motivates us to work as counsellors and psychotherapists? During introductory and open evenings for new students at one course I taught on, I would always ask that question and emphasise some of the downsides – that it’s very hard work, intellectually and emotionally, is guaranteed to disturb your equilibrium and shake your relationships, plus there is no guarantee of paid work at the end of training.
Try this
Why do I work as a therapist – what do people say about me?
Listing Personal Qualities and Values
Finding somewhere you feel comfortable to write, and allowing yourself no more than 10 minutes, start to write a list of those personal qualities, experiences or values that brought you into training and working in counselling and psychotherapy. If it’s easier, write what other people have said about you.
An example:
Peter is:
Warm and approachable
Creative
Helping others is important to him
The peacemaker in family of origin
By writing a list in this exercise, you have already started preparing for this journey. Where did you decide to write? Did you use paper, pencils, the Internet, a digital platform? There is no wrong or right way to do this self-writing in practical terms, only the way that suits you best.
PHILIP I can listen. That’s what people say about me. I’ve struggled at times and maybe it’s those hard times that have made me able to listen to people, all sorts of people, and understand a bit better what they’re going through.
ANITA I wanted to do something connected with health. It wasn’t going to be taking care of people physically – I’m too squeamish for that. Psychology interested me and led on to this course.
JO There are so many reasons for me wanting to train to be a therapist , and I’m not sure where to start. Some days I’m not even sure I’ve done the right thing. It’s hard going with all the academic learning and then the personal journal writing and the group work. We have to do personal therapy too. It feels like I’m being dismantled somehow – hard to keep going.
Personal and Professional Development
Personal and professional awareness or development are defined by John and Julia McLeod as follows:
The definition that has informed our own work is: therapist personal development consists of an enduring, career-long, commitment to engage in cycles of collaborative reflection on both life experience and practice, leading to new ways of understanding and active experimentation with new ways of being with others, for the purpose of being able to be as useful as possible to the clients, patients or service users with whom one works. The key ideas here are (a) it is never over; (b) it is something that needs the active involvement of other people; (c) it is not merely concerned with insight and awareness, but with being able to do things differently; (d) it is not necessarily about coming to terms with personal problems … (McLeod & McLeod, 2014: 10)
The personal and the professional go together; they are often linked in the counselling and psychotherapy literature and it can sometimes be a pointless exercise to attempt to disentangle one from the other (Rose, 2017). It seems certain that personal and professional development continue throughout a career in counselling and psychotherapy (Rose, 2012). Decades ago, Hazel Johns suggested that personal development never ends for therapists:
Personal development is not an event but a process, life-long and career-long: it must and will happen incidentally before and after any training course, through all aspects of life and work. (Johns, 1996: xii)
Since then, professional bodies in the psychological therapies have considered what might define personal development competence. For example, the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) and other professional bodies have referred to self-awareness as one necessary criterion for professional accreditation, but have not yet provided more specific detail about what self-awareness is or how it might be measured (Bond, 2015). The need to be aware of social justice and how to build therapeutic relationships across diversity is emphasised, acknowledging the ongoing critique of counselling and psychotherapy as white and middle class (Feltham et al., 2017; Watson, 2006). In the USA, the Council for the Accreditation of Counseling and Related Education Programs (CACREP) states that the presence of self-awareness is a prerequisite for counsellor fitness to practise, yet also leaves aside exactly what is meant by self-awareness and how it might be assessed. The need to demonstrate how you have developed personally and professionally and the role of writing in that process is considered in more depth in later chapters.
In this book professional development and the kind of writing we provide practice for is hard to separate from personal development. We cover a terrain, akin to writing for reflective practice, where you might not be certain where the path you’re taking will lead, and where your assumptions will be challenged (Bolton & Delderfield, 2018). Keeping a reflective journal is one way of noticing how your experience changes, how your values and the background you come from play a part in your ability to create and maintain therapeutic relationships:
To be an effective therapist, it is necessary to develop a way of being with people that is genuinely grounded in one’s own personal experience, values and cultural context. Over and over again, research studies have found that what makes the difference to clients are the personal qualities of the counsellor, and his or her capacity to form an accepting and facilitative relationship. (McLeod, 2010: 6)
Whether the terminology in your particular counsellor education or practice refers to self-awareness or personal development, the centrality of knowing yourself in order to develop effective therapeutic alliances makes sense. Personal development could include ‘a unique pattern of moral, emotional, sexual, social and intellectual concerns’, allowing the practitioner or trainee to ‘identify her own strengths, limitations and oddities’ (Johns, 1996: 59). You may be working in a personal development group as part of your practice or involved in personal therapy, so this self-writing may only be part of that journey of self-exploration. Although there is little conclusive evidence for the effectiveness of personal therapy and therapy groups for the personal development of trainees in counselling and psychotherapy, research continues (Norcross, 2005). What’s certain is the role of the therapeutic relationship in making a difference to clients, and again, there is more on this in later chapters.
When asked for the advantages and disadvantages of writing compared to personal therapy or personal development groups, some counselling students on an integrative programme used words such as:
… reflection, time/space, a means of clarifying thinking, expressing and identifying feelings, confidential, honest, freedom of expression. (Daniels & Feltham, 2004)
In the same study, one student said:
Writing enables me to articulate in a non-vocal way material what I wouldn’t dare express in any other way. (2004: 184)
There is increasing evidence for the professional and personal benefits...
