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A qualitative exploration of personal change through counselling psychology training

Counselling and psychotherapy training courses emphasise the importance of trainee's personal growth and development but there seems to be little understanding of what these terms actually mean in terms of trainee's personal changes and experiences and how they impact on trainees, their relationships and clinical practice. This study explores the personal change experiences of seven trainee counselling psychologists from six London universities using semi-structured interviews. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) identified nineteen common themes across four domains: (a) personal changes, (b) the impact of personal changes on trainee’s relationships and clinical practice, (c) the experiences contributing to changes, (d) acknowledgement of personal change in training. The findings show that counselling psychology training has a profound impact on trainees which affects their relationship with themselves, their partner, family, friends and their clinical practice, however the findings show that this impact is not made clear or addressed and supported enough in training. Since little research has been conducted into trainee's experiences through training, the findings from this study provide a much needed insight into trainee's experiences, and the implications of these findings for training programmes and directions for future research are discussed. The findings highlight that more research into the personal impact of training is needed to normalise and contextualise trainee's experiences, facilitate trainee's learning and engagement and increase their awareness of the positive and transformative changes and contributions to clinical practice which counselling psychology training can enable.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:646056
Date January 2010
CreatorsClifford, Miranda
ContributorsSoren Petter, Nils
PublisherRegent's University
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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