Counselling courses: Advice for disabled applicants
The following information has been taken from the University of
Leicester website.
A student with a disability wishing to apply to the School of
Psychotherapy & Counselling Psychology may find its
contents helpful:
Effective competent counsellors need
considerable knowledge and skill, but everything revolves around
their ability to make, sustain and end sound, reliable therapeutic
relationships. Such relationships are at times hugely
demanding.
Clients/patients can present with a
multitude of difficulties, can bombard the counsellor with all
kinds of demands, may be abusive, seductive, angry, distraught or
manipulative: the counsellor must maintain a relationship and
withstand whatever they encounter.
People can develop a capacity to sustain
such relationships and do this work, but it takes time, dedication,
motivation, openness and sufficient self-esteem and emotional
responsiveness to bear the challenges that training throws
up.
Counsellor training
Counsellor training always involves experiential work,
interacting with others in roleplay and actual client work.
It involves group work in which individual weaknesses and
vulnerabilities are often revealed and worked with. Students
give and receive support from others, which is essential to a safe
learning environment.
The learning experience will often feel
unsafe, as all aspects of an individual’s emotional world are laid
bare. It has to be like this, as each person must be prepared
to encounter the unknown world of their clients and be helpful to
the other, but survive themselves.
Prospective Students
For these reasons, we need to select prospective
students/trainees with care. We need to use our own
therapeutic skills and experience as therapists to make a judgement
about who will be able to withstand the demands of training and
ultimately withstand the demands of a therapeutic relationship as a
practitioner.
This is not a precise science, but two
tutors and a range of activities are used in the selection process
to give us the best possible opportunity to make that
judgement. Specific criteria for selection are used for each
of our courses, that differ slightly depending on the level of
study and intended learning outcomes.
Acceptance Criteria
These criteria have evolved as a result of our experience of
training counsellors and noting over the years factors that
influence the successful completion of our courses. If we
choose not to accept someone it is almost always because we do not
feel at this time that the individual can benefit from what we are
offering or because we are concerned that the training may expose
too many vulnerabilities and be damaging to them.
For these reasons we ask about mental health problems that
people have experienced. It is not a barrier to training that
people have had mental health problems in the past, that have been
resolved, but we think very carefully about applicants with current
health problems as the training may exacerbate their
difficulties.
The bottom line is ultimately the relationship with potential
clients and our decision is based on our judgement about the
ability of the individual to sustain such a relationship without
harming themselves or the other. We also have to consider the
dynamics of the training groups and we usually make the decision
not to have established couples of people who have a close
employment relationship in the same training group.
Advice for students with a mobility
disability
Classes are usually delivered in teaching rooms accessed via
stairs. If you have a condition that affects your mobility and you
require ground floor rooms, or rooms with lift access, please
notify Registry as soon as possible. You are also advised to
contact the Disability Officer.
Page last updated 1/7/2010