Therapy Personalisation – What kind of therapy do I/you want?
I have numerous folders of paperwork which have been gathered over the last 9 years since I started my counselling training. They’ve been collected from volunteer opportunities i’ve had, training courses, GP surgery self-help booklets, tools from fellow counsellors and so on. I decided to add a blog element to my website in order to share some of these documents for both clients and counsellors to access and hopefully benefit from.
The link below is a ‘Therapy Personalisation Form’ which enables you as a client to communicate what kind of therapy you have preferences for to your counsellor, and equally for your counsellor to discuss with you about how they might work with you to fit these preferences. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not a case of ‘I want, gets’….but rather it’s a way of starting that conversation together. All counsellors work differently, and will likely work differently across the range of clients they are seeing, it should not be a one size fits all approach! Ultimately, it should be about working together to ensure the therapy is effective. If as a client you expect and would really appreciate homework every week, but your counsellor doesn’t offer it, you may leave feeling disatisfied and disappointed. Some counsellors don’t provide homework as a rule, but if this is something important to you, it’s important to discuss together, and hopefully you can work out something that suits you both.
It might be useful to complete the form before you first meet your counsellor and use the points as a guide in discussing what you are seeking from therapy to help work out whether they would be the right counsellor for you. Equally, counsellors could use this form to consider how they like to work with clients, and think about how flexible they are within the category in order to assess whether they can work to their clients preferences.