Counselling Skills I

Learn about yourself and develop the capacity to help others?

• Self Paced Correspondence Course for Counsellors

• Learn a team of from professional counsellors and psychologists in Ireland and the UK

• Learning Cloud is recognised by the International Accreditation and Recognition Council, a member of the Association of Coaching and established since 1979

• Upskill for volunteer work; or start training for a professional career

Learning Cloud Graduate comment: "This course has been extremely valuable to me as throughout those 5 months my friends all seemed to go through some crisis or other. I have learned so much that I could put into practice and from the responses I have had, it's been very positive. Tutor feedback was fantastic. All individual answers were given a comment which helped me understand if I missed something." Brenda Harvey, Ireland - Counselling Skills I course.

What Does a Counsellor Do?
The role of the counsellor is to facilitate the person’s resolution of these issues, whilst respect their values, personal resources, culture and capacity for choice. Counselling can provide people with a regular time and space to talk about their problems and explore difficult feelings in a confidential and dependable environment.

Counsellors do not usually offer advice, but instead give insight into the client’s feelings and behaviour and help the client change their behaviour if necessary. They do this by listening to what the client has to say and commenting on it from a professional perspective. Counselling covers a wide spectrum from the highly trained counsellor to some one who uses counselling skills as part of their role, for example, a nurse, youth leader, personal trainer or teacher.

There are 8 lessons in this course:

1. Learning specific skills:
   • What is Counselling
   • Perceptions of Counselling
   • Differences between Counsellors, Psychotherapists, Clinical Psychologists and Psychiatrists
   • Counelling Theories
   • Empathy
   • Transferrence
   • Directiveness, non directiveness
   • Behavioural Therapies
   • Systematic Desensitisation
   • Positive Reinforcement and Extinction
   • Goals of Psychoanalytical Approach
   • Defense Mechanisms (Repression, Displacement, Rationalisation, Projection, Reaction Formulation, Intellectualisation, Denial, Sublimation)
   • Use of Psychoanalytical Psychotherapy
   • Psychoanalytic Techniques
   • Analytic Framework
   • Free Associations
   • Interpretation
   • Dream Analysis
   • Resistance & Transferance
   • Humaniustic Therapy
   • Evaluating the Effectiveness of Therapies and Counsellors
   • Case Studies
   • Methods of Learning
   • Micro Skills
   • Triads
   • Modelling
   • Online and Telephone Counselling
   • Telemental Health
   • Clinical Considerations
      
2. Listening & bonding:
   • Scope of Listening and Bonding
   • Meeting and greeting
   • Creating a Safe Environment
   • Location
   • Time and Duration of Sessions
   • Privacy in Telephone and online counselling
   • Showing warmth on the phone
   • The contract
   • Helping the client relax
   • Listening with intent
   • Minimal Responses
   • Non Verbal Behaviour
   • Use of Voice
   • Use of Silense
   • Case Studies
   • Active Listening
   • Dealing with Silent Phone Calls
      
3. Reflection:
   • Non Directive Counselling
   • Paraphrasing
   • Feelings
   • Reflection of Feeling
   • Client Responses to Reflection of Feelings
   • Reflection of Content and Feeling
   • Case Studies
      
4. Questioning:
   • Open & Closed Questions
   • Other types of Questions (Linear, Information seeking, Strategic, Reflectivew, Clarification, etc)
   • Questions to Avoid
   • Goals of Questioning
   • Identification
   • Assessment
   • Intervention
   • Case Studies
      
5. Interview techniques:
   • Summarising
   • Application
   • Confrontation
   • Reframing
   • Case Studies
   • Perspective
   • Summary
      
6. Changing beliefs and normalising:
   • Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
   • Changing Self-Destructive Beliefs
   • Irrational Beliefs
   • Normalising
   • Case Studies
   • Designing a Questionnaire
      
7. Finding solutions:
   • Moving Forward
   • Choices (Reviewing, Creating, Making choices)
   • Facilitating Actions
   • Gestalt Awareness Circle
   • Psychological Blocks
   • Case Study
      
8. Ending the counselling:
   • Terminating the session
   • Closure
   • Further Meetings
   • Dependency
   • Confronting Dependency
   • Chronic Callers
   • Terminating Silent Phone Calls
   • Silent Endings
   • Case Study
   • Other Services

Each lesson culminates in an assignment which is submitted to the school, marked by the school's tutors and returned to you with any relevant suggestions, comments, and if necessary, extra reading.

Aims:

• Explain the processes involved in the training of counsellors in micro skills.
• Explain how to commence the counselling process and evaluation of non-verbal responses and minimal responses.
• Discuss both content and feeling, and their appropriateness to the counselling process.
• Demonstrate different questioning techniques and to understand risks involved with some types of questioning.
• Demonstrate how to use various micro-skills including summarising, confrontation, and reframing.
• Demonstrate self-destructive beliefs and show methods of challenging them, including normalising.
• Explain how counselling a client can improve their psychological well-being through making choices, overcoming psychological blocks and facilitating actions.
• Demonstrate effective ways of terminating a counselling session and to explain ways of addressing dependency.

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