Thinking of becoming a counsellor? PDF
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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
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