Counselling Psychology

A Textbook for Study and Practice

David Murphy

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781119106869, 9781119106852
• eBook ISBN: 9781119106838
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

A complete introduction to the theory and practice of contemporary counselling psychology

An excellent resource for students at undergraduate or graduate level, Counselling Psychology: A Textbook for Study and Practice provides valuable insights into the key issues associated with theory and practice in this field. The contributors represent a diverse array of approaches, reflecting the rich diversity within the area, and care is taken to avoid favouring any one approach. The book begins with an overview of the historical and philosophical foundations of counselling psychology, before taking a detailed look at major therapeutic approaches and exploring issues associated with specific client populations, ethics, research design, and more. In particular, the text seeks to explain how counselling psychology differs from and informs other areas of contemporary applied psychology. The result is an engaging balance of the personal and academically rigorous, presented in a highly accessible format.

• An authoritative introduction to and key issues involved with the theory and practice of counselling psychology for students and practitioners at all levels
• Considers all major approaches to psychotherapy including existential, person-centered experiential, psychodynamic, and cognitive-behavioural
• Explores issues commonly encountered when working with specific client groups including children, people with intellectual disabilities, and emergency trauma victims

PART 1
Introduction and Foundations

1
Introduction to the Textbook on Counselling Psychology

DAVID MURPHY

---

LEARNING OUTCOMES

BY THE END OF THIS CHAPTER YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO ANSWER THE FOLLOWING KEY QUESTIONS:

1. What is counselling psychology?
2. What are the main approaches to counselling psychology?
3. What key issues does counselling psychology engage with in practice?

---

This textbook is for anyone with an interest in counselling psychology. When I was an undergraduate psychology student I learned about the different divisions in the British Psychological Society (BPS) and the important differences in the work that people do within different psychologist roles. I came to realize that my passion was in psychotherapy. This interest in psychotherapy had started prior to being an undergraduate and was stimulated by a reading of both Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and Carl Rogers's On Becoming a Person. These two books had a profound impact on me, although each in quite different ways. It was the practice of psychotherapy, and the humanistic psychology of Carl Rogers, which seemed to call me closer and provided the motivation to discover more. I realized that counselling psychology was where I needed to be. This journey to counselling psychology began in the early 1990s and it's very satisfying to have the chance to contribute this book to the professional field of counselling psychology.

After undergraduate studies I took the independent route to chartered psychologist status, achieving full membership of the Division of Counselling Psychology. This involved completing the BPS Qualification in Counselling Psychology. In completing this qualification I elected to commit to an extensive training in person-centred therapy, and undertook further training to become a person-centred group facilitator. I also trained in interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) and completed supervision training, and developed a personal interest in the experiential approaches to education and psychotherapy. The journey was long, hard, and expensive. So why am I telling you this? It's because I hope that if you are reading this and are yet to make the journey towards qualification as a counselling psychologist, you will be able to use the book to help and accompany you through your own journey. Counselling psychology is a profession that can be rich in the satisfaction it brings and it is a great privilege to share in the lives of our clients; I hope that this book might offer some companionship to you in your training.

The aim of this book is to provide a textbook that can be a companion to studying counselling psychology at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. I hope you will find many valuable insights if you are a qualified practitioner too. Counselling psychology in the UK is a lively and thriving profession. It is also, in my experience, an inclusive professional group and I hope that this book will speak to everyone with an interest in counselling psychology. Together with my contributing authors we have created an engaging text that is both personal and academically rigorous in an accessible format.

Inclusion is an important feature of the book. The origins of counselling psychology lie firmly in the field of humanistic psychology, which considers the therapeutic relationship as central. Our success in therapy is reliant on the relationships we build with our clients. Within these relationships counselling psychologists are able to draw on their skills and high level of competency and creativity to find the best ways to support their clients towards personal change and growth. This relationship paradigm must always be identified as a radical alternative from and reaction to the pernicious effects of the medical model ideology. The medical model ideology is all too dominant in the field of professional psychology. Counselling psychology must actively work against the medical model ideology. Counselling psychology's potential for shaping the wider field of applied psychology comes with a great deal of responsibility. It is the task of counselling psychology, in my view, to humanize the psychological professions.

There are a number of ways in which counselling psychology can take up this responsibility. The key activity of counselling psychology is psychotherapy. Psychotherapy has to be protected as something that exists beyond being a “health profession.” More radical counselling psychologists, for example, might see themselves less as “health practitioners” and instead see psychotherapy as something that cannot be confined to the field of “health care.” Health care, at least in the field of mental health care, is not concerned with human growth and development. It is concerned with repair, with restoration, fixing, and addressing deficits in functioning. To many this might sound perfectly acceptable. For counselling psychology this is not satisfactory. It is restrictive to put such limits around our human potential, and to focus only on deficits, problems, and fixing things does just this. Instead counselling psychology is based on the growth paradigm rather than a deficit paradigm. Whilst existing mental health services are based on the deficit paradigm, counselling psychologists are concerned with growth, with reaching human potential with full functioning, and thereby offer a radical alternative to any other application of psychology.

There are, however, some challenges facing counselling psychology. We need to address the issue of eclecticism and pluralism. A varied and evolving counselling psychology field is essential to our ongoing growth. The creative tensions that exist within our community can and do give rise to new developments and exciting ways forward. What we must be cautious about, however, is imposing eclecticism and pluralism onto the field rather than seeing them as emergent from the field. To configure the field of counselling psychology by supposing that eclecticism and pluralism are right for everyone is to create a new dogma. To impose eclecticism and pluralism upon all practitioners forces a situation where everyone must be all things to all people. In this book a wide range of approaches to counselling psychology, of issues and contexts, are explored as well as a range of research approaches presented. This is because counselling psychology is inherently pluralistic in the sense that it offers a broad range of ways of practising. But this is different to saying that everyone needs to be “a bit of everything” themselves. This book intends to convey the richness in how diverse our approaches are from one another. It intentionally does not state or support the notion that every counselling psychologist must/should/ought be doing everything.

Individual counselling psychologists can retain their right to professional self-determination and to practise an approach to psychotherapy to which they are best suited. Counselling psychology has nothing to fear from this. Perhaps it is the existential, person-centred experiential and psychodynamic practitioners who are most likely to remain true to their original models. Integrative, pluralistic and cognitive-behavioural therapists already have practice methods that are integrative. The integrative and pluralistic approaches will readily adapt therapy to what the therapist thinks will be most effective for the client depending on the therapist's understanding of the client's problems. There is a risk, though, of the practitioners of those approaches moving towards the medical model ideology without having realized it (see Chapter 3).

This book is organized into six parts containing 29 chapters. The parts provide a map to help guide readers through the book. All chapters have been contributed by leading figures with years of experience in the field of counselling psychology practice, research, and education.

Part 1 focuses on introducing and providing an overview of the foundations of counselling psychology. To outline these chapters in more detail, we begin by setting counselling psychology in context historically, paradigmatically, and philosophically with chapters from Frankland (Chapter 2), Joseph (Chapter 3), and du Plock (Chapter 4), respectively.

Then, in Part 2, there is a series of chapters that each considers a different therapeutic approach counselling psychologists might practice. These include existential counselling psychology in Chapter 5 (Kasket). Chapter 6 is on person-centred experiential (Murphy), Chapter 7 is on the psychodynamic (Halewood), and Chapter 8 is on the transpersonal (Rowan) approach. Chapter 9 introduces cognitive-behavioural (Dryden), and Chapter 10 pluralistic (Hanley, Winter, McLeod, and Cooper), and finally Chapter 11 is on integrative counselling psychology (Lambert and Norcross). Each of these chapters offers an overview of the philosophical underpinnings, the theory of distress, and the theory of therapy in counselling psychology, and offers a case example showing how the approach can be practised.

In Part 3 you will find chapters on client groups. Chapter 12 is where Hanley, Frizina, and Nizami focus on working with children and young people. Next in Chapter 13 Emerson offers a chapter on working with people with special needs and disabilities. Then, in Chapter 14, Rutten provides a chapter for counselling psychologists working with people with Asperger syndrome. Trauma is increasingly recognized in the emergency services and Tehrani covers working with this client group in a chapter reporting on her trauma support programme with emergency service personnel (Chapter 15).

This is followed by Part 4 containing chapters on the socio-cultural issues associated with counselling psychology. Arnold and Brewster consider sexualities in Chapter 16, and in Chapter 17, Liu and Colbow consider social class. In Chapter 18 Nkansa-Dwamena considers issues of race and ethnicity, and in Chapter 19 Barker and Richards consider issues of gender in counselling psychology. Each of these issues warrants a chapter in its own right; however, counselling psychologists also need to develop a complex and sophisticated understanding of how issues of sexuality, social class, race and ethnicity, and gender all intersect. Consequently, throughout this section an intersectional approach is taken.

Part 5 considers professional issues, and in Chapter 20 James foc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Contributors
• Foreword
• PART 1: Introduction and Foundations
• PART 2: Approaches to Counselling Psychology
• PART 3: Working with Client Groups
• PART 4: Socio‐cultural Issues
• PART 5: Professional Issues
• Index
• End User License Agreement