Professor McLeod said towards the end of his article that he guessed 90 per cent of readers would disagree with him. I am respectfully, but very certainly, one of them! What has bothered me increasingly in recent years is not where the distinction falls between psychotherapy and counselling, but that that is the only distinction that people seem to make. Everything that isn’t ‘psychotherapy’ comes under the umbrella of ‘counselling’ with no acknowledgment of the huge differences between the various counselling approaches.
 
When I did my training, not that many years ago, people would ask were you a person-centred or psychodynamic counsellor? There was debate around that time as to whether approaches like CBT, SFBT and other more cognitive or behavioural orientations should really be described as ‘counselling’ at all because they were very different in their focus and length. Now it often feels as though counsellors who work in the ‘old-fashioned’ way should no longer be described as counsellors.
 
I am a counsellor, not a psychotherapist. My qualification is in counselling. But skills, strengths, strategies, achievement of tasks (tasks?), developing a structured programme – these concepts are totally removed from the way I work.
 
I work with transference and counter-transference; I work only in private practice; I work almost entirely long term (and at the moment entirely online). I never set contracts for a specific number of sessions – the client and I work together until we both feel that she or he has got as far as they can for the moment; I work deeply, with much emphasis on the unconscious.
 
McLeod believes that many counsellors are really functioning as ‘brand name’ psychotherapists, and ‘are not interested in developing a more collaborative, contextualised, pluralistic and socially-oriented way of working.’ He seems to be suggesting that we should forget half of what we have learned, abandon half of our skills and merge with the majority, doing work that we are ill-fitted to do.
 

 

Sue Whitlock, MBACP (Snr Accred)