288 – How Counselling Training Affects Your Personal Relationships

7 Habits of an Effective Counselling Supervisor – Seeking Counselling for a Loved One

In Episode 288 of the Counselling Tutor Podcast, your hosts Rory Lees-Oakes and Ken Kelly discuss this week’s three topics:

• First up in ‘Ethical, Sustainable Practice’, Rory and Ken discuss the 7 habits of an effective supervisor.
• Then in ‘Practice Matters’, Rory speaks with Lucy Mosha to get an insight into what it’s like to seek counselling for a loved one.
• And lastly in ‘Student Services’, we look at how counselling training affects your personal relationships.

7 Habits of an Effective Counselling Supervisor [starts at 4:00 mins]

If you’ve been thinking about training to become a supervisor, here are some of the skills you’ll need to be of best help to your supervisees:

• Active listening – a supervisor will take up more of a listening role, building up a trusting relationship.
• Constructive feedback – helping to inform your supervisees practice with feedback that they can act on. The feedback should be actionable, and helpful.
• Modeling professionalism and ethics – your supervisor should be able to guide you, and should understand the ethics of your modality.
• Fostering reflective and reflexive practice – thinking about what could’ve been done differently and how you can put that into practice. Helping you to meet the client with more humanity. This comes with a degree of gentle challenge from the supervisor.
• Adaptability and flexibility – everyone’s practice will be different. Help them to understand how to apply their theory, try to understand how your supervisee best learns.
• Cultivating a supportive environment and a safe space – a supervisee should be able to tell you about things that don’t go well without fear of judgement. Use thoughtful language when discussing mistakes or things that didn’t go to plan.
• Commitment to ongoing learning – you can’t know everything, if a supervisee comes to you with something you don’t know much about, go away and learn about it. Regular CPD will keep your knowledge current.
• You are working in service of the client by helping to ensure they receive the best possible practice from your supervisee.

Seeking Counselling for a Loved One [starts at 39:08 mins]

In this week’s ‘Practice Matters’, we look at counselling from the other side. Rory speaks with Lucy Mosha about her experience finding a counsellor for a loved one, and the difficulties that came with it.

The key points of this conversation include:

• It can be overwhelming to know where to start.
• There is so much choice that needs to be narrowed down.
• The idea that therapy is something that has to be assigned to you – there might be a reluctance to reach out on your own.
• A fear of making the wrong choice.
• It is comforting to be given the option to meet with a counsellor to see if they are the right fit for you, with the reassurance that if it doesn’t work you can look elsewhere.
• Having the counsellor acknowledge how difficult it is to reach out, and the possibility of them not being the right fit for you.
• The feeling that your difficulty isn’t serious enough to be seeking help, especially from charities.
• This first meeting might be the only opportunity for the client to speak to a professional, having a bad experience can make it very difficult for the client to want to try again.
• If you know what is triggering for the client before meeting, you should proceed carefully and gently.

How Counselling Training Affects Your Personal Relationships [starts at 59:55 mins]

In this section, Rory and Ken share some of their personal experiences with how going through counselling training can affect your personal relationships:

• You are likely to undergo personal changes.
• Becoming a counsellor can give you a new perspective of the world.
• Your values might change.
• Your relationships with others might change as a result of this.
• When undergoing counselling training, you might find yourself needing to renegotiate some of your personal relationships, set new boundaries.
• This might be your relationships with your friends, your family, or a romantic relationship.
• As you train to become a counsellor, you might have to acknowledge that you are no longer your old self.
• What you’re experiencing is growing pains. You can’t expect someone else to change just because you have; they’re not undergoing the same experiences as you are.

Links and Resources

Counselling Skills Academy

Advanced Certificate in Counselling Supervision

Basic Counselling Skills: A Student Guide

Counsellor CPD

Counselling Study Resource

Counselling Theory in Practice: A Student Guide

Counselling Tutor Shop

Facebook group

Website

Online and Telephone Counselling: A Practitioner’s Guide

Online and Telephone Counselling Course