Online Counselling Course

Whether you want to become a fully qualified counsellor or you simply wish to learn basic counselling skills our online correspondence course in counselling will get you started, Just add your email address to the right and instantly receive part 1 of your free mini course delivered weekly over 5 weeks.

Before we move on I just wanted to share with you what 25 years of experience has taught me is important to any successful counselor. And that would be that you are naturally open minded, with a warm hearted personality, a strong sense of integrity and a firm basis in ethical standards. - And with an equally good intuition, ability to listen& really listen to others - to the person in front of you who is seeking your help. Because your ability to listen to whoever you seek to help and your compassionate empathy is far more important than trying to use some fancy technique.

Now we will move onto a few of the common pitfalls you must overcome before you can really do quality counselling. For example; if you are not aware of your own personal issues they will likely become your blind spots in the counselling situation; because sooner or later they will interfere with your objectivity.

You risk to be helplessly identifying with and drawn into your clients conflicts and subjective world, manipulated in all sorts of power games. Or as an opposite example - YOU may risk to impose your own solutions and ideas on your client, because you believe that you know better, because that would be right for YOU if you were in his or her shoes.

And if you are not aware of your own personal issues and how they are amplified and even interfering with your counselling, you may risk to become burnt out, sooner or later.

Thats why it is so important to know and practice the guidelines for professional conduct, such as confidentiality, respect for your client, readiness to refer a client on to someone else if you are not skilled enough to treat a particular problem, and so on.

One of my favorite analogies that I love to tell my students because it illustrates things perfectly is if you want to vacuum the house, you must first have clean soles on your shoes. No matter how good you are at vacuuming, what strategy you have; it doesnt matter if your dirt keeps colouring what your trying to clean. ~ Erik Sandersen, Teacher, Counselor & Co Author of this Online Counselling Course

Now can you imagine how this applies to counselling? What if your client is having relationship issues and youve just broken up with your husband or wife?

I remember once in Denmark, when I was working in my private practice: At a certain stage I noticed a surprisingly repetitive phenomenon - that most of my clients appeared to be tired, and that I therefore found myself recommending them, one after another, to let go for a while and have a holiday until it dawned on me, that it was ME, who needed a holiday! Consequently I went on a holiday, a wonderful fortnight in Greece, and came back absolutely refreshed& and I no longer saw this repetitive pattern in my clients.~ Ulla Sandersen, M.A. Psych, MAPS Co Author of this Online Counselling Course

In short these and other basic guidelines in counselling is what is being taught in the first part of the online counselling course.

So far, weve covered projections indirectly and as you read more Ill tell you more about them specifically because at the heart of counselling lies understanding not only your clients projections but also your own; so because projections are one of the irrefutable constants in human nature no online counselling course would be complete without covering projections in intricate detail.

In fact, if you did nothing more than help a client notice and own their own projections you would already be better than many of counselors out there. Why? Because at the heart of almost all arguments lie projections. We know its a big statement, so weve backed it up with a couple of examples you may find have an amazing resemblance to situations youve witnessed or experienced.

Example #1

Youve had someone you really didnt like, maybe even hated, yet a third person who both of you knew was unbiased told you how much you were like or how much you had in common with the person you really disliked.

This probably annoyed you, maybe you even tried to argue against it… or maybe this hasnt happened to you but you can think of a situation where youve been the third neutral party and youve observed it in friends, family, workmates or acquaintances.

This is a projection, because many times when you see something you dislike in someone else youre actually just observing some of your own qualities that you unconsciously have, yet are unwilling to confront.

Example #2

How many times, when you think about it, have you had a situation where you really thought a friend or a relative was being too harsh on themselves, or not taking responsibility for their actions when if you think about it now you can see the same characteristics in yourself?

Ill rephrase this, do you tend to say things like Im not smart enough, Im stupid and I could never do that& however when you hear a friend or relative say something similar youre the opposite No I think youre a really smart person, stop being so hard on yourself& or I really believe in you, just go for it and give it a shot&

Now maybe this applies to you, or maybe it doesnt quite, but if it does, can you now own that while what you hear from others that you think they should do in many cases is something similar that you need to do.

Carl Gustav Jung, the famous Swiss analyst, says simply that everything in the unconscious is projected. As a counselor you will find this to be true over and over again, and it is essential to know techniques to work with peoples projections in ways that are both sensitive and effective. We begin covering projections extensively in the free online counselling course.

Archetypes; what they are, why they are important to anyone wanting to be a counselor and how we teach you about them.

You will find we teach some topics which you may not immediately relate to counselling, this is because this course is more than just an online counselling course. It offers at the same time topics that help you to expand your way of thinking in new directions, to be flexible, and to associate and combine in ways that gives you the opportunity to span over wider horizons. In our classes over the years here at Starbridge Centre we have got the feedback that these additional topics have been inspiring and added more depth and dimension to the counselling.

Let us here describe some these topics a bit more: We have included mythology, primarily the Greek myths about the twelve star signs of the zodiac with all their eternal heroes, villains, dramas, and so on. That is because they reflect the archetypes, the dynamic structures lying in the depths of our psyche, which over time have almost developed a life of their own, and which, if we do not have any understanding of them, will precondition our lives quite a lot from underneath. The archetypes are very difficult to get in contact with from the mind alone; they can be described indirectly through myths, reflecting typical patterns of what it means to be a human being. These unconscious archetypes can be recognized in lots of real problems that clients present in the consulting room, such as relationship problems, gender issues, self image, and problems with authority figures, goals and priorities. Myths are not there to be analyzed; they are there to offer a supplementary, intuitive bridge into the unconscious.

So how do you deal with Trauma Counselling and Crisis Counselling?

Before we begin, a warning: DO NOT work with any serious trauma from the teaching in this online course alone! You will have to know much more about it, have trained it and been followed closely by a competent, professional supervisor before you can safely deal with a client with a serious trauma or personal issue.

With that warning, what is a trauma? Our definition of a trauma is anything that drastically exceeds the flexibility of the mind.

Traumas are sometimes very subjective; what is a trauma associated with mortal danger for one person may be insignificant for someone else. We once had a client who was in real shock because she had just heard that her husband in two years time would risk loosing his income. Other traumas can be of a nature that you as the counselor may feel traumatized by merely listening to them.

This means that an incompetent counselor can add further damage, even cause an irreparable nervous break down, deep depression or even worse. Be careful. Our online course covers the topic of crisis and trauma counselling, and post traumatic stress disorder syndrome (PTSD) in a way that will help you to get an basic overall understanding, enough tools to be an first aider if you find yourself in the situation that you are the only one present to help a person in acute shock or sitting with a client who is uncovering an old trauma. Again we must stress that well give you the information you need, however NO online counselling course can give you the experience and skills to actually deal with a serious case. You must attend a workshop or seek supervision with an experienced professional for that.

You cannot touch trauma counselling without also touching the drug and alcohol issue, which we have extensive training in, since Erik was a senior counselor at Addcare for a year before moving on to start our own practice when we first arrived in Australia.

The reasons why people are on drugs or are alcoholics are as varied as people; there are a couple of general observations though because it seems as if drug abuse often happens in people with a unbalanced or unconscious spiritual longing, while the issues behind alcohol abuse more often are personal loneliness and inferiority type issues.

We could easily keep talking about everything thats important to you as a counselor, and move onto things such as reading body language, power games, being grounded and helping your client to ground themselves and naturally we will be covering these topics in depth during our online counselling course.

However, since that would take many hundred pages, and since you are still reading this you would probably prefer to get this material in a more accessible format.

And weve listened, just add your name and email address below and well send you a lesson each week for the next 5 weeks starting the very instant you hit the submit button.

Ok, So you are giving me a free online counselling course? There has to be a catch, what is it?

Absolutely. We are giving you a basic online counselling course because we just want to get you started in your journey to become a better counselor. As for the catch; there is no catch, you dont owe us a cent, we wont give out your contact details to anyone and you can remove yourself completely from our database with a single mouse click.

That said, we admit we do have invested interests. We want to provide you the best possible correspondence counselling course we can in the hope that you tell your friends about us, and that you find our material of such value that you continue to use us for your further studies within this exciting field.

And we also expect a few things from you. Since were giving you a large part of what weve spent many years perfecting completely free of charge we ask you to show us the same respect and tell us exactly what you think.

We've spent years improving and changing this material each and every year we ran our diploma course and were not about to stop. So if you want to know anything, if anything wasn't completely clear cut we ask you to let us know so we can make this even better still.