A Student′s Guide to Therapeutic Counselling

Kelly Budd, Sandra McKeever, Traci Postings, Heather Price

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526408303, 9781526408297
• eBook ISBN: 9781526480156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Co-published with the CPCAB, this highly practical book is a comprehensive training guide based around the 7 areas that students have to evidence in order to become accredited. It offers a firm foundation of knowledge and skills, looks at practice issues, helps with study, and also answers the most common questions students have when training.

Part I Training To Be A Counsellor

1 Working Ethically and Safely as a Counselling Professional

This chapter is about working ethically and safely with clients as a counselling professional.

Ethical Frameworks

Oh no, not ethics again, we did that last year, and the year before! Why do we have to do it again?

Well the clue is in the sentence above – can you see that it says, ‘counselling professional’? That’s the difference. Towards the end of this year you will begin to work with real clients in an agency placement. You will be joining the counselling profession. So as well as all your skills and theory, your knowledge about ethics will be called upon because it will be so important to work safely with your clients in a professional manner.

Reflection

So take a moment to think about working with clients – that’s quite a responsibility isn’t it? Just jot down anything that concerns you about working professionally, safely and ethically.

So I expect you have listed things like not letting my clients down, keeping their confidentiality, holding the boundaries, doing the right thing, not harming the client, being competent, managing suicide threats, making referrals, getting on with other people at the agency, using supervision.

Let’s start with what you know already. You have learnt that there are such things as Ethical Frameworks and that they exist to protect the client and counsellor, to ensure that the counsellor is accountable to a professional body and that the client has access to an avenue for making a complaint if necessary.

OK, so far? We’ll come back to some of these things later, but at this stage of your training it is about learning to apply and extend the skills and knowledge you already have in order to work with clients, within an ethical framework. This is the next step on from just carrying out practice sessions with your peers in class.

What do we mean by working ethically with clients?

The word ethical is used in various ways – you will probably have come across some of them. For example ‘ethically farmed’, ‘ethically sourced’, and ‘ethically invested’. If you consider each of these phrases you will see that they all have something to do with doing good and/or causing least harm.

Exercise

Jot down as many words as you can think of that define ‘ethical’ for you.

Here are some of the more common ones – equitable, honourable, just, morally right, accepted standard of conduct, right minded.

So are morals and ethics the same then?

The word ‘moral’ implies conforming to accepted or established notions of right and wrong in a community, country or culture. The word ‘ethical’ suggests the more complex and subtle exploration of fairness, rightness or equity and might need to be considered for each individual case, for example, a family’s ethical consideration of the pros and cons of having a Do Not Resuscitate order for their elderly mother.

Reflection

Consider the following: It may be scientifically possible to clone human beings, but is it ethical?

So, coming back to counselling, what exactly is an ethical framework?

It is a set of guidelines which aim to lay down a broad standard or benchmark for working as a counsellor. An ethical framework is produced by a professional body in the field of counselling and determines how a counsellor should conduct themselves, and what a client can expect when they enter into a counselling agreement. The reason for this is so that there can be a generally accepted standard for counselling work all across the country, in all types of agency, dealing with all kinds of clients and a whole range of issues. The standards usually include reference to values, principles and moral qualities and how these relate to good practice, that is, putting the client first.

I understand all that, but how does it impact on me working as an individual counsellor in an agency?

You need to know which ethical framework your placement adheres to so that you can work according to the same guidelines as everyone else in the agency, so that you are conducting yourself in a way which conforms to the same standard of behaviour as the other counsellors, and so that the clients know what to expect from you and all the counsellors in the agency.

Activity

Find out which Ethical Framework is adhered to at your agency placement. Does it differ from the framework you have already signed up to? Print out a copy and familiarise yourself with all its m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• Part I Training To Be A Counsellor
• 1 Working Ethically and Safely as a Counselling Professional
• 2 The Therapeutic Relationship
• 3 Working with Client Diversity in Counselling Work
• 4 A User-Centred Approach
• 5 Working with Self-Awareness
• 6 Counselling Skills and Theory
• 7 Working Self-Reflectively
• Part II Practice Issues
• 8 The Counselling Training Placement
• 9 Placement Supervision
• 10 Agency Requirements
• 11 Personal Therapy Requirements
• 12 Trainee Self-Care and Avoidance of Burnout
• 13 Writing a Case Study
• 14 Recording a Counselling Session and Analysing a Transcript
• Part III Professional Issues
• 15 What If?
• 16 What Next?
• References
• Index