Getting Started in Co-Counselling

Julian Briggs 1999

Co-Counselling is ...

• a powerful tool for personal development
• an effective method of stress managment
• a training in emotional competence
• a gentle way of peer support
• a system of self-discovery

It offers lots of ways to help you change

For example you might want to:

• feel more alive, in your body and in the world
• feel more confident, connected and happy
• spend less time feeling anxious, irritated or hurt
• let go of rigid, repetitive, negative thinking
• enrich your friendships
• get on better with your Mum and Dad
• stop shouting at the kids
• become more self-directed
• improve your relationships, home, work ...
• or appreciate them more as they are

Co-counselling helps you do this by:

• affirming your qualities and skills
• clarifying what you want in your life and how to make it happen
• releasing anxieties, hurts and irritations which limit you

Who is it for?

Co-counselling is for people who are managing their lives satisfactorily and can give attention to someone else for a while. It may be for you if you:

• want to open up and make changes in your life
• can set aside your own problems whilst in the role of counsellor
• can remain self-directed in the role of client
• are not be dependent on psycho-active drugs

Learn co-counselling

An excellent way is to take a co-counselling training courses with a co-counselling teacher. The listings on the web are incomplete, so its worth contacting one of the Co-Counselling contacts who can give you details of local courses and active teachers.

Courses are a minimum of 40 hours often spread over weekends, or weekly evening classes. Most are run privately by co-counselling teachers but increasingly they are run through colleges. Cost varies enormously, this year charges have ranged from £9 (for a student on benefit attending a training run through a college) to £200 for a small private group.

Co-counselling courses are experiential (you learn by trying things out). Typically the teacher introduces ideas and ways of working in co-counselling, participants then try these out in a short session, and we hear how that went and answer questions about it. Courses are a good way to experience a variety of styles of clienting and counselling and of meeting co-counselling partners. They are sometimes intense, often fun and occasionally life-changing. (An example fundamentals of co-counselling workshop.)

If you cannot attend a course, you may learn one-to-one from an experienced co-counsellor but you miss some of the breadth, depth, fun, intensity of a course and meeting fellow co-counsellors. Again one of the Co-Counselling contacts may be able to help.

After learning co-counselling

Find a co-counselling partner:

• someone on your training course
• join a co-counselling network (most have membership lists and newsletters)
• ask a co-counselling contact

Co-counsel one-to-one

Try having sessions with several different people, styles vary and you may find you feel more comfortable or work more effectively with some people than others. Some co-counsellors work with the same partner regularly for years, some just fix sessions when they feel the need, some go to workshops...

Go to workshops

These gatherings of co-counsellors may be a day, a weekend or a week. The residential ones can be very exciting, stimulating and inspiring. Much of my deepest work has been in sessions at long workshops.

Find out more

• visit co-counselling websites
• join a co-counselling mailing list
• read co-counselling manuals and related books

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