The psychological health of the counsellor is crucial in determining the success of the counselling relationship. A counsellor owes it to the client not to engage in counselling whilst experiencing problems of their own.

This course will help you provide appropriate professional practices and attitudes necessary to develop a healthy client-counsellor relationship.

Pre-requisites: It is assumed anyone undertaking this course will already have a basic grounding in psychology and counselling, at least equivalent to the “Introduction to Psychology” course offered through this school.

Course Aims:

• Discuss some of the main personal qualities that counselling will draw upon and demonstrate an awareness of the types of issues that new counsellors will need to resolve within themselves.
• Raise awareness of: the ethical issues that arise within the profession, legal requirements, informed consent, decision-making and other related topics.
• Gain insight into how the self, and one’s perception of the self influences both the client and the counsellor, and to understand the effect of the self upon relationships both within and outside the counselling process.
• Enhance awareness of what is considered a healthy personality, to consider different types of personality tests, and to become aware of the application of different approaches to personality within the counselling process.
• Explain how emotions arise, what they are, how they influence our bodies, minds and behaviour, and their role in the counselling process.
• Understand the necessity for counsellors to have ongoing supervision throughout their professional career and to be constantly striving to upgrade their skills.
• Delineate circumstances in which it is preferable to refer a client on to another health care professional, and to understand some of the main disorders that they may encounter.

Detailed Course Outline

This course is made up of a number of lessons or units. Each of these has self assessment questions, a set task (practical homework) and an assignment which you can upload online.

There are 8 lessons in this course:

1. Understanding Counselling

• • The client-counsellor relationship
  • Effective counselling
  • Counselling the counsellor
  • Counsellor’s values
  • Multicultural counselling

2. Ethics & Confidentiality

• • Needs
  • A code of ethics
  • Informed consent; Right to privacy
  • Legal requirements
  • Use of psychometric tests
  • Ethics and multiple relationships

3. Keeping records

4. Understanding the Self

• • Self-awareness
  • Self-monitoring
  • Self-concept
  • Social Perception
  • Attribution theory
  • Implicit personality theory
  • Relationships
  • Social exchange
  • Love and intimacy

5. Personality

• • What is a healthy personality?
  • Trait approach
  • Psychodynamic approach
  • Humanistic approach
  • Social learning and cognitive approaches

6. Emotions & Behaviour

• • What are emotions?
  • Emotions and Counselling
  • Effect on communication
  • Aspects of emotions
  • Emotional expression and counselling

7. Supervision

• • Why supervision?
  • Working with others
  • Quantity and effectiveness of supervision
  • Personal counselling
  • Dependency
  • Types of supervision

8. Referral Practice

• • Counselling vs mental health issues
  • Secondary care counsellors
  • Abnormal psychology
  • Anxiety
  • Depression
  • Schizophrenia
  • Personality disorders

When you have completed the lessons of your Certificate course, you will be given the option of taking the optional exam. It’s okay if you don’t want the exam, we still issue your Careerline Certificate. For Advanced Certificates however, the exam is compulsory (per module) and are included in the course fee.