Co-Counselling – Self Help – Self Empowerment
In a society where we’re encouraged from an early age to keep our feelings hidden and ‘under control’, our emotional and mental health can be sadly neglected. Co-counselling aims to redress that balance, providing an effective self-help method to manage the stresses of our everyday lives, to explore our feelings in a safe environment and better understand ourselves and those around us.
Co-counselling at its most basic is a method of working through the issues in your life with one other person: your co-counselling partner. After an agreed amount of time as ‘client’, you switch roles (you become the ‘counsellor’ and the ‘counsellor’ becomes the client) and reverse the process. Both counsellor and client are similarly trained, leading to a relationship of equals. The counsellor is not ‘in control’ of the process – refreshingly, it is the client that is in charge! As client you decide what you want to work on and how, which of the counsellor’s suggestions to take up (and which to ignore) and what pace you want to work at.
In this certificated course you will be given a set of tools or ‘interventions’, which you can use while ‘clienting’ or offer as counsellor. Successful completion of this course means you become a member of the London Co-Counselling Community (receiving free membership for a year and subscription to its email newsletter, Open Space). You can then set up co-counselling sessions, for free, with any other member of the worldwide Co-Counselling International (CCI) network (you can even do co-counselling on skype!) You can also join a local co-counselling peer group and take part in a range of co-counselling workshops and community events.
Co-counselling
can become a lifelong self-maintenance programme, a means of
maintaining mental and emotional equilibrium and discovering new and
wonderful things about the wonderful person that is YOU!
See
also the CCI UK website, CCI network site, and the CCI World News
Service for a flavour of what co-counselling is all about. You can also
sign up to the London Co-Counselling Community enewsletter for news of
related events and information.
Facilitated by ALAN MARGOLIS – Accredited by Co-Counselling International