310 – Importance of PD Groups

Relational Depth in Trauma Therapy – Getting Your Reading List in Order

In Episode 310 of the Counselling Tutor Podcast, your hosts Rory Lees-Oakes and Ken Kelly take us through this week’s three topics:

• Firstly in ‘Ethical, Sustainable Practice’, we look at relational depth.
• Then in ‘Practice Matters’, Rory speaks with Dr Sonja Falck about the importance of personal development (PD) groups to a qualified practitioner.
• And lastly in ‘Student Services’, Rory and Ken talk about getting your reading list in order for the academic year.

Relational Depth in Trauma Therapy [starts in 03:34 mins]

Relational depth is an important aspect of working with traumatised clients. In this section, Rory and Ken discuss how to build relational depth and its benefits:

• Trauma isn’t just a dysregulation of our thinking, but of our physical being.
• It’s important to offer a client compassion – sometimes we have to empathically suffer with the client.
• Meet the client where they are with unconditional positive regard.
• Relational depth requires a high quality of listening.
• It’s not just about listening to the words a client says, but thinking about their body language. What are their eyes/hands doing? How is their breathing?
• Practice embodiment exercises – think about your posture, how are you sitting? Are your feet planted firmly on the ground to give you a grounding of self, being mindful in the moment?
• Being aware of your own body, even focusing on the air as you breathe in and out, will help you keep yourself fully grounded in the here and now.
• Be robust and regulated against projection.
• Avoid rescuing tendencies – allow the client to process trauma without jumping in to ‘fix’ them.
• Manage your personal regulation and recognise dysregulation.

Importance of PD Groups to Qualified Practitioners [starts in 20:37 mins]

In this week’s ‘Practice Matters’, Rory speaks with Dr Sonja Falck about the importance of PD groups to a qualified practitioner.

The key points of this discussion include:

• People can have differing experiences of PD groups.
• Being in a group is a powerful experience – evolutionarily, belonging in a group was safer than being on your own, helping each other to find resources and protect against predators.
• It’s in our DNA to want to belong in a group and seek safety and acceptance.
• On the flip side, this can evoke fears of rejection, being disapproved of, and/or being excluded.
• There are 3 main aspects to a successful PD group for counselling practitioners: clarity, safety, and skill.
• Clarity – what is the purpose of the group? What are you doing and how are you going to do it? How do individuals participate? There needs to be an understanding of these things within a group for it to succeed.
• Safety – create conditions where people start to build trust with other members of the group. This allows them to feel like they can take risks and express themselves without something disastrous happening.
• Having safety doesn’t mean no one will ever feel uncomfortable – it’s creating safe discomfort.
• Skill – there needs to be the skill of the facilitator in helping to create this feeling of safety. How do you manage when someone feels uncomfortable or triggered by what somebody has said and ongoingly create and maintain clarity?
• They should be able to model good interpersonal interactions and encourage them.
• For neurodivergent counsellors in PD groups, it can be really useful to make things very explicit, e.g. when you react in X way, it might be understood/received in Y way.
• Can you express or communicate things such as, ‘I want to say something, but I’m worried it will take up too much time’, etc.
• Encouraging people to share what’s really going on for them can be incredibly useful.
• There can be different types of PD groups: a closed group over a fixed period of time, or an open, ongoing group with no end date.

Getting Your Reading List in Order for the Academic Year [starts at 43:00 mins]

Receiving your reading list for the year can feel really overwhelming, but in this section, Rory and Ken discuss some of the ways you can make your list feel more manageable:

• Don’t think of them as books that you read from front to back – find the specific section that is relevant to you and read that.
• Highlight things that are useful so you can find them easily when it comes to an assignment.
• Don’t be discouraged if you don’t understand something straight away. Attend your lecture, do some skills practice, and talk to a peer before coming back to it.
• Learning is about repetition and revisiting.
• Stick post-it notes in the book to help you find specific areas of interest and some key pages.
• If you are purchasing your books second-hand, be careful with books on legislation and ethics. As opposed to theory that never changes, these should always be current and up to date. It is probably worth investing in a new edition of these books.

Links and Resources

• Intelligent Relationships by Dr. Sonja Falck
• 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