Psychological counseling training materials

The core of qualified psychological counseling training has never been about how many schools of theory you have memorized or how many practice certificates you have passed. It is about developing the ability to catch the true emotions of different clients under a strict ethical framework. This is the first thing I want to say to all novices after 12 years of hard work in the industry, more than 30 interns, and nearly 2,000 hours of cases.

In the past two years, I took care of a young girl who had both a bachelor's and master's degree from the 985 Department of Psychology. The pile of various certificates was half a foot high. She knew the knowledge points in the textbook by heart. When I asked her, she could tell her the diagnostic criteria for depressive episodes verbatim. When I received an appointment for the first time, the visitor sat down and said without saying a few words. He said with red eyes, "I really feel like this lately." Life is meaningless." Her first reaction was to open the drawer and take out the SDS (Self-rating Depression Scale) and SAS (Self-rating Anxiety Scale) and hand them over. "You fill out these two forms first, and we will look at the scores." The other person was stunned on the spot. After sitting for less than two minutes, he got up and left, and never came back.

Don't tell me, this is not an isolated case. I have met at least dozens of novices who have just graduated or just passed the certificate exam, and they have all made the same mistake - they have learned too much "standardized" content, but they have forgotten that the person sitting across from them is a living person, not a set of symptoms to be diagnosed.

Interestingly, domestic psychological counseling training now happens to go to two extremes. The first category is purely academic. It starts with half a year of theoretical courses, covering general psychology, developmental psychology, and abnormal psychology. The exams are all multiple-choice questions such as "Piaget's cognitive development stages are divided into several periods." Many people have completed the entire course and are afraid of how to say the first sentence "What do you want to talk about today" to visitors, let alone take on real cases. The other type is the "quick practice" group that has become popular in recent years. They can earn you tens of thousands in 7 days and claim to be able to earn more than 10,000 yuan a month after completing the course. They come up and teach you fixed skills. "When a visitor complains about your family, just say 'I understand how you feel.' When a visitor says he is in pain, just say 'you have done a good job.'" Shengsheng has made inquiries that require flexible response into e-commerce customer service automatic responses. Last month I met a novice counselor who had participated in this kind of training. She received a client whose husband had cheated on her. After hearing the client cry for two minutes, he said, "I really understand how you feel." The client responded on the spot: "Your husband has never cheated on you, what the hell do you understand?" ”, the situation was so tense that it could not be ended.

Regarding whether training should teach theory first or practice practice first, there have always been big differences between different schools. Old people who engage in psychoanalysis always say that counselors who have not done 100 hours of personal experience are not qualified to take on cases - you have not cultivated your own complexes, and when you encounter a case that overlaps with your own trauma, it is easy to bring your own emotions into it. I have seen such an example before. A counselor who was adopted by her parents when she was a child received a case where she was anxious about being separated from her parents. As she talked, she collapsed first and cried harder to the visitor than others. In the end, she asked the visitor to comfort her in turn. However, humanistic counselors do not recognize this standard. They believe that "the ability to catch emotions" is essentially a talent. Some people, even if they have not read much theory or done dozens of hours of personal experience, are naturally sensitive to other people's emotions. If they learn basic ethics and communication methods for a few months, they can handle ordinary emotional distress cases very well. I used to know an elder sister who worked as a community social worker for ten years, and then changed her career to become a counselor. She didn’t have any academic qualifications or certificates to show off, but she was very good at handling adolescent cases. A rebellious child that other counselors could not deal with would open up after sitting with her for half an hour. To put it bluntly, she could really think about the problem from the child’s perspective and would not pretend to be “I am a counselor and I will educate you.”

To put it bluntly, no matter which school you belong to, what is most lacking in many trainings now is the most basic ethics courses. Many people think that ethics is just a bunch of useless rules and regulations, such as "cannot have contact with visitors other than the consultation relationship", "cannot provide consultation to acquaintances", and "cannot accept gifts of more than 50 yuan from visitors". Memorizing these things is not as useful as learning two more techniques. But in fact, these rules are all lessons learned from previous mistakes. In the past two years, there was a case reported in the industry. A male counselor fell in love with a female client. The client's family complained. Not only was his professional qualification revoked, but he also lost hundreds of thousands of yuan to the client. He will never be able to have this job again in his life. You said that if the teacher had told him twice more about the importance of ethical boundaries during his training, he wouldn't have reached this point.

When I was coaching interns, what I disliked the most was "simulated case drills". Two interns acted opposite each other, one pretending to be a visitor and the other a consultant. All they said were pre-written lines, and it was useless to practice them a hundred times. There is never a script in real consultation. You never know what "bomb" the client will throw at you next. I had a visitor before who spent the first forty minutes complaining to me about how stupid his company leader was and how stressful his work was. Suddenly the conversation changed and he told me very calmly, "I threw my cat that I had owned for two years from the 12th floor yesterday." At that moment, all the techniques and words I had memorized before were useless. All I could do was to stabilize my emotions, not judge him, and ask him, "How did you feel when you made this action?" ”——This is real practice and cannot be practiced through simulation.

In fact, to put it bluntly, learning psychological counseling is very similar to learning to drive. You have memorized the traffic rules and the structural principles of the car. Even if you drive thousands of kilometers without being on the road, you will still panic when encountering unexpected situations. Don’t even think about signing up for some sky-high-priced training class, learning some exclusive technique, and you can be famous all over the world with one move. Every visitor is unique. Only when you show your sincerity to others will they be willing to give you their sincerity. Oh, by the way, one last thing to add, if you encounter any training class that tells you, "After studying, you will get a certificate, you will receive cases, and it is not a dream to earn 20,000 yuan a month." Don't hesitate and turn around and leave, it will definitely deceive you.