Co-counselling - General Description

General Description

The main activity in co-counselling involves participants arranging to meet regularly in pairs to give each other peer-to-peer counselling, in turn taking the role of counsellor and client, with equal amounts of time allocated to each. Co-counselling functions by giving people an opportunity to work on whatever issues they choose with the accepting support of another person, with whom they have no actual relationship. The person in the role of counsellor acts a facilitator to the client, sometimes as third-party observer and sometimes as second-party confidant. While co-counselling is sometimes practiced outside a formal organisation, formal co-counselling organisations have developed leadership and support structures, including trainings and retreats.

Safety (in the sense of being very low risk) and the sense that a co-counselling session is a safe space is important to the methods. There are strict rules of confidentiality. In most circumstances, the counsellor may not talk about a client's session without explicit and specific permission by the client. This is stricter than in other practices where practitioners discuss clients with supervisors, colleagues and sometimes with all sorts of other people. The peer relationship makes a considerable contribution to a sense of trust.

The nature of the co-counselling session opens up the possibility for people to get in touch with emotions that they would avoid in any other circumstance. A belief in the value of working with emotions has become a core focus of the approach. Co-counselling training emphasizes methods for accessing and working with emotions, and co-counsellors aim to develop and improve emotional competence through the practice. Evidence as to the actual effectiveness of this method is undemonstrated.

To get involved in co-counselling, it is usually first necessary to complete a course in The Fundamentals of Co-Counselling. The training involves learning how to carry out the roles of client and counselor. Trainers may be counsellors or simply experienced members of the community. It also covers the guidelines or rules affecting co-counselling for the particular organization. Differences in approach mean that each organization normally requires completion of one of its own courses as a prerequisite for membership, even if someone has already completed a course with another organization.