Courses

AN INTRODUCTION TO ONLINE COUNSELLING

By

Gill Jones

Saturday 10th September 2011

The need for online counselling has increased dramatically over the last 15 years and since the mid 1990s, the Samaritans have been offering an email service alongside their better known telephone service. This way of working is increasingly popular with clients who work or live in remote areas, who have problems with public transport or where few counsellors are available.  It is also useful for clients with a disability or mobility problems or those that cannot commit to ongoing face to face sessions because of work arrangements.

If you are thinking about adding online counselling to your practice or interested in learning more about this way of working the workshop will help you consider what you will need to do this. It offers you a whistle-stop tour of the world of online counselling plus opportunities to try your skills as an online counsellor with another workshop participant.

This training day will give you an opportunity to experience what it’s like to be in both the counsellor and the client roles, working primarily with text, and is designed to help both the convinced and the unconvinced explore how it might feel to work online without the usual visual and verbal cues.

Gill Jones MA, MBACP (Sen. Accredited Counsellor) has more than 20 years’ experience of counselling. Her MA focused on the training and supervision of counsellors and psychotherapists.   She began her online counselling practice nearly 10 years ago and has been training others to work online since  April 2001.   As course director for On-Line Training for Counsellors Ltd., Gill co-authored, with fellow director Anne Stokes,  a book about online counselling (“Online Counselling:  A Handbook for Practitioners” pub. Palgrave, 2009) which sets out their accumulated experience of training, supervising and practising online counselling.