Whilst the literature underpinning counselling psychology generally acknowledges that values and ethics are inherent in therapy1, the different ways in which they feature and to what effect are under-explored areas. Though therapeutic literature would seem to recommend that counselling psychologists take a critically reflexive approach to values and ethics, the extent to which counselling psychology training engenders this kind of thinking is unclear. This research project therefore set about examining the ways in which values and ethics were constructed in the talk of final year trainee counselling psychologists discussing values and ethics in counselling psychology training and practice. Four focus groups comprising a total of nineteen participants were conducted and transcribed. The transcripts were analysed using Willig’s (2008) six-stage approach to Foucauldian discourse analysis, identifying and exploring the ways in which participants constructed values and ethics in counselling psychology training and practice. The analysis examined the implications of the different constructions identified for counselling psychology training and practice and the subjective experience of counselling psychologists within these contexts. Three discursive constructions of values and two of ethics were identified, drawing on four discourses. The use of each discourse produced its own effects, offering participants different subject positions with different consequences for their therapy practice and subjective experience. The relationship between contrasting constructions of values and ethics from within an institutional and a humanistic discourse dominated discussion and appeared to have greatest impact on participants’ practice and subjectivity. Tensions were experienced between the differing demands of the institutional and humanistic discourses, resulting in feelings of dissonance and discomfort, as participants tried to mediate between contrasting constructions in an attempt to forge a coherent sense of identity and practice involving both.

The theoretical component of professional training for counselling psychologists is recognised, if not assumed, to be important by those in the field. Currently, several models of therapy are taught to trainees, each with its own theoretical approach to understanding and working in the therapeutic setting. This study considered the helpfulness of theory in practice and explored this with the research question ‘how do trainees make sense of their emotional responses to clients in practice, and what is the impact of theory on the way they make sense of this experience’. Twelve counselling psychologists in the final stages of training participated in semi-structured interviews with the researcher. A grounded theory analysis found eight categories in total. The overarching category, ‘the trainee’s relationship with theory’, indicated that theoretical learning was a social process that became incorporated into trainees’ developing professional identities, and that it evolved during the course of their training. The impacts of theory were found to be both helpful and problematic, and identifiable in four categories: ‘theory reveals the trainee’s experience’, ‘theory conceals the trainee’s experience’, ‘theory raises uncertainty in the trainee’, and, ‘the trainee’s inability to perceive the impact of theory’. The remaining three categories ‘the trainee’s personal and professional development’, ‘the nature of the trainee’s relationships’, and ‘relieving the impact of the trainee’s experience’ described factors influencing trainees’ relationship with theory, and the degree to which each impact category was experienced. The research findings open dialogue about: the disadvantages (alongside the advantages) of using one’s reflective practice. These implications are discussed.

Previous studies have suggested that becoming a counsellor takes place according to stages and that development can be explained through the achievement of specified tasks. The professional training process is also understood to give rise to considerable anxiety with this traditionally conceptualised as a predominately negative experience hindering the learning process. The aims of the current study were: 1) to understand and identify how counselling psychology trainees make sense of and experience their development in becoming counselling psychologists, 2) to understand how anxiety is implicated in trainees’ growth and development into becoming counselling psychologists, and 3) through the application of an empirical existential phenomenological framework to promote an alternative perspective to the dominant medical model in relation to anxiety and the meaning attached to this experience in the process of becoming a counselling psychologist. Five trainee counselling psychologists and two recently qualified counselling psychologists were interviewed for this research project. The phenomenological analysis identified situated structural descriptions with the themes from these individual accounts forming the basis of a general structural description of the phenomenon of anxiety in becoming a counselling psychologist. By means of this existential phenomenological analysis, the multiple meanings attached to the experience of becoming with reference to anxiety were investigated. Two important findings emerged namely; 1) anxiety was not a negative, debilitating process for the trainees and 2) that counselling psychology’s pluralist theoretical affiliations whilst anxiety provoking contributed to the depth of transformation experienced by trainees. By adopting a pluralistic stance ambiguity was found to be prevalent in the experience of anxiety; this opened up the possibilities for becoming for this group of trainees. Therefore a non

This research has drawn on poststructuralist thinking to posit that assertions of supervision being a benign and necessary process or activity rely on modernist assumptions. Utilising Foucault’s work on discourses and power, this study conceptualised supervision as a social construction that has implications for practice and subjectivity, and that this process, within the context of counselling psychology, with its particular epistemological underpinnings, is worthy of further exploration. This study makes an original contribution through extending the work by Crocket (2004, 2007), who has investigated supervision’s shaping effects on professional identity, to apply it to the particular epistemological and theoretical context of counselling psychology, a profession said to value postmodern ideas such as pluralism and ambiguity (Rizq, 2006). Semi-structured interviews with six women counselling psychology trainees were analysed using Foucauldian discourse analysis, a social constructionist methodology, and found a number of discourses implicated in trainees’ subjectivity and practice. Whilst expert, developmental and gender discourses were found to be implicated in constructions of supervision as hierarchical, which was seen as a key aspect of constructions of power in supervision, other discourses were identified that offered positions from which to resist this. The researcher acknowledges that the discursive resources identified are based on this particular sample, could have been read in other ways and does not assume they can be applied to all trainee counselling psychologists. Rather, it is hoped this study may contribute to debate around supervision and it’s shaping effects and consequently be useful in enhancing counselling psychology’s reflexivity in research and practice.