Where have I been?
If you’ve visited this website before, you may have noticed that it’s been rather quiet for the last few years. Centred Counselling hasn’t disappeared, though. Quite the opposite. While the website has been standing still, I’ve continued working with clients while studying, learning and developing as a counsellor.
When I first trained as a counsellor around ten years ago, much of my focus was understandably on becoming qualified. There was so much to learn, and qualification felt like the destination.
What I hadn’t appreciated then was how much the questions would change once I started working with people.
Instead of What do I need to know to become a counsellor? I increasingly found myself wondering: What is happening for this person? Why might this be so difficult? Is there something I’m not understanding? What else might be helpful here?
Those questions have shaped much of what I’ve chosen to do since.
Becoming an accredited counsellor
As I gained experience, professional accountability became increasingly important to me.
Counselling and psychotherapy are not currently regulated by law in the UK in the same way as some other health professions. This means it’s particularly important that people looking for counselling have ways of understanding the training, experience and professional standards behind the person they choose to work with. BACP recommends choosing a therapist who is on a Professional Standards Authority-accredited register.
For me, becoming a BACP Accredited Counsellor was an important part of this.
Accreditation goes beyond initial qualification and registration. It recognises experienced practitioners who can demonstrate high standards of knowledge, experience, professional development and ethical practice.
I wanted the way I presented myself professionally to reflect not only that I was qualified, but the experience and development that had happened in the years since.
For me, it was also about accountability. When somebody trusts a counsellor with something as personal as their emotional wellbeing, I think they should be able to have confidence in what sits behind the title.
BACP explains more about registration, accreditation and choosing a qualified therapist here.
Taking on an MSc
I also decided to take on an MSc in Advanced Psychotherapy and Counselling Studies. As a mature student, this was my first experience of university, and I was doing it alongside continuing to work in private practice and completing clinical placement work as part of my studies.
This wasn’t simply about gaining another qualification.
Balancing studying, placement, private practice and everything else that comes with ordinary life wasn’t always easy. There were definitely moments when I wondered why I had decided that taking on an MSc was such a good idea! But there was also something incredibly valuable about learning while continuing to work with people. What I was exploring at university could be considered alongside real clinical practice, while the experiences and questions that arose in my counselling work often followed me back into my studies.
Private practice can sometimes be an isolating place to work. University gave me an opportunity to be alongside other practitioners again – to discuss ideas, hear different perspectives, question some of my assumptions and think much more deeply about the counsellor I had become.
It helped me understand and put language around my own philosophy of counselling, explore the areas of practice I had become particularly curious about, and think about how I wanted my work to develop in the future.
Perhaps most importantly, it reminded me that becoming more experienced doesn’t necessarily mean becoming more certain about everything.
Sometimes it means becoming more curious.
Looking for different ways to help
Trauma is one of the areas that has continued to leave me with questions.
Talking can be enormously valuable, but it isn’t the only way of working. We now know that healing doesn’t necessarily require someone to repeatedly talk through everything that has happened to them.
That curiosity led me to train in the Flash Technique, an approach that can be used with distressing or traumatic memories without requiring someone to focus on them for prolonged periods.
And it’s also led to the next stage of my learning.
I will soon begin training in Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), another approach used in working with trauma and distressing experiences.
I’ll write separately about EMDR, what it is, why I’ve chosen to train in it and how I hope it will complement the way I already work.
For me, learning approaches such as Flash and EMDR isn’t about finding the answer. It’s about having more possibilities available when I’m sitting alongside somebody and wondering: What might be helpful here?
And what happens to the website now?
Hopefully, it won’t be another five years before you hear from me!
As I’ve been rebuilding Centred Counselling, I’ve been thinking about what I would like this website to become.
I’d like it to be more than somewhere you visit to find out whether I offer counselling.
Over time, I hope to build a collection of accessible information and resources around some of the things people commonly experience – anxiety, sleep difficulties, trauma, understanding our emotional and physical responses, and whatever else seems genuinely useful along the way.
Some resources will be things I’ve created, while others may point you towards good information I’ve found elsewhere. There is no expectation to use any of them. They’ll simply be here if and when something feels useful – perhaps alongside counselling, between sessions, or simply because you’ve found your way here looking for some understanding.
It will take time for that collection to grow, so please bear with me while I build it.
Ten years after first qualifying, I certainly don’t feel that I’ve reached a point where I’ve learned everything I need to know. If anything, experience has made me more aware of how much there is still to understand.
And perhaps that’s where I’ve been for the last five years:
working with people, asking questions, following my curiosity and continuing to learn.