If you’re a trainee on a counselling, psychotherapy, or counselling psychology programme, skills practice is likely to be a central part of your training. This practice is invaluable in helping you develop your competences as a therapist, so it’s essential to know how to make the best use of it.
Skills practice is often in pairs or ‘triads’ (with the three roles of speaker/client, listener/therapist, and observer).
Some pointers to help you make the best use of your time:
Listener/Therapist
Be natural: Don’t ‘play-act’ at being a Therapist or pretend that you’re in a situation other than the one you’re in. You’re probably in a classroom, listening to a peer, with someone watching you—that’s fine. So no need, for instance, to pretend you don’t know your ‘client’, or for elaborate introductions to the therapy—unless that’s a specific skills that you’re practising. Just focus on doing your best to listen and respond therapeutically, to the real person that is there in the room with you.
If there’s a specific area of skills that you want to work on, and get feedback on, it may be helpful to let the Observer know before you start, so that they can focus on that.
Remember that when you are practising a particular skill (such as active listening) this is not necessarily how you should always do counselling practice. Later on, for instance, you may also develop skills in empathic reflections, self-disclosures, or even advice-giving. But it’s good to be able to develop specific skills to a point where you feel confident and capable in them—then you can do more.
Don’t rush things, or feel that you have to demonstrate everything in the practice time you have. If your client has a lot to talk about you may ‘just’ be listening. So if, for instance, you’ve got 15 minutes for practice, think of doing the first 15 minutes of a session, rather than trying to do the whole session in 15 minutes.
Speaker/Client
Given the context and time available, it’s important you only talk about something you are comfortable sharing. At the same time…
…It’s helpful to the Therapist if you can talk about something with some emotional resonances for you: for instance, a current worry and concern. If it’s a purely intellectual issue (like what you are going to cook for dinner) it can be hard for the therapist to engage and practice real skills.
Use the time usefully. That’s most helpful for the Therapist (if it’s something that you’re wanting to talk about) and also most useful for you. If you’re not sure what to talk about, take a few minutes at the beginning of the time to think about what would be helpful to talk about, or just about how you’re feeling at that point in time.
Don’t feel responsible for the Therapist, or that you have to make things ‘easy’ for them. It’s your time, and the Therapist needs to learn to deal with more difficult/complex situations, as well as with someone who can easily talk. So, for instance, if you’re feeling stuck as you talk, no need to apologise to the Therapist—give them the opportunity to practice learning how to deal with such situations.
A Tutor may come, at times, to listen in to how your Therapist is doing, so that they can offer feedback. If you’re talking about something that you don’t want them to hear, it’s normally fine to ask them to leave.
If you run out of things to say, try to stay in roles for the allocated time, rather than ‘switching over’ and giving someone else a go. It can be uncomfortable if things dry up but, as above, it can be important for the Counsellor to learn how to deal with such situations, and it means you can relax more into the allocated time. As the Client, you don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.
Observer/Feedback Process
Your feedback should be to the Therapist, not the Client. You really don’t want to get into commenting on the Client’s material, or asking them more questions about what is going on. The whole point of this exercise is to help the Therapist develop their skills, not ‘sort the Client out’ (however much you might feel you know what they should do).
Try to give specific feedback on specific Therapist activities rather than general, vague comments.
Keep in mind what the purpose/focus of the exercise was—for instance, to develop skills in empathy or practice minimal encouragers—and keep your comments oriented to that. If you’re not clear what the exercise/practice is for, it’s worth clarifying that before you start.
Positive feedback is as important as more challenging feedback, so make sure you include positives and encouragements as well as possible areas for development.
…And challenging feedback is as important as positive feedback. That can sometimes feel really tough to give, you don’t want to upset your peer (or prime them to challenge you when it’s your turn) but it’s also what can really help them learn. Some things that can help to make challenge more productive:
Be descriptive rather than evaluative: what you observed, saw, and felt; rather than what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.
Unconditional positive regard is, of course, essential: focus on the behaviours and activities rather than the person: ‘challenge’ rather than ‘criticism’.
Remember that your view is your view: just one perspective on what went on. As legitimate as everyone else’s, but not more so.
As Observer, you might find it useful to take notes, but make sure these are confidentially destroyed at the end of it.
Recording the session (audio or even video) and then playing it back may be useful in terms of giving concrete feedback. Again, however, it’s essential that any recordings are destroyed (or stored securely, as per ethics and relevant regulations e.g., GDPR]) to maintain Client confidentiality.
It’s often useful to start the feedback process with the Client, as they are the one who experienced the session and have the best sense of how it went.
In the observation and feedback process, there are some really helpful scales that you might want to use to support and structure the feedback process.
Person-Centred and Experiential Psychotherapy Scale-10 (PCEPS). This is a recently developed measure to assess an essential range of person-centred competences, such as ‘emotion focus’ and ‘accepting presence’. You can download the form here, and a paper describing its development and testing is here.
For counselling practice for work with young people, there is a PCEPS-YP that you can download from here, and a shortened version of it here. A paper describing the development and testing of the PCEPS-YP is available here.
To assess the depth of experiencing that counsellor and client are working at, you can consider using the Experiencing Scale. This has seven levels: from the most ‘disowned’ description of events to a deeply-felt ‘unfolding’ of experiencing. Excerpts and further information are available here.
Afterwards
Of course, everything that the Client shared is strictly confidential, and it’s essential that none of the content is disclosed outside of that context. That includes, for instance, talking to the Client later about an issue that they shared, unless they specifically indicate to you that they would like to discuss it further.
As the Therapist, think about what specifically you can take away from this session into your practice. Perhaps make some notes about your learning, some action points, or incorporate it into your journaling.
Skills practices
Here are some basic exercises that you might want to use, in triads, to develop core counselling skills.
Active Listening
Choose who will be Counsellor, Client, and Observer. Each person should get a turn in each role.
Client: Talk about an issue or concern that has some emotional resonance for you (see guidance above), for 10 minutes.
Counsellor: Focus on just listening to the Client. Try to put to one side (‘bracket’) any need to:
Advise
Reassure
Guide
Inform
Solve the problem, etc.
Just listen—take in what the Client is saying. If you want to prompt or ask questions to help the Client unpack their experiences, that’s fine (you don’t need to leave awkward silences), but try to keep it minimal. Don’t take over!
After 10 minutes, feed back with the Observer on how that was. How easy did the Counsellor find it just to listen? What kind of things were they having to ‘bracket’? What was the need behind wanting to say those things, and would they have actually have been helpful to the Client? (perhaps ‘yes’, perhaps ‘no’).
Empathic reflections
Choose who will be Counsellor, Client, and Observer. Each person should get a turn in each role.
Client: Talk about an issue or concern that has some emotional resonance for you (see guidance above), for 5 minutes. No interjections from the Counsellor, except for minimal encouragers (‘mm hm’, ‘yes’, etc).
Counsellor (5 mins): Your task now is to summarise, in your own words, what the Client said that they are (or did) experience: What are they (or were they) feeling, thinking, imagining, wanting? Try to describe their subjective, felt-experience of particular events (how it was for them), rather than the events or behaviours themselves. For instance:
‘You felt upset when your brother was cold to you. You wanted to talk to his boyfriend. You imagined how it would be to have a brother who would really look after you…’
The Client and Observer should now feed back on how well the Counsellor summarised the Client’s felt-experiences (5 mins). The question here is not so much whether they remembered everything, but whether they fed back at the level of subjective experiences (feelings, emotions, thoughts, perceptions, fantasies, desires, etc) or whether they focused more on objective, external ‘facts’.
Once everyone has had a chance to do this exercise, you can move on to practising empathic reflections in a more interactive way.
Counsellor counsels the Client (10 mins), offering the Client summaries and reflections of the Client’s experiences as the session progresses (and not just at the end).
Feedback with the Observer on how much the Counsellor reflected back the Client’s subjective felt-experiences (5 mins).
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