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.

Therapy Personalisation Form

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You may have an opportunity where you can seek support through work or a local service and in which case be allocated to a counsellor. However, if you choose to seek private counselling you will likley be confronted with many different profiles of people in your local area. I have been through this process as a client and as a counsellor, so here are some of the things I think it is important to consider when choosing the right counsellor for you.

Qualifications/Status: I would encourage you to seek counselling from someone registered with a counselling governing body. I can only speak from a BACP (British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy) perspective as this is who I am registered with – but in order to be a registered member you must have completed a certain number of clinical hours and either done a BACP recommended training course or a BACP exam to prove your abilities. This also ultimately gives you as a client a pathway should you feel the need to make a formal complaint about your counsellor. Some counsellors will also state that they are accredited, in the case of BACP accreditation this demonstrates that they have completed a minimum of 450 clinical hours  and chosen to complete a dissertation like piece of work for this status. Whilst Accreditation doesn’t necessarily indicate that one counsellor is better than the other, as one counsellor may have been working for much longer and have more experience but just chosen not to apply for the accreditation – it’s just another way for the counsellor to demonstrate their competence.

Experience/specialism in your niche issue: Often clients will seek counselling from someone who specialises in their particular issue. Arguably working with 5 clients with the “same issue” will never be the same piece of work, and therefore it is not necessary to work with someone with specialist experience in that area. For example, a client struggling with bereavement does not necessarily need to seek bereavement counselling as loss is a common subject matter that all counsellors should be able to work with successfully. However, with some more complex or uncommon issues it can be important to seek specialist help. For example, counsellors are unable to work with clients seeking support about adoption, unless they have done specific training to do so.

Gender: Some clients may prefer to choose a counsellor of their own gender, assuming that they may understand their specific problem more than someone of the opposite gender. It may be that based on experience the thought of working with a particular gender might feel scary.

For example, a woman having experienced sexual trauma or abuse from a male may not feel comfortable working with a male counsellor. Whilst this is completely understandable, working with a male therapist in this instance has the potential to have hugely healing results, providing the client with a much more positive and healthy experience of a relationship with a male. It is up to the client to assess what feels comfortable to them of course, but it may be something to consider.

Age: As a relatively young counsellor myself I have experienced mixed reactions to my age. I have had some clients who have specifically chosen a younger counsellor who is more their age with the assumption that someone their age will understand them more. I have also been challenged by older clients who have commented that it’s not possible for me to understand because I haven’t had enough life experience. I want to discuss age in more detail in a future blog post as it’s an issue that was very much at the forefront of my mind whilst I began my training in 2010. I wanted to add it here to just point out that age isn’t always an indication of life experience, or ability to have dealt with those experiences and learnt from them.

Distance: It might feel the most convenient idea to seek help from whichever counsellor is the closest to you. Whilst I agree that travelling a long distance won’t likely be sustainable for the time you access counselling, it may be less complicated to see someone a little further than your doorstep. As a counsellor it has been a very rare occurrence to bump into a client, and I have never had any negative repercussions from doing so but I have heard tales of counsellors and clients bumping into each other at the gym in the showers! Obviously these things happen regardless of who lives where, and can be dealt with between the client and counsellor as part of working together but I’m sure most would agree it’s something they’d rather avoid where possible! It may also increase the chances of having mutual friends, and if this is not immediately known this could cause issues down the line and the relationship may feel somewhat contaminated. There are no strict rules of course, it’s just something to consider for both clients seeking counsellors and counsellors wishing to set up their own private practice.

I would strongly encourage anyone seeking counselling to shop around, and at the very least email a handful of counsellors who fit your requirements. Some counsellors offer free or low cost initial telelphone conversations, or short sessions just for you to experience what it would be like to work together. We are all human at the end of the day, and sometimes you click with some people more than you do with others. You may get a sense of the counsellor just based on their response to your intial enquiry. It is so important for you to feel comfortable with who you are working with in order to get the most out of your sessions. Obviously, complete trust can only develop in time and the time it can take will vary for different individuals, but as humans we usually have a gut feeling about whether an individual makes us feel comfortable and safe around them.

Should you wish to contact me about counselling, I offer a free 15 minute telephone appointment so that we can discuss whether working together would be a right fit. Email me on info@morrellcounselling.com for more details.

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Today I’m writing about working with the people who are engaging in problem gambling. Problem gambling is relative to the individual, but regardless of the amount of money, it is a problem if it is affecting your life, your relationships and you are unable to stop.

You may have a certain image of what a problem gambler looks like. What do you imagine? The harsh reality is that this can affect people of all ages from all walks of life. Your perception of what you think a gambling addict looks like may prevent you from accepting you have a problem of your own. E.g. “I’m intelligent and have got a good job so I can’t have a gambling problem”

If you recognise that you are a problem gambler, you could contact the GamCare helpline for support on 0808 8020 133 (open between 8am-midnight) or access the website www.gamcare.org.uk

You may be referred for some counselling and have to go through an assessment to determine what kind of support will be most appropriate for you at this time.

So how might counselling help recovery from a gambling addiction? Often people access the service with an expectation that I am there to tell them off or tell them what to do. Whilst there are some programs out there that offer a set structure or program when recovering from an addiction this is not necessarily how counselling works. I am there to support the individual to understand how they have ended up where they are, to deal with the consequences they have been left with and to collaborate on developing a plan of recovery. Each set of sessions is therefore very much tailored to the individual, but there are some common themes that may crop up:

Practical advice: There will likely be some discussion around the practical elements of recovering from an addiction. For example – passing over bank cards and passwords to accounts to a partner or loved one to take control of or adding blocking software onto your computer. However, these practical blocks aren’t always enough to recover fully. Once you remove the barrier (e.g. you will at some point get frustrated at having to ask a partner/family member for money every time you need it), it’s likely that with no understanding of how it happened in the first place, it will become a problem again at some point in the future.

Understanding WHY: I think a lot of people assume the only reason people gamble is for the money, and this is not the case. Addictions can be a form of escape from reality, hiding from difficult feelings like guilt, anger, sadness or rejection. Gambling can be a means of experiencing a high so different to every day life that it seems so mundane without it. It can be a chink of light at the end of the tunnel, a small glint of hope that “if I just win x amount all my problems will be over and I’ll be happy”. There are so many different reasons why people gamble and in understanding your own reasons this can help you to avoid it happening again. For example, if we identify that you gamble when feeling sad, we can consider alternative ways of dealing with those feelings of sadness, whether that’s accessing counselling, speaking to a loved one or writing a journal.

Money: Whilst money isn’t always the focus of the work, we will more than likely consider your relationship with money in general. What does money mean to you and how did you develop those beliefs? For example, if you have grown up within a family who have a tendency to make extravagant purchases and show off their wealth, you may feel under pressure to have the same amount of money to be able to compete. Financial pressure could be part of the reasoning behind someone’s decision to gamble. Whilst it is impossible to tell people that they won’t win, it’s important to consider actually what you risk losing in continuing to chase those winnings.

Relapse: Unfortunately when dealing with addiction people often experience a cycle of their behaviours, and relapse is very much a part of that. Some clients come to Gamcare having experienced their very first big loss. Some clients access GamCare for the first time having experienced numerous losses and maybe even short portions of time where they have managed to control or stop their gambling. We will discuss the possibility of relapse occurring and try to understand what could happen in the future to trigger the gambling beginning again. Once we identify those triggers we can come up with strategies of dealing with those situations. Should you relapse it is important to learn from the mistakes that led to that relapse in the first place and make further changes. It could be easy to think with a relapse you are back at square one and unable to stop, but this is not the case.

Hopefully this has given you some idea of what may be discussed when accessing support for a gambling addiction. Obviously all counselling practitioners have their own approach and each client will have their own individual situation, so each piece of work will be entirely different.

Should you require further information on counselling for a gambling addiction, feel free to send me an email info@morrellcounselling.com or contact GamCare on 0808 8020 133 (open between 8am-midnight)

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