theories – Iain Douglas Stewart

L3CiCS Reflective Diary – 25th June 2020

By Iain 25 June 2020Qualifications courseworkNo Comments

So that’s that then. Last night I got an email from the college saying that our internal and external assessments have been submitted to the CPCAB for a calculated grade. Our tutor had already told us that we would all pass. Now that our final grade is being calculated, between a pass and a fail, there is no need to…

L3CiCS Learning Log – 29th May 2020

By Iain 8 May 2020Qualifications courseworkNo Comments

Limits of proficiency are, as they sound, the limits to which a counsellor can work. Once again, boundaries are important. People come to counselling for an incredibly wide range of reasons, and not all counsellors are fully trained in all aspects of counselling. A counsellor’s initial training is the foundation which can be built upon as they gain professional experience…

L3CiCS Learning Log – 10th April 2020

By Iain 10 April 2020Qualifications courseworkNo Comments

The purpose of this piece of work is to examine what is meant by research and how it informs and supports counselling work. What is research? Research is a lot of different things depending on the context. Pure research is more like exploring and finding out more information about something. Applied research is directed by a hypothesis or the desire…

L3CiCS Homework – 10th April 2020

By Iain 10 April 2020Qualifications courseworkNo Comments

This week, as an introduction to the everyday use of research, we were asked to brainstorm how we would research buying a car. Quite handily, I have been researching buying a car for a while now, so the ideas should flow quite easily. I may even discover more aspects of research that I could include in my car hunt. I…

L3CiCS Reflective Diary – 10th April 2020

By Iain 10 April 2020Qualifications courseworkNo Comments

Research is an interesting aspect of counselling and psychotherapy, and I think it is very important. It is essentially a sphere of knowledge that exists parallel to your own body of knowledge as a person and as a counsellor, and overlaps in places. Research, or “finding out what works” has created talking therapies and its different modalities and theories, and…

L3CiCS Reflective Diary – 6th March 2020

By Iain 6 March 2020Qualifications courseworkNo Comments

This week we split up into small groups to discuss case studies in a simulation of a peer-supervision group. The first case study I presented was a male in his mid-forties that had been suffering from a lack of direction and had several signs of being in the midst of a mid-life crisis. I related to the client a lot,…

L3CiCS Reflective Diary – 7th February 2020

By Iain 7 February 2020Qualifications courseworkNo Comments

This week we split up into small groups to discuss how we could use counselling theory to understand our own personal history, and to reflect on what we have learned about the theories so far to help understand events in our life, and our responses to those events. Studying theory has definitely made me fully aware of how the past…

L3CiCS Reflective Diary 31st January 2020

By Iain 31 January 2020Qualifications courseworkNo Comments

This week we looked at why theory is important in counselling work. Through a group discussion we identified several key aspects of why it is important, and I was quite surprised by the amount we came up with. First though, I think it’s important that I reflect on what is meant by the word “theory”. A theory is generally a…

L3CiCS Reflective Diary – 17th January 2020

By Iain 17 January 2020Qualifications courseworkNo Comments

To solidify our learning and get an idea of how it is practically applied, it would be useful to take our knowledge of the three theories we have studied so far and apply it to a range of presenting problems. As I mentioned the last time we used these case studies (22nd November, when we were applying SMART goals to…

L3CiCS Reflective Diary – 10th January 2020

By Iain 10 January 2020Qualifications courseworkNo Comments

Over the past few weeks we’ve been learning about three very different counselling theories – Person-centred counselling, Psychodynamic counselling and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) – with very different methods, glossaries and philosophies that ultimately all work towards the same goal, which is helping people. They each offer a different language, and a different way of understanding our personality or self,…