Are your students looking to use counselling skills to enhance their existing helping role? Are they taking the first steps towards becoming a professional counsellor? This practical guide will provide readers with the ideal 'way-in', showing them what helping and counselling is all about. Part 1: Counselling Skills will introduce readers to the underpinning knowledge and practical tools needed to develop a range of helping skills for use in a variety of helping roles, showing what it means to work safely and ethically. Part 2: Counselling Studies will help them take their understanding further by considering in detail important theories and professional issues, preparing them to work as a professional counsellor. Part 3: Counselling Study Skills will offer practical advice and hints and tips to help them make the best start on their counselling portfolio, including journal and essay writing skills, research skills and how to get inspired and overcome blocks to learning. The new edition now includes a more detailed discussion of key theories, has a new chapter on self care, and is fully up to date with the occupational and professional standards and ethical frameworks. Packed full of practical activities and written in a supportive conversational style, this book is essential reading for anyone wanting to learn counselling skills or embarking on their first stage of training to be a counsellor.

Inside Counselling is an original, innovative, and creative exploration of the experience of becoming and being a counselor and engaging in the therapeutic process. Written in a novel-like format, the book enters the internal, subjective world of counselling through its characters: students, counselors, clients, supervisors, and the author himself. Weaving together their perspectives and using "talk" as its main mediumùthe talk of counseling and supervision sessions, the training group, workshops, and the studentÆs journalùthe book breaks away from traditional methods and conventions to present complex theories, difficult concepts, and serious information in an engaging, focused, and manageable way through personal experience, reflection, and comment. Inside Counselling encourages its readers to think subjectively, to question theories that come solely from outside, to stay with and use their internal world as the main focus of counseling work, and it provides personal development exercises to help the reader access long-forgotten feelings. This is a memorable book, and one that is sure to promote and provoke controversy and discussion.

`Anthony Crouch examines the internal and subjective reality of being a counsellor. Using a series of vignettes, rather than case studies, Crouch builds in all participant perspectives, counsellor, client and supervisor... [the book] proves to be eminently readable, like a good novel. And like a good novel, as opposed to merely a "good read", it takes the reader into the world of its characters so that we might understand them. From the outset, Crouch asserts that the effective counsellor is one who can enter the intimate subjectivity of the client and use that reality as a catalyst for change and growth. By the same token the counsellor should grow through that interaction. The book also contains a series of challenging personal development exercises which the author invites the reader to undertake' - Counselling and Psychotherapy, The Journal of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy This innovative and creative book explores the experience of becoming and being a counsellor, and engaging in the therapeutic process. The book enters the internal, subjective world of counselling through its characters: students, counsellors, clients, supervisors and the author himself. It weaves together their perspectives and uses `talk' as its main medium - the talk of counselling and supervision sessions, training groups, workshops and students' journals. In so doing, the book breaks away from traditional methods and conventions to present complex theories, difficult concepts and serious information in an engaging, focused and manageable way. The book encourages readers to think subjectively, to question theories that come solely from outside, and to stay with and use their internal world as the main focus of counselling work. It also provides personal development exercises to help readers access long-forgotten feelings.