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The values of Counselling Psychology
Introduction
As a branch of applied professional psychology, the focus of counselling psychology in professional practice is provision of services to people and organisations that are
- based in scientific evidence
- delivered competently
- transparently open to reflective practice and review
- moreover are seen as helpful to people.
Many professional trainings achieve these goals by means of competence based training, and counselling psychology along with other applied psychologies takes this approach. For the regulated professions there are generic standards of proficiency for healthcare professionals as a whole, then profession specific standards which spell out what members of that profession are expected to be able to offer.
Competencies for Counselling Psychology can be accessed via the following link:
http://www.hpc-uk.org/assets/documents/10002963SOP_Practitioner_psychologists.pdf
Important as these competences are, there is more to being a professional than being trained in how to do things:
We also ask on what the competencies are based i.e.
- Why are they are important to the practice of our profession?
- What does it mean to be a professional in this particular field?
- What underlies the exercise of professional judgement in this context?
There are perhaps three related dimensions to these questions
- clinical skills
- research
- values.
Clinical skills are core to meeting the needs of users of the psychologist’s services and are the bedrock of the professional registration process. Research competence is integral to our development and ongoing work as professional consumers and producers of research. The other area relates to values and these both inform and impact on theory, research and practice and on the integration of all of these within counselling psychology.
What then are the values of counselling psychology? Are these the same for us all and how do we express them?
As counselling psychology develops, the profession is demonstrating its capacity to attract and retain people with a breadth of different perspectives on the value base of counselling psychology, and as a result practising in different ways and in different fields. The benefits for service users and for the professionals themselves of this plurality are apparent.
Consequently the Division is not prescribing one articulation of the values of the profession of counselling psychology. Instead we wish to demonstrate the rich pluralism in our midst.
Adopting an open reflective stance is part of what our professional identity is about and we have begun the process of inviting a collection of colleagues to present their individual perspectives. The examples below are central to the authors’ identities as counselling psychologists, to their practice and beyond. They are offered here not to give a definitive answer, although how much would we all at times like the certainty of definitive answers, but to give a flavour of how a range of counselling psychologists reflect on their values. Thanks go to all our colleagues who have taken the time to write and share an understanding and experience of their values.
We see people (by Alan Frankland and Yvonne Walsh)I am looking at the wood across the lane outside my office window and what I see is a rather skimpy hedgerow and then trees, a lot of trees standing in grassy leaf mould and stretching up the hill, filling my view. If I were an artist I might see images to capture - of shapes, of shades of green, of light and dark as the clouds move with the wind. If I were a botanist or a forester I’d perhaps see it differently - I’d know each tree type at a glance and be aware of the depth of their roots, their approximate ages , their state of health and the ways the bushes and the grasses and the ivies interact. Maybe if I was an ecologist or a biologist I’d know about the whole ecosystem the wood represents and its value in the environment in storing CO2 or as a habitat for the roe deer and the boar and smaller game that live there. But what I see is trees (and a few bushes in the hedgerow) individuals with individual characteristics which I don’t know very much about - some have ivy growing up them, there is the odd ball of mistletoe in a few, the occasional broken branch, peeling bark, some new growth: it would take hours simply to describe what I see in one tree.
The link to Psychology and specifically the profession of Counselling Psychology is probably pretty clear, whilst other kinds of observers of humanity legitimately see subjects for art and poetry or issues about how the organisms work or questions of how they function together, what psychologists see are, on the whole, individuals; people. And what Counselling Psychologists tend to see is the uniqueness and complexity of each individual, which is not captured by typology or biology or by measuring, atomizing or comparing but only by knowing: getting to know each individual by careful observation, by taking time and (unlike knowing the trees) by engagement and interaction at many levels.
Counselling Psychology can be seen to have one foot in formal (scientific) Psychology and the other in humanistic psychotherapy. It would be crazy to ignore the years of painstaking discoveries within our parent discipline or in the other social and natural sciences that can tell us about humanity. However, what drives the discipline is seeing people, working with individuals, whether on their own, in couples or groups or within organisations, most importantly by being in relationship with them as human beings. This is the core, and somewhat radical, value that comes to us from the other foot in the long tradition of humanistic counselling, itself linked to a whole range of psychotherapeutic and philosophical positions.
Therapeutic work is hard whatever tradition or models the therapist is trained or works within because it brings us constantly face to face with human unhappiness and the issues of existence, and because ultimately only the client can make the changes that resolve their therapeutic issues, which can be frustrating or painful for those who seek to help. We choose to work in the misery industry for all sorts of reasons but one element in the choice for Counselling Psychologists must be one of values: respecting the needs and rights of others and a finding a willingness to be alongside them in their struggle to resolve or move on from pain and conflict.
Some therapeutic professions try to limit or resolve this pain by dealing in certainties or by abstracting the humanity from the situation, by atomising, categorising and objectifying those they seek to help. Counselling Psychology, at its best, tries not to do that but to hold the tension between the scientific and humanistic positions in which it is rooted and to live with at least a measure of uncertainty, of not knowing everything about everything, of not even pretending that’s possible. It is a diverse discipline, in that its practitioners work across modes, settings, traditions and models, yet it is unified by their rootedness in humanistic philosophy, whatever context or situation they work in. Counselling Psychology tries to have enough of a knowledge base to be secure, enough of a skills base to be able to offer to help with some confidence, and enough uncertainty to stay open to the experience of those who seek our help so we hold our theories lightly and know that we can only proceed by being in relationship with anyone we are trying to help.
So we meet people. Not problems, not cases, not patients, we relate with people. And through that relationship - derived from our values and embedded in the mixed traditions at our roots - we try to help people. In the end it’s not the suffering or dysfunction that we meet, it’s the people who are struggling. We see people.
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