Counselling Skills: Practice and Reflections

Summary

In this insightful video, Mick Cooper, a professor and practicing psychotherapist, demonstrates core counseling skills through a role-play session with an actor client named Tara. The video aims to aid beginners in counseling by providing a backstage view of practical counseling, focusing on reflection, empathy, and reevaluation. By exploring Tara's experiences and challenges around exams and friendships, Mick illustrates the depth and flexibility required in counseling, emphasizing emotional connection and the importance of helping clients to understand and address their issues.

Highlights

• Mick begins by explaining his approach to counseling, focusing on empathy and understanding 🙌.
• Tara, the client, shares her struggles with stress from exams and changing friendships during the pandemic 🎓.
• Mick demonstrates reflective listening and helps Tara unpack her feelings about isolation 🌌.
• As the session progresses, Mick explores Tara's deeper feelings of exclusion and self-worth 💭.
• The session illustrates the process of helping clients identify and address core issues in their lives 🛠.

Key Takeaways

• Mick Cooper emphasizes the importance of emotional connection in counseling, focusing on empathy and understanding 🧠.
• The demonstration reveals the use of reflection, reevaluation, and action in tackling client issues ✨.
• Mick discusses the balance between giving clients space to express and guiding them towards clarity 🕊.
• He highlights the importance of understanding clients’ perspectives and the underlying emotions 🎭.
• Counselors should encourage clients to unpack their feelings and find their own solutions 🌱.

Overview

Mick Cooper uses his deep understanding and experience in existential and person-centered therapy to guide viewers through a practical counseling session. Working with an actor client, Tara, he showcases essential counseling techniques and skills aimed at beginners.

Throughout the session, Mick emphasizes reflection and emotional connection. He demonstrates how exploring a client's feelings, like Tara's stress and loneliness, provides insights into their personal world and helps them discover new perspectives.

By using empathy and active listening, Mick validates Tara's experiences, illustrating how effective counseling can empower clients to find their own solutions and move forward with renewed confidence and understanding.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 02:00: Introduction and Overview The chapter titled 'Introduction and Overview' starts with a greeting accompanied by music, followed by an introduction from Mick Cooper, a professor of counseling psychology at the University of Roehampton. Mick is not only a practicing psychotherapist and counseling psychologist, but also an author of several books focusing on person-centered, relational, and existential approaches to therapy. The video aims to demonstrate concepts related to these therapeutic approaches.
• 02:00 - 06:00: Counseling Skills and Techniques The chapter titled 'Counseling Skills and Techniques' provides an overview of fundamental counseling skills and offers insight into the internal processes of a counselor during a session. It is particularly aimed at beginners to give them an understanding of the counseling environment, its appearance, and the cognitive processes involved. The transcript includes an example with a fictional client named Tara, used for demonstration while maintaining confidentiality and anonymity.
• 06:00 - 12:00: Understanding the Client's World The chapter "Understanding the Client's World" is a personal demonstration of the author's practice, centered around person-centered ways of working. It emphasizes the use of listening skills, empathizing, and understanding to be very accepting of the client's perspective. Although the actor mentioned, Tara, plays someone else, it doesn’t relate directly to her. The key takeaway is the importance of personal practice in empathizing with clients.
• 12:00 - 18:00: Exploring Feelings and Emotions The chapter titled 'Exploring Feelings and Emotions' primarily discusses a therapeutic approach structured around three R's: Reflecting, Re-evaluating, and Re-deciding. Initially, it involves guiding clients to reflect on and understand their own experiences more deeply. It then encourages clients to re-evaluate their current methods and perspectives, questioning whether they align with their desires or if there are alternative approaches. Lastly, it involves re-deciding, which is about considering what different actions could be taken moving forward. While this approach has an action-oriented focus, it still remains rooted in principles similar to classical person-centered therapy.
• 18:00 - 24:00: Therapeutic Leverage and Solutions The chapter 'Therapeutic Leverage and Solutions' discusses the adaptation of therapeutic practices during the October 19 pandemic, emphasizing the transition from face-to-face sessions to online platforms like Zoom. The narrator mentions the experience of working virtually, reflects on the challenges of creating a natural virtual background, and hints at available training that can aid in adapting to online therapy settings.
• 24:00 - 32:00: Self-Perception and Challenges In this chapter, the focus is on self-perception and the challenges that come with it. The dialogue begins with a casual exchange between two individuals, Tara and another person, discussing their current situations. The speaker acknowledges an effort to appear friendly and approachable, despite having a resting face that might seem serious. This highlights the challenge of self-perception and the desire to communicate warmth, which may not always naturally come across visually.
• 32:00 - 39:00: Summarizing and Moving Forward The speaker reflects on personal growth over the years, emphasizing the importance of coming across as friendly, welcoming, and genuine in interactions. They highlight the impact of these qualities in research and recognize the need for self-improvement. The speaker describes a typical session with a client, starting by asking what the client would like to talk about. This approach helps determine the direction of the session and aligns with the client's focus and goals.
• 39:00 - 43:00: Conclusion and Reflections In the concluding chapter 'Conclusion and Reflections', the focus lies on encouraging clients to pause and think about how they want to use their session time productively. Rather than starting the session without direction, clients are prompted to reflect on their goals and the agenda for the session. The chapter suggests that this approach helps avoid awkward silences and gives clients a purposeful direction. Asking clients directly what they would like to discuss is presented as a beneficial approach, ensuring both the client and the facilitator are aligned and engaged.

Counselling Skills: Practice and Reflections Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] hi my name is mick cooper i'm a professor of counseling psychology at the university of roehampton i'm a practicing psychotherapist counselor counseling psychologist and i've written a number of books on person-centered relational existential approaches to therapy in this video i wanted to demonstrate a
• 00:30 - 01:00 range of core counseling skills and also to show something of what goes on uh kind of behind the scenes if you like uh what i'm doing counseling kind of my thoughts and i'm feeling and what i'm trying to do in the counseling so this video is particularly for um people starting off on counseling just to get a sense of how it works what it looks like and some of the thinking that goes on behind it the client uh in this extract is called tara it's not a real client it's someone acting to preserve an anonymity and confidentiality just
• 01:00 - 01:30 confuse things the actor is called tara but she's not playing herself she's playing somebody else and it doesn't bear any relation to her um what i've tried to demonstrate here is um how i work so it's a kind of personal demonstration of my own practice it's kind of um based around person-centered ways of working and you'll see there's lots of listening skills there empathizing understanding trying to be very accepting um but it is a personal way of working and i guess i see my practices based around
• 01:30 - 02:00 what i would call kind of like three r's so the first part of that is just reflecting helping clients to reflect on their experiences and understand more about what they experience then there's something about reevaluating and thinking about whether the way they're doing things and how they're seeing things is how they want to be or whether there's maybe different ways of doing it and then the third one it's not really not it's kind of redeciding like thinking about okay what could i do differently here so it's quite a kind of action focus maybe more than classical person-centered therapy but it is very much based on
• 02:00 - 02:30 trying to understand with clients what's going on for them and how they experience the world most of my work is typically face-to-face uh but this is during the october 19 pandemic so i'm going to demonstrate work that's been done online via zoom uh yeah and before you say it when you see this the virtual background definitely could do some improvement i wanted something a bit more natural than the uh background that i've got behind me but it's something to think about and there's some great trainings actually uh both kind of long-term and
• 02:30 - 03:00 and brief ones on working online uh okay let's get going hi tara nice to see you nice to see you too so we got some time together uh to just talk about where you're at and what's going on where where would you want to start with okay so you can see here that i'm trying to be smiling welcoming maybe i'm doing it a little bit i have what's called resting face i tend to look quite serious uh when i'm just concentrating so i did try and smile to communicate some of the warmth that
• 03:00 - 03:30 i'm feeling because i've learned over the over the years and that's something i need to do um yeah that is really important we certainly know from the research that kind of coming across as friendly welcoming uh valiant is really important but also genuine and maybe that's something for me to work on so i start by asking tara uh what she'd like to talk about um and that's typically how i'd start a session just by inviting clients to say a bit about you know what they'd like to focus on uh gives me a sense of where they want to go with a session and i guess also helps
• 03:30 - 04:00 them reflect on it maybe a bit and think about how they want to use this time rather than perhaps just launching into it and then clients not really knowing or me really knowing uh where it's going i mean a lot of the time clients find they just start and that's great um but but it can be helpful i think and there's no harm really asking clients you know what would you like to talk about and i think it's better than sitting kind of awkwardly in silence both you kind of sensing that you should be doing something and not quite knowing where to go so it doesn't need
• 04:00 - 04:30 to be a big discussion but just sometimes something just briefly around what should we talk about today i haven't been feeling very great recently and i just have a lot of my mind and i've just been a bit stressed and i wanted to just see if there was something you could help with yeah sure so when you say stress can you tell me a bit more about that i think for me listening at the start sessions is just so important really trying to get a
• 04:30 - 05:00 sense of the whole story about what's going on um trying to feel my way into the story you'll see that a lot in this session really trying to film my way in and and giving the clients space to talk so that i can get a sense of the story and then begin to explore that with them at not just their kind of intellectual level but also an emotional level and of course you know if clients are struggling to talk then sitting there in science one of the things i've learned is that it's not always helpful um setting their assignments if clients are struggling to talk that it's important to give that
• 05:00 - 05:30 balance between giving clients space but also not letting them sit in their kind of stewing or awkward silence can we we've learned from our research that can be really uncomfortable uh for clients but you know tara seems to be able to talk about what things going on she doesn't seem to be uncomfortable so it feels good to be able to give her space and just really listen in what you can also see here i'm starting to do is the help of what i'd call unpack her story and that's just to kind of talk more about how she's feeling uh you know if you imagine kind of boxes in the attic and i'm just kind of going
• 05:30 - 06:00 up in their attic and opening up these boxes and seeing what's in there and just helping her to lay out if you like and and and what what things are like for her and particularly as you'll see around how she's feeling what kind of stress what's that been about well obviously exams uh but also it's just i haven't been having all my friends around recently
• 06:00 - 06:30 and it's been a bit difficult especially because exams are coming up and i don't have my friends around to support me like i usually do yeah so what happened tell me about your friend when you tell me a bit about your friendship group and what your friends are like um they're really cool that is a really really awful fake smile isn't that that's terrible uh definitely something to work on so we we're together in year seven
• 06:30 - 07:00 and then we've been in the same class throughout except for this year so i'm just really listening just really trying to take in tara's world just trying to get a sense of you know what's it like being tara in this world how did she experience her world what does it feel like how does she perceive it what's the kind of complexity of things around her and i'm just trying to give her that space um to talk so that i can immerse myself in it i'm not um kind of coming in with new ideas or asking lots of things not because that's
• 07:00 - 07:30 not necessarily helpful but just because the first thing i want to do is really to understand the depths of it the depths of it and you can't get there if you're talking too much as a counselor since five of us and um yeah they're really nice we have fun we like to hang out together and we're just very very close yeah yeah you've been close for a long time with them yeah and then
• 07:30 - 08:00 but then what's happened that they're not around so much at the moment with the example well we're in the same class right now um so it's a bit harder to hang out because we have different timetables and i don't know they're just they're not they're not really free to hang out with me at the moment i guess so i'm just listening i'm clarifying i'm summarizing what's going on for me here is i'm thinking much less in terms of i'm not
• 08:00 - 08:30 thinking what should i be doing here or any specific techniques or interventions or strategies or anything it's far too early for me for that but i'm just trying to really talk to have a conversation with tara um get a sense of how she's experiencing her world and and then genuinely asking herself is it like this is it like this and again you know you can think about that summarizing or empathizing about something but really it's just having a conversation and just saying you know what's it like and and that's what i'm trying to do is
• 08:30 - 09:00 get that sense of that lived experience you used to hang out and you spend a lot of time together and you it's kind of like been like that in this five years and now it sounds like what you're saying is that people are around a little bit less and that's kind of making the exams more stressful as well well yeah because if i have a problem usually i just go and talk to them and then when we hang out it makes me relax a little bit more but now that we can't hang out i just feel
• 09:00 - 09:30 that i don't know what to do so what's going on is i'm starting to get more of a sense now um of what's going on for tara um but that yeah she's talking about this revision period it's stressful for her and that kind of links him with her friendships because her friendship group and her links with her friends is often a way for her of dealing with the stress but that's not there anymore and and therefore she's feeling more stressed i can kind of begin to start to sense that to feel that and that feels good i feel like i'm kind
• 09:30 - 10:00 of getting on track a bit because i'm having a sense of how things are for and also i just miss my friends yeah so you haven't been seeing them as much no that's a cool term for that is that's a really crappy reflection um it's very kind of on the surface level just kind of talking about details and i guess that's me kind of struggling a bit to really understand something again at the more kind of felt level and just kind of saying something for the sake of it but
• 10:00 - 10:30 um it's not helpful you've got the exams coming up yeah uh-huh and how are you feeling about that i mean stress i guess like everyone yeah um i've been i've been studying a lot so you can see here that i'm still struggling a bit to really get alongside her and what i'm doing again is asking a factual question um it is about her feelings i do ask about affinity it's kind of a bit left you can sense it's not really connected
• 10:30 - 11:00 to what she's saying it's not really kind of coming out of what she's saying because i'm struggling a bit to get alongside her and get that felt sense you know and we can't always get the felt and sometimes as well as where we're at clients are sometimes more or less connected with their emotions and if they're not then it becomes more difficult to get that felt sense but that's really what i'm trying to do is experience that felt emotional world as tara experiences to understand really what's important for her i think i'll be okay i hope i'll be okay
• 11:00 - 11:30 but it's yeah you never know you never know so you worried about not doing so well or well yeah yeah so i'm trying to bring out more of the feeling here perhaps you know her worry her anxiety about not doing well trying to get that sense of that red thread of what the emotions are and pretty much always when clients come to us and they've got concerns or issues it's not just a kind of cognitive uh rational
• 11:30 - 12:00 worry i mean certainly there's rational elements of it but you know at the depth of it there's there's a feeling there's a feeling whether it's worry or sadness or frustration that means that things don't feel right and when you're starting off campus particularly starting off i think it's very easy to get caught up in the kind of logic or the story or the narrative and and sometimes what can get lost is the emotion the feeling and the kind of what's really going on for that person in terms of um how they feel and and when you're
• 12:00 - 12:30 responding when you're inviting a client to talk always thinking about how can you find ways of helping them to talk about their emotions and their feelings and maybe some of the things that are more difficult to talk about you know one of the ways that i think about counseling and what counseling skills do is it gives clients a chance to talk about things that maybe they can't talk to other people in their lives about often you know factual conversations are quite straightforward to have um or to you know talking about the
• 12:30 - 13:00 weather talking about relationships talking about what happened talking about your feelings is more difficult um often it's hidden and often people don't know exactly what their feelings are so if you're talking to a counselor or someone practicing counseling skills it can be a chance to bring those things out uh more and in a sense i see my job as a therapist to help clients talk about things that they find difficult to talk to other people about i i am a little bit stressed
• 13:00 - 13:30 because of the exams because if i don't if i don't have the grades i need to get to get in yeah not to share what i will do so just as you're listening to tomorrow i mean what's your sense of what she's feeling um i mean i guess i'm beginning to get more of a sense of just the anxiety things going wrong with not doing well in their exams and if i start to feel that myself some of that kind of what i've called embodied empathy really feeling that anxiety remember that tightness i've got to get this right in this
• 13:30 - 14:00 situation and again for me that's a good sign that i'm connecting with the client and understanding something uh of their world but of course different people would understand different things and it's less about kind of getting it right and knowing exactly what clients are experiencing and more about the dialogue being able to feed that back and working together to get closer and closer to really helping the client articulate what it is my friends they're very hard-working like me so usually we'd go study together and then we'd help each other out but um
• 14:00 - 14:30 i've been studying by myself yeah so i'm starting to get just that felt sense within myself of you know this really being half a tar and you know that's a good sign it means i'm connecting with what she's wanting to talk about that's make me even more worried about the exams because i don't have my friends to help me with the test and help me quiz me and everything so it's i'm not used to that i guess you see here that we're coming back to something that tomorrow has already said but you know that feels
• 14:30 - 15:00 good and it's something that clients often do uh as we're kind of getting into more meaningful staff deeper feelings counseling and talking is often less of a kind of linear uh process and more of a circling you think about water going down a drain that's not a very good analogy it doesn't mean that emotionally but just that kind of circling process that you go around them around something and each time deepening it so what happens when you study by yourself
• 15:00 - 15:30 i start to drift off a little bit so i'll try to study i'll try to read my book and then i will stop thinking about something else so i would go on facebook go on instagram so i think i'm getting more of a sense now why study's hard for tara when her friend's on about and you know why that ends up being stressful for her whereas it sounds like when you had your friends about and when you do revision with your friends you concentrate more and you can kind of
• 15:30 - 16:00 get more into it yeah because we all we all working we know that the whole afternoon is just us working together and we push each other to do a bit better i guess so you can see me working with tara to try and clarify what's going on and what comes next from me is a summary uh to check out that understanding and but again it's about kind of going back to those circles it was about going round and round but she's getting clear each time spiral not getting ready circles going around in spirals
• 16:00 - 16:30 and getting deeper and deeper uh into the reality of her life um and it's it's a process you know i have a sense that it's going okay because i'm sensing more of an emotional connect with it if i wasn't sensing that emotional connect i think that as a counselor that's when i start to worry is when i don't feel that emotional connect because it feels like i'm not understanding what's really important to the client at that particular point in time it's that emotional connect that gives me a sense of what there till we met and what we're
• 16:30 - 17:00 working on is important here and then you can see tara's taking it forward again introducing something new so it's about there's something about when you're revising your friends you can actually do more and you can focus more on concentrate more and get more done and then there's also something about like you can talk to them about the process and what you're worried about yeah because when we revise together we'll we'll be revising but we'll also be chatting and it's just more fun and stuff and it's hanging out with my friends so it's so
• 17:00 - 17:30 that reflection seems about right and where do you feel at the end of the day you don't feel do you feel like you haven't done a good job well yeah obviously i feel like i haven't studied like i should have okay and then that's where the stress is so i have a timetable for my revisions but i often don't reach the target that i want to and then i end up trying to make this time up when i get back home and i haven't been sleeping very great so right right
• 17:30 - 18:00 yeah so presumably that doesn't help not sleeping very well and what's happening what what's happening with your so what's happening with you just finding a bit more so why has it changed with your friendship why aren't you doing revision together is it a practical thing or is it something that's happened in the friendship group that is kind of throwing things out a bit i don't know we haven't had a fight or anything um we didn't have any arguments but i guess they just they don't have
• 18:00 - 18:30 the time time anymore they're busy with other stuff and they don't really have time to meet up so coming under some more about the issue i'm now inviting tara to say more about the kind of broader the overall context of what's going on and i guess what you could say that what i'm doing now maybe implicitly rather than explicitly is what i would kind of call therapeutic leverage which is a bit of a mechanistic term leverage but i quite like it it's something about the kind of areas
• 18:30 - 19:00 in which things aren't quite working out and where we might be able to work on and where we can help clients improve things in their life um i guess perhaps there's something with a friendship group you know what i'm thinking is when there's something with a friendship group that has broken down uh and perhaps that's something that if we can sort and look at things in her friendship group then perhaps that will help her get back to a previous study but it may be that that's not the solution but it just
• 19:00 - 19:30 seems that that would be an area that'd be worth exploring and seeing where things may have gone wrong so it's a bit leading you know you're probably not classical person-centered practice but i think it's this thing about you know when i'm working with clients i'm thinking where where can we where can i be helpful where are the points that we might be able to change something where the client with all the best in the world is doing their best but maybe there's ways that they can be doing things that would be more helpful for them
• 19:30 - 20:00 and of course you know that's not more helpful for them in my eyes but in their eyes and the things which will really genuinely help it's a bit harder to be able to convince everyone to meet up yeah so do you feel like you're kind of trying to convince people to meet up and they're maybe more reluctant yeah 100 i'm always the one texting everyone asking can we meet up should we do something okay so that doesn't sound brilliant
• 20:00 - 20:30 how does that feel well it's a bit annoying because i when they wanted to meet up i'm i'm obviously yes so it does sound like there's something a bit more going on here that tara does sound i can kind of pick up that she's a bit resentful uh or maybe a bit hurt towards her friends it's not really how friends are meant to be like yeah because i'm there for them all the time do you feel that they're not there for you at the moment
• 20:30 - 21:00 no so that's quite a strong statement i make there and perhaps pushing things a bit too far but you know my sense is it is what's going on for her and tara pauses and i think it connects with something in there we need to be a little bit cautious because um you know there's a power dynamic in the therapy relationship that makes it uh difficult for clients saying no that's not right i don't agree with you so when clients seem to agree with us you know it may be actually that they're just um trying to appease us but uh if clients
• 21:00 - 21:30 come back to it a number of times it's generally because it has touched something important it feels like i don't have best friends at the moment yeah that's a big thing isn't it so from feeling like these people you're really good friends and that they're your best friends and they've been there forever and now you're kind of questioning that a bit on you well yeah because i mean we spend five six years being together all the
• 21:30 - 22:00 time and i i don't get it because there wasn't any issues it's not like we had arguments or anything and i don't understand why they doing this now you can see here that i'm going for where you know maybe the emotion is and trying to draw out uh what the stronger feelings might be i don't think i've changed i'm the same as last year i can send some emotion in tara here about this
• 22:00 - 22:30 they they went to to a few parties without me and they didn't even invite me and we had this group chat on whatsapp and nothing was on the group chat so i think they have another chat but without me you can see my face there and in my expression but uh you know just being struck by the emotion here which again for me is a sign of being connected um you know it does sound pretty painful it sounds you know being
• 22:30 - 23:00 excluded being left out sounds really horrible and you can see that quite quickly we've got down to some of these quite kind of nub issue about feeling excluded from my friends that originally what was an issue about not being studying able to study very well we've moved down into some of the more complex and deeper feelings so it feels like they're having conversations and that they're kind of not inviting you not not wanting yeah and i saw some stories on instagram and they have been hanging out
• 23:00 - 23:30 but when i try to organize it they just say they don't have the time yeah how's that feel well not great but so again we're getting down now into some of the deeper feelings perhaps here rejection exclusion uh hurt um but let's just pause for a minute let's just think you know why are we doing this why go into this video
• 23:30 - 24:00 there's not particularly pleasant feelings so why go into some of these more painful more difficult perhaps less expressed feelings and i guess where i'm coming from and it's not the only way of viewing counseling or counseling skills by any means but it's that finds them a lot of things going on for them and often these are things that they don't particularly share with anyone and that can feel a real burden uh it can partly feel a real burden because it can feel just all these kind of things stuffed into you and sometimes if you don't have any you want to talk about with it you can't get it out and
• 24:00 - 24:30 often clients talk about getting things off their chest and just that process of getting things out there can be quite a relief uh and like like a kind of but not being bottled up for one of a better word and i guess it's also something about that if you have feelings that you're not talking to anyone about or thoughts it could be that people don't know about it it can leave you feeling very alone and isolated so that it's not just for instance that you feel sad or in tara's case that she feels
• 24:30 - 25:00 excluded but um it's also kind of a sense of feeling alone and then feeling alone because you can't tell anyone that you feel alone so you feel kind of on your own with those feelings as well so if that's something that i can hear and that accounts like something counseling can listen and just allow to be expressed then it doesn't get rid of necessarily those primary feelings it doesn't make everything okay but it does mean those secondary feelings of feeling alone or isolated or maybe
• 25:00 - 25:30 ashamed for having those feelings can be eased a bit and feeling more kind of integrated feeling more coherent feeling more like yourself and that it's okay to have those feelings there's also something then that if we can explore those feelings and allow clients to talk about things that haven't been said then it allows them to address things in their life but address the things that really matter for them you know if client if tara is able to talk about the fact
• 25:30 - 26:00 that actually what's really uncomfortable and unpleasant for her is that she feels excluded and maybe that's something she's kind of aware of but hasn't quite admitted to herself or admits to someone else she talks about that she puts it into words and then we can think about okay what can you do with that and we can focus in on what the real issue are the real things that are causing her upset uh rather than perhaps the more surface level things that actually if we address that wouldn't really change much you know revision schedules might not change much because actually it's not dealing uh with the uh exclusion
• 26:00 - 26:30 and and the isolation that actually is the real thing that's upsetting tara and is a part of you that are you kind of feeling like right i am being excluded here or they're not wanting me or is it part of you thinking maybe it's just how i'm seeing it and actually things are fine or you do you feel fairly certain that something is going on that's a long and not particularly helpful response from me i think
• 26:30 - 27:00 with something like that there's a real risk of communicating to a client that you don't believe them and uh you know particularly early on in a in in a relationship like you're saying to them well you're just imagining this and even if not if it's not what we mean it's easily what clients can hear the more i think about it the more that that was a pretty dumb last thing to say i guess what i was trying to do what was i trying to do i was trying to you know i know that some clients at the same time can recognize in certain situations that um
• 27:00 - 27:30 you know that maybe they are exaggerating or perceiving something that maybe isn't there and i did genuinely want i mean it came from a genuine place of not knowing uh as most of my questions do i think all my questions really come from you know i'm not asking a question as a technique it's because i genuinely don't know i genuinely want to understand more and i genuinely genuinely wanted to get a sense of whether for tara uh she felt that maybe she was exaggerating a little bit of what was going on and actually that really was what was going on which is
• 27:30 - 28:00 uh what she described and i guess it's also it does feel important for me that that when we think about things like projections and and you know clients projecting onto situations rather than us as therapists as counselors uh making the call on that that we have that dialogue with clients and see what clients think about that but i'm not going to justify it too far because uh yeah i don't think it was very helpful i don't think it's how i see it
• 28:00 - 28:30 because well it's happening is that i think before before they went to the parties i i was definitely thinking that i was just being paranoid and it was just in my head because technically we didn't have a fight do anything so i think from tara's response fortunately she's not too offended or upset by my comments and she but she and she does just clarify which is great that she comes back that um you know it's definitely something going on and i think what's important here what i'm pleased that i do is that i go with
• 28:30 - 29:00 what she's come back with there's been very interesting research on ruptures uh with clients when things do go wrong and what they show is that if we can uh um kind of accept what clients say maybe apologize rather than kind of sticking to what we said and what we've done that has maybe upset or thrown the counselling that things can get back on track it's a bit like kind of bringing up a kid that perhaps is less about always getting things right and more about being able to acknowledge when we get things wrong and correct it and get get back into a
• 29:00 - 29:30 relationship into into a dialogue with someone rather than sticking to our guns no matter what the feedback anyone and i can imagine i mean tell me if i'm wrong but i can imagine that when you're trying to revise and when you're trying to do your work the party issues that you've got this at your back of your mind like this quite upsetting thing with your friends about am i being kind of left out here and being excluded something happening yeah and i think since it happened more than once when i invite them to my house to revise
• 29:30 - 30:00 and they say no and then i go on instagram and stories i tend to just go and check a little bit more she's listening to this again i'm not quite sure what she's saying actually but i do get a sense of some of the emotion and some of the feelings again are being excluded what you see here is also that from here having gone into some of the emotions is i do invite her to think about what might be the best way forward on a kind of more i guess behavioral level and i guess you could
• 30:00 - 30:30 say that that could be a bit too leaning or a bit too directive but it's something that i do uh ask clients you know how do you think we can move forward from here or what's your sense of what would be the best thing to do uh to look at where they go um and again it's a genuine question i don't have answers to that or where they should go but it's about kind of again i guess thinking about therapeutic leverage and and and working out better ways for the client for them to um do things and my sense of
• 30:30 - 31:00 research is that clients do value that at times not all the time and not if it gets in the way of understanding and if it's not too quick but um when once clients have understood things and they feel that we've understood things often they do want to look at solutions and ways forward and and how to address it uh rather than just staying perhaps with the feelings per se do you have a sense then what's best to do around this at this point
• 31:00 - 31:30 well no because i'm just i don't know because i don't want to i don't want to have an argument with them yeah but at the same time i do want to hang out with them so it's just i feel like i'm a bit trapped because i don't know what to do there's no good solution so tara says here that there's no good solution and in a way that's not surprising i always think with clients that if they had a good solution they probably wouldn't have come to us and talked about it generally the issues the problems clients come to
• 31:30 - 32:00 us with and are complex and they're difficult and uh and i don't expect myself to have an easy answer because i kind of think if i reckon that i've got an easy answer that's a bit disrespectful to clients in a way you know my eyes some kind of brilliant intelligence above and beyond them that you know i can see easy answers where they can't generally things are complex um but if they can explain it to me and i can understand it and understand it at a felt level then it's something that we can work out
• 32:00 - 32:30 so just to reiterate you know i'm really not thinking here oh if i knew sorry then x or y and i'm not and i'm it's not just i'm not thinking that i'm not trying i'm not trying to work out a solution because i'm assuming that solutions are probably fairly complex but i need to understand all the different parts that there's pretty good reasons why clients are doing some of the things that are also kind of problematic and it's going to take a little bit of time to uh to unpack unpick it but i have some faith in that
• 32:30 - 33:00 um what tara goes on to talk about now is her thoughts about next year uh where she's hoping to be at a university and and how she thinks that she's going to be quite isolated then it's again it's quite interesting and and you'll see that there's also again perhaps some opportunities from for some therapeutic leverage there and i don't know i think yeah i'll just be at the library a lot during my room and i was kind of hoping for this year to be a bit of a
• 33:00 - 33:30 nicer change yeah so you're hoping for this year to be like a good year lots of parties what's going on lots of socialising partly because you're kind they're thinking that next year it's going to be less social and you'll have less people to hang out with yeah and i mean they say uni is a bit harder to make friends so i know the timetables are very different from what it is now and there's i feel like now it's it was very easy to make friends with
• 33:30 - 34:00 them because we were in the same class and we've known each other for so long by uni it's a bit different and there's going to be all those random people that i don't know so one of the things that tomorrow says there is about it being harder to make friends at university she says i want people to say hi to my friends at the university and actually my reaction tonight is oh i didn't know that and then i actually think actually i'm not sure that's true but i'm noticing that that's her assumption it's harder to make friends at university and then a number of things kind of click into place like why she feels so much
• 34:00 - 34:30 pressure for things to be good now because she's kind of feeling like that's a last chance and then it's going to kind of be downhill from here and i guess again then i'm thinking about this in terms of or i'm feeling not even consciously but it seems like a point of therapeutic leverage because maybe that's something that can be challenged this assumption that things are you know friendships aren't going to be possible at university and actually maybe if she can fill that actually you know university maybe i'll have better friendships and that will take off some of the pressure that she's feeling at the moment
• 34:30 - 35:00 yeah yeah so you're kind of torn in a way because on the one hand you're feeling like these are my only friends if i don't have them i'm gonna have no one but then you're feeling like these are people who maybe aren't being that good friends anymore and it's kind of hard to hold on to that friendship well it's it scares me a bit because they all have
• 35:00 - 35:30 they all have other friends to hang out with they're fine with the people in their class and i don't know why i i feel like they don't need me but i'm always running after them all the time i'm the one making the effort so that feels quite a profound then quite an emotive statement emotional statement i just want to stay with it with her
• 35:30 - 36:00 because when you think about not wanting to be around you if that's what it feels like they want to be around you like why would that be i know you're kind of a bit confused by it but is that because you think maybe you're not fun or a bit shy a bit yeah i think i do think that maybe they don't feel like i'd bring much to the group so i've invited tara to
• 36:00 - 36:30 explore how this links to herself sense of self and often as is often the case it brings out some quite deep and perhaps you know really unexpressed feelings about how she sees herself often it's a very fertile area of exploration is about someone's self-perception and and and and is a touchstone for a lot of other things that clients feel i don't know i got some the vanilla flavor of the group a little bit the vanilla flavor yeah
• 36:30 - 37:00 that's a bit more about that no i guess i'm just the i don't know i don't want to say that just the lamp post of the group where i'm just there but because i i do i do i do hang out with them and i i i do make myself hurt and stuff like that but it's just i'm not the most vocal out of the group
• 37:00 - 37:30 so you can see here you know that there are really are some deeper connections to uh how tara sees herself that is that how you feel you are kind of like outside of that friendship group or someone that people can just kind of take or leave bit vanilla a bit bit unseen i think so and as i was saying that that feels some very fertile ground for further work so we're just jumping a bit forward now in this session to something a little bit later and it's
• 37:30 - 38:00 coming back to the question of what tara might do differently so i wonder if there's a w what can you do differently i don't know i guess just kind of stand up for myself maybe a little bit more and then if it doesn't work out it doesn't work out yeah what would that mean standing up for yourself well my friends just maybe instead of
• 38:00 - 38:30 being so chill all the time maybe call them out a little bit more when they're not doing something that's very nice and just i don't know i mean i guess there would be you know some people might say well one thing to do would be to you know to be really clear and just say look you know i i'm you you're getting all my stuff
• 38:30 - 39:00 you're doing stuff without me i feel really upset about it um you know i feel really you know i feel left out by it um is there something going on is there something that you know that i've been doing or about me that you know you don't like and to really kind of face into i mean i'm not saying you should do that but i guess that's one option isn't it is to you know to to to rather than as you say kind of going on with it because it sounds like through your life the way that you've dealt with things is
• 39:00 - 39:30 by going along with it trying to be you know a good girl and you know getting it right for other people but i guess some people would just say you know okay look this is what's going on for me and kind of standing up standing up to it and uh you know i mean there's consequences i guess it's a difficult time for you you've got exams and going on and it may not be what you want to be doing right now um but i guess that is one off geez that's quite a spill you know that's the kind of one you just put your head in your hand and go i mean shut up just stop talking you know it's kind of
• 39:30 - 40:00 advice giving it's coming from a very external frame of reference really doesn't feel particularly helpful but i guess what i'm trying to do is bring to tara one possible way of responding to the challenges around her and you know couching it in a way which is not entirely authentic i don't like that about either which is but it's trying not to say this is what you should do but you know here's a possibility um you know i don't like it and it feels it doesn't feel good but at the same time i haven't learned from the
• 40:00 - 40:30 research over the years that clients really can appreciate uh counselors introducing different ideas different possibilities uh suggestions advice clients can appreciate advice a lot i think it has come from a deep understanding of what clients are experiencing and and thoughts then about where they might go but in the right place i don't think there's anything wrong with that i know in certain models person said that particularly it's not seen as it's not seen as consistent with a model because you're really trying to work with the
• 40:30 - 41:00 inner experiencing perceptions of the client rather than introducing something external but what i've seen in the research is a lot of clients really valuing uh advice from class in indeed including which is a paradoxical thing from person sent to councillors that kids in person center counselling again and again and again say what they love is the counselor's advice even though the counselors were blind that they never gave a word of advice yeah i think i just have to stop being such like
• 41:00 - 41:30 i could push over and i'm not a pushover saying yes to everything and just just being okay with all this happening and not just standing up a little bit more for what i think is right and what i think is not right yeah it sounds like you tried to call them out but maybe you haven't done it as kind of forcefully or as clearly as well i think it was very much i didn't want to upset them and i didn't want
• 41:30 - 42:00 them to gang up on me like they usually do so i just i just i i guess i'd rather not cause any wave and just wait and see but then nothing has changed and it keeps happening so maybe that wasn't the best thing to do well it's understandable i guess if you if things can change by not creating any waves that's brilliant if that can happen but what you're saying is that it hasn't really shifted stuff no not at all nothing
• 42:00 - 42:30 is the same yeah so i guess the options are that you you know that that carries on and it probably will carry on or you try and call it out more forcefully yeah i'm just getting if i do so then i'm gonna end up like really alone this time and then i just i just i'm just scared it's gonna backfire a little bit yeah so that's why i'm i'm not really
• 42:30 - 43:00 that's why i'm so scared of doing it because i'm just scared that if what if they're like okay then buy or we don't we don't want to we don't hang out with you anymore then what do i do so i guess there is a real risk here and again i'm not coming into with a sense that there's easy answer i jimmy i genuinely i genuinely don't know what is best for tara to do in this situation i've got some ideas um i have a sense that she does that you know that's maybe something's a
• 43:00 - 43:30 bit better than others and also that doing nothing uh isn't particularly helpful so there's a need to kind of work it out and it's not anything i guess if you spend some time looking at anything you get some better ideas about it um you know you spend some time looking at a car manual you learn more about a car and in the same way if you spend some time looking at a problem then you get some better ideas ideally about what to do but it's not easy and i'm not expecting easy answers but i am happy to work with her to look at
• 43:30 - 44:00 the alternatives and to weigh them up and if this was an ongoing relationship then we'd be um trying things out should be trying things out maybe she'd come back and say well i talked to my friends and this happened and they did that and they said that and then we'd look at other options so um so over time i guess we find some some ways forward maybe not solutions but ways forward and what you see following on from this is that we then come back to another area of therapeutic leverage that was opened up earlier which was about
• 44:00 - 44:30 whether maybe she could um reflect on this expectation that universities are going to be a really difficult time for meeting friends and to look at that and again i'm not assuming that that's wrong or it's a pathological belief but it did just kind of strike me as a bit well not necessarily true not necessarily to remember a way of framing it i i kind of thought well that doesn't have to be that way therefore i'm thinking maybe that's something that could be useful to explore and maybe challenge and maybe she'll convince me that
• 44:30 - 45:00 actually she's right and maybe you'll change my how i assume you think but i'm willing to kind of pick it up and discuss it with her and because i do think something that you've been saying about um you know that i don't think things you can't see things developing in university and you know to do some work around opening up more for new relationships and perhaps establishing new friendships rather than feeling like you got to hang on to what's there
• 45:00 - 45:30 i guess if i'm not friends with them anymore i kind of i'll be forced to find new friends yeah it's just i think it's going to be difficult yeah but i can't know until i try so i don't know yeah i kind of i'm struck by that sense of it's going to be really difficult finding new friends and making new friends and i do just wonder how much that comes
• 45:30 - 46:00 back to you know how you see yourself as a friend and what you think that you got to offer from moby feeling you don't have as much to offer because it sounds like what you said about yourself is that you know you've got some really good qualities you're very caring you know you're someone that you can talk to people that that you know people can get a lot from a friendship with you from what you're describing so i feel like sorry i feel like this is something that when you meet someone for the first time you don't really care if they're caring
• 46:00 - 46:30 it's something that you would want in the long term but when i'm gonna meet people at university at parties and stuff like that they won't care that i'm caring and i feel like that's why it would be difficult to make friends because with them they know i'm caring because we've been together for so long right but what do you think they'll see then in you that maybe will make them feel that well i'm not so sure i want to be friends with this but is it because you're quieter yeah and then
• 46:30 - 47:00 if they want i feel like sometimes if if they don't approach me i'm not gonna be the one who's gonna be like hey hi how are you doing my name's tara that's just so it feels like maybe when people see you for the first time because you're not kind of so exuberant and extroverted that they'll not be so interested and they maybe won't get to know you they won't get to see that you're caring
• 47:00 - 47:30 well yeah yeah i feel like this is something that you find out with time but in that kind of environment everything's very fast-paced and it's not people are not going to stop for someone who's scaring yeah so i understand what you're saying more now because what you're saying is one of the things that's precious about these friendships is the fact that people have known you over time so they've got to see your caring site so that quality has really come out and i think one of your fears is in new relationships is that
• 47:30 - 48:00 people aren't going to see that for a long time and they may never see that because what they'll judge or what they'll think about it's just your first impressions really which which and what they'll want to see is somebody kind of more extroverted and more outgoing yeah you'll never get to know that kind of more caring side so you can see what i'm trying to do here is really understand the logic or what ronnie lang the existential therapist called intelligibility the kind of thinking the intelligence behind the
• 48:00 - 48:30 client's feelings and behaviors kind of underlying logic and rationale for why she's doing what she's doing and perhaps encountering the problem she is i i i strongly believe that clients are doing their best um but doing the best isn't always the best thing that someone can do sometimes with the best win in the world we do things that actually aren't that helpful for us and therefore talking about it finding different ways of doing it getting some input can help us do things better um so i think there is a place in council for challenging
• 48:30 - 49:00 maybe misperceptions misunderstandings that clients have but before any i i do that it needs to come from within the client's uh understanding of the world not just from an external frame of reference from my frame of reference thinking well do this do that think about this think about that but really immersing myself in the client's world and then from there maybe trying to understand challenging questions and things well that kind of means that you're in a way you're i don't know almost trapped by the relationships that you've had so far
• 49:00 - 49:30 like that's almost that that's is all where your possibilities for friendship lies because it feels like you kind of think maybe there's you know it's not going to get to that point again well yeah and that's why i really wanted that's why i don't want to risk maybe losing them because then what if i never have that again then i'm just losing
• 49:30 - 50:00 the and i feel like with them maybe it's just a question of time i maybe then they're not being very nice right now but maybe next year they'll be fine once we go out or for uni and we come back yeah so it could be that if you just leave it and let it go and don't just like hold on to it and just like wait until we go to uni because at the end of the day they're not going to the same uni so they're not going to hang out anyway so yeah so you could just leave it and wait
• 50:00 - 50:30 and see what happens after yeah after we go and then maybe it will come back and you know there'll be that closeness there again so we're coming to the end of this session now and i'm inviting tara to spend a few minutes summarizing and bringing things together so what do you think we're kind of coming towards the end and you know you you talked a lot about your life and where you're at and
• 50:30 - 51:00 you know wanting to study for the for your a levels but that it's been difficult in many ways because of um it's been hard to do kind of revision set differently and that you're doing that you're on your own and then there's kind of stuff going on in the back of your mind about you know what's happening with your friendship group and i can hear that the stuff with your friendship group is quite upsetting at the moment and i can also you know we've talked about some kind of resonances between that maybe what happens with your family and kind
• 51:00 - 51:30 of maybe that there's some of the same processes about how you are and perhaps not not challenging things what's your sense of maybe where you can take things following a conversation i think i'll i'll try to talk to you amino sarah and see see if i can find out maybe what happened and why they're doing this
• 51:30 - 52:00 i feel like there's no point in just waiting around now i am going to wait around i rather know why so maybe i can try to find a solution for it rather than just living in the shadows until they get over it so yeah rather than living in the shadows until they get over it just being a bit more proactive yeah and that maybe if it is something i did then i can apologize for it or i can understand what happened
• 52:00 - 52:30 and so i think i'll definitely speak to you one of them okay it sounds like maybe there is something about being a bit more kind of proactive you you're really used to kind of trying hard and and kind of going along trying your hardest to go along with things and maybe there is something about a kind of slight shift in how you do things about kind of addressing things and not feeling like you always have to go along with
• 52:30 - 53:00 everyone else yeah 100 and i feel like i think i'll try to just make myself heard a little bit more because right now whatever i'm doing right now is not working very well yeah okay and how does it feel talking about things over the last hour or so it's good i mean it's not like i usually talk to my friends and because they're not there it's just i haven't it's not like i can talk to
• 53:00 - 53:30 anyone else about this so it's good to have it's good to unload everything and then also you don't know them and you don't know how we are so it's just easier because it's more of a a neutral i guess environment all right sorry well it's been really good meeting you and we can talk about and if you wanted to get back in touch and then there'd be
• 53:30 - 54:00 time to talk more about it and maybe see how things are going okay okay okay thank you so i hope that's given you an idea of how i is a therapist how's that work i wouldn't say it's a fantastic piece of work it's you know 15 minutes or so of an extract and nothing massively dramatically changes but hopefully it illustrates something about those counseling processes that over time can lead to quite dramatic quite substantial changes
• 54:00 - 54:30 and just to summarize i guess what i'm trying to do is really help clients in the first place explore express clarify unpack their experiences about how they experience the world to really enter into that not just at a cognitive level but to get a felt sense of it to really understand the emotion um and that through that to help clients then both express something of that get things off their chest feel
• 54:30 - 55:00 less alone but also to um reevaluate how they're doing things and and some sometimes that process of getting things off one's chest is enough but also that reflection can allow for that process of reevaluation and of course it's not one where i'm coming in and saying you're doing that wrong are you doing that wrong why don't you do it like that but just gently being with the client to help them think about is that the best way for me sorry not for me as a therapist for me is if i'm the client uh that i can be doing things and i
• 55:00 - 55:30 i think we know from the research the clients appreciate that challenge uh most clients and and and one cow seems to be a space in which they can be invited to think about things in in different ways and then after that perhaps there is that process of deciding to do things in a different way or trying things out in a different way and seeing how that goes coming back to it and that change towards uh better ways of doing things sometimes when there's when it you know it's very embedded habits that can take a long time over
• 55:30 - 56:00 therapy uh and it may be changes in actions it may be changes in how we think about things and just constantly trying to think about maybe kind of gratitude for instance might be where somewhere a client gets to or or avoiding a particular relationship or all those kind of changes that sometimes take a long time to bed in but ultimately can help clients lead a life that is more fulfilling and satisfying for them and the work really comes from
• 56:00 - 56:30 a place of valuing and appreciating how clients do things and and recognizing that they're doing the best that they can in within their world and and and and entering into that and entering into that world view and then with them it's kind of an accelerator you know i'm not coming in as some kind of savior it's much more coming in and as a catalyst and accelerating a process that the clients are really going through trying to think things through and bringing something more of a uh perspective about it one of the
• 56:30 - 57:00 things we know very much from the research is that so much of change is not about the therapist about the client so much of what determines whether therapy is effective is about client qualities client characteristics like being motivated involved uh having agency being further advanced in in in in where change is so the research really supports that idea that therapy isn't about um waving a magic wand being a savior doing something to someone that some
• 57:00 - 57:30 miraculous act um that somebody never thought of it's about being alongside someone entering into their world and helping them to take forward their think so i hope you found that helpful and yeah good luck with your work [Music]
• 57:30 - 58:00 [Music] [Music] you