Models can help us understand life better which is helpful when things go wrong. Levels of change is one of those models that explains human needs. We can compare clients’ lives to this model to see if there is anything lacking.

Now we are going to look at a new model. Levels of experience deals with how we interact with the world as individuals. This stage by stage process reduces human needs to its most basic form. We can’t experience the top level without nurturing the bottom level.

We are not used to seeing selfishness in a positive light. But sometimes we need to for the wellbeing of ourselves and those around us. After all, how can we help others if we are struggling ourselves?

Being positively selfish can really change a client’s life. You will see in these real life examples that we can only experience happiness and share it with others if we are giving ourselves the attention we need.

Unhealthy relationships are really bad for wellbeing. The worse we feel the more difficult relationships get. This cycle can be broken with the transactional model of people relating to each other. We all need to take an appropriate role in relationships.

To be happy we need to experience good things. But this positivity can’t only come from one area of life. We need to get it from various places from social to physical to spiritual. Clients need to find balance.

You will find that many of your clients are not balancing the areas of life. Often we put work before anything else including our family and ourselves. That can lead to all kinds of issues. Imbalances need to be dealt with.

We all have values but they don’t always help us. They can lead us to experience a conflict between what we think we should want and what we actually want. There are exercises that help settle this conflict.

We hold onto preconceived firmly but just by being aware of them and challenging them can help us choose our values. Imposed judgements can be helpful but they can also be harmful. Clients need to know how to tell the difference.

We have a variety of needs. Some are required to survive and some make us happy. Abraham Maslow has organised them into a hierarchy so we can make sure each level is met before we attempt to move up the pyramid.

Counselling is a theory you can combine with CBT with effective results. There are some similarities between the two but counselling does bring new techniques that can enhance your sessions.

As well as mastering the theory, you need to know how to run sessions effectively. It is your responsibility to create an environment that is comfortable for clients so they feel able to open up to you and make progress.

When you start counselling a client, you enter a helping relationship with them. You need to nurture this relationship in a helpful and appropriate way. There are a few things you need to do at the beginning to start the relationship off right.

The helping relationship will eventually come to an end. You need to finish things off properly so clients leave your practice with a sense of closure and an ability to use the tools you have given them. A client coping themselves is a sign of success for you.

For clients to be able to leave counselling with the tools they need to cope, you need to help them build a support network. This consists of both people and activities that they can use when they are struggling to prevent things getting worse.

Referrals are an inevitability. You do not have the expertise to help every client, not by yourself at least. This is a common technique used in an industry to get clients the help that will benefit them most so don’t be afraid to use it.

Counselling will help you with certain elements of therapy just as the other theories have their own advantages. Counselling in particular is person-centred so it will help you gain useful information from clients during conversations.

To be a good therapist, you need to be supervised by another practitioner. This will benefit both you and your clients as you work through any issues that could be damaging to the quality of your sessions.

Now we have tackled basic counselling skills, we can look at counselling at a more advanced level. There is so much to learn and knowledge about therapy is being constantly updated. You can learn new skills through extra reading or taking specific courses.

In counselling we are dealing with real people so not everything will go perfectly to plan. There are strategies you can use to have efficient sessions and bring the helping relationship to an end when necessary. Include the client in every decision you make.

No matter how many qualifications or how much experience you have there will always be instances where you struggle with clients. This is why supervision is so important. It gives you a chance to discuss the best solution with a professional while maintaining confidentiality.

There are two main ways that you can practice as a therapist: independently or as part of an organisation. Both have benefits and downfalls so you need to weigh up your opinions and decide what works best for you.

There’s a lot of terminology within the world of therapy. Things can get political especially when it comes to drawing the line between different theories and methods. These are the definitions you need to know.

We are expanding on our understanding of basic counselling skills by relating it to the different theories and development in western psychology. Basic counselling can be used in all approaches to some extent which is why it is so valuable to understand.

The distinction between basic and advanced counselling skills isn’t super clear but in general the more you use a skill, the more expert you are at it. We can categorise these skills in different ways too.

There are lots of different helping skills we can use in therapy sessions depending on the client’s needs. We are going to look at the roles contracting and respect play in building the helping relationship.

The next two helping skills you can use is concreteness and immediacy. These allow clients to define their feelings, making them easier to understand, and focus on the present, encouraging positive change now.

Questioning and empathy are essential to conducting therapy. Clients are not always sure what information to share and when they do share information they need to feel like you understand where they are coming from.

The skills focusing, confronting and unconditional positive regard are helpful in different ways. Counselling needs to have some kind of goal without being too rigid. Sometimes you need to challenge a client. Whatever happens clients should never feel judged or they will not be open with you.

Conversations are always a two way street. While the focus is on the client, your responses are key to clients untangling situations and finding ways to move on. The skills in this lesson help you to play your role.

You need feedback too. If something isn’t working with a client, there is no point in continuing with it. Often perspective can change everything. In some situations, the skill of reframing can make a real difference to how clients cope.

These are the last few skills we are going to discuss. They each have their place in the process of therapy and you should have a good understanding of them so you can use them competently with clients.

Developmental psychology can help us understand how clients respond to life events. Different experiences affect our mind in different ways. To understand the present, we need to understand the past.

There are lots of different approaches to developmental psychology. There are different opinions about how our mind is impacted by our experiences. It can be hard to come up with set rules considering all our experiences are so different.

In this lesson, we are beginning to look at Freud’s theory of development. It is seen as quite controversial today but he had a big influence on the progress of psychology so it's important to understand his theories.

Some of Freud’s most famous ideas come from the phallic stage. He has the idea that as we start to take our gender role we develop an attraction to our opposite sex parent. His theories are based around a traditional family setting.

At any stage of Freud’s psychosexual development, negative experiences can stunt development. But it is believed certain trauma at certain stages can have an even more significant effect. This is no different for the latency stage.

The genital stage takes place in the teenage years which is often a difficult time for clients. Freud has various ideas about what can go wrong and why in this final stage.

Jung takes quite a different approach to development. He looks at concepts like symbolism and group consciousness. He also has a theory of persona. All these things have an impact on who we are.

As we are exploring developmental psychology, we are going to look at a few interpretations. One of these is the classic developmental psychology model that presents a theory of how children grow.

Erik Erickson’s theory is the last piece in the puzzle of developmental psychology. He focuses more on what can go right than Freud who likes to highlight what can go wrong. Erickson’s model is based on the challenges we face as we grow.

This is our summary lesson of section five. Before taking the assessment recap the different models we looked at when it comes to developmental psychology. Also consider how this could be applied in therapy sessions.

By understanding the elements of the psychodynamic theory, we can understand how this is applied to psychoanalysis and the methods you could use in therapy. While developed a long time ago, it is still a useful approach.

The psychodynamic approach does have a lot of focus on past experiences. This can be really helpful with understanding how a client has got to where they are today but it does have its limits. So does the other element we are discussing in this lesson - transference.

As well as using the past to understand today, dreams can be really insightful. Symbols and interpretations aren’t set. They really depend on the experiences of the client.

The basis of all therapy is talking. It's no different for the psychodynamic approach. It uses the methods of basic counselling as well as having its own stance on the role of the therapist.

The technique of free association is used to access the subconscious, something the psychodynamic approach is particularly interested in. Sometimes the subconscious has more to say than clients realise so accessing can really help progression.

Actually using free association is not as simple as it is portrayed in the media. There are certain steps you need to take to use the technique effectively. Preparation is needed too.

Jung is also part of the psychodynamic approach. He came up with his own theories about personality and the unconscious. He came up with his own archetypes and symbols that are part of our collective consciousness.

Jung is responsible for lots of different concepts including introverts and extraverts. His archetypes can explain the mid-life crisis. He also has a visualisation method that we will go through.

In this section we are taking on a new approach, humanism. While it might not be as well known as other approaches, its principles can be seen across therapy applications.

There are some major differences that humanism has with other approaches in terms of theory and application. In this lesson we are comparing it to the psychodynamic approach.

We are learning about different approaches to therapy because different techniques work for different people. This is something you need to bear in mind particularly when you are working with people who have had therapy before.

To wrap up section seven we are combining humanism and CBT so you can understand how you would use the methods and technique in practice. Everything we learn links back to helping clients.

While we have been looking at different types of therapy and psychological approaches, there are actually different types of CBT. They each have their own benefits and will suit a range of clients.

CBT has developed out of the history of psychology so we need to take the past into account when understanding what it is today. It can be used for a variety of different purposes.

Lots of different people contributed to CBT. In this lesson we are going to look at Ellis’ contribution of REBT. This has its own model and focuses on the belief system.

Ellis’ ABC model expands to allow clients to take back control of their thoughts and following behaviour. Our ability to make conscious choices is really life changing.

Irrational beliefs often need to be dealt with for clients to be able to move forward. Understanding how they have formed and why they aren’t helpful can help with this process.

Beck’s contribution to CBT is CRT. He created his own triad and also takes into account the impact of irrational beliefs. His focus is more on the meanings we put on events which triggers a certain emotional response.

Uses the CRT principles, there are techniques you can try in sessions with clients that help them overcome irrational beliefs and have a more appropriate response to events.

The next type of CBT is attributional therapy. This helps clients to consciously consider meaning instead of automatically relying on belief systems that are often faulty. It gives clients tools to work with.

SIT is the final type of CBT. It introduces the client to new ways of thinking. This allows clients to reduce stress responses as they become comfortable with the different outcomes they could experience.

According to the psychodynamic theory, our ego has defence mechanisms it uses to protect us. We may not even realise these are happening as it is an automatic reaction.

You need to be able to tell whether a defence mechanism is actually helping a client cope or if it is just suppressing their problems. A little humour is helpful but using it too much can prevent clients from processing trauma.

Often irrational thinking is brought up in therapy. This is because a lot of difficulties can be improved by changing how clients interpret the world around them. They might have got into unhelpful thinking patterns because it made sense before but it is no longer relevant.

Errors in thinking aren’t beneficial for clients or the people interacting with them. It always puts their experience in a negative light and negativity is hard to live with.

There are various ways you can help clients overcome errors in thinking. You could take a behavioural, relaxation or cognitive approach. Make it work for individual clients.

So you understand how to apply the information you have just learnt, we are going through three example exercises.They are all designed to help clients challenge their errors in thinking.

We are continuing to look at errors in thinking and how they can be improved. This time we are exploring thought forms and the positive impact they can have on the wellbeing of clients.

Errors in thinking can be challenged by finding contradictory evidence through experiments. Assumptions and negative predictions can be disproven fairly easily this way.

Surveys are the kind of experiments that will provide evidence for creating accurate perceptions. They do need to be conducted in a certain way though so they don’t cause more problems than they solve.

A lot of the things that clients do that are unhealthy happen automatically. They aren’t even questioned. Making conscious decisions is really important and awareness exercises can help with this.

To wrap up section ten, we are going step by step through an awareness exercise so you are prepared to do it with clients. It is a process you’ll need to practice to get used to but it is effective.