Thinking of becoming a counsellor?

177 Pages·2012·0.66 MB·English

by  Ingrams

THINKING OF BECOMING
A COUNSELLOR?

THINKING OF BECOMING
A COUNSELLOR?
Jonathan Ingrams
First published in 2012 by
Karnac Books Ltd
118 Finchley Road
London NW3 5HT
Copyright © 2012 by Jonathan Ingrams
The right of Jonathan Ingrams to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and
78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be repro-
duced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission
of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-13: 978-1-78049-016-8
Typeset by Vikatan Publishing Solutions (P) Ltd., Chennai,
India
Printed in Great Britain
www.karnacbooks.com
CONTENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR vii
INTRODUCTION ix
CHAPTER ONE
Beginnings 1
CHAPTER TWO
The age of psychoanalysis 20
CHAPTER THREE
The impact of childhood 41
CHAPTER FOUR
The road to self-discovery 54
CHAPTER FIVE
How we construct our world 69
CHAPTER SIX
Inter-relationships 83
v
vi CONTENTS
CHAPTER SEVEN
The power of conditioning 100
CHAPTER EIGHT
Automatic thoughts and irrational beliefs 116
CHAPTER NINE
The counselling environment today 139
CONCLUSION 151
SUGGESTED READING 155
INDEX 157
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jonathan Ingrams came to counselling following
twenty-five years of making medical educational pro-
grammes for doctors and general audiences in the
United States and Europe. Over the past fourteen
years he has practised as a psychotherapist with a
broad spectrum of clients from the “worried well” to
those suffering a range of mental illnesses of varying
severity. His work has included counselling for Young
Offenders and taking referrals from GPs, insurance
companies, and Employee Assistance Programmes.
He is the author of Counselling …? Me?: A Guide to the
Talking Therapies (Karnac, 2011).
vii
To Angela
INTRODUCTION
If you’ve picked up this book it may be that you’re
thinking of training to be a counsellor. You have per-
haps had to raise a family, deal with career changes,
cope with grief, with disappointment, with living under
financial hardship, or with going through a mid-life
crisis. Having survived all of this, it is not unreason-
able to wonder whether you could use your range of
life experiences in a productive way. The idea of offer-
ing comfort and support to someone who is undergoing
difficulties you may yourself have gone through and
overcome seems to make sense, and indeed is why
counselling is one of the few careers where older age
can actually be an advantage.
First, we should ask: Is there a need for counselling?
According to the Office for National Statistics
(ONS), three out of ten of us experience some kind
of psychological difficulty in the course of a year.
About 10% of children and one in four unemployed
people have a mental health problem at any one
time, and the UK has one of the highest rates of
ix