The Pragmatic Counselling Series (PCS) teaches counsellors at any stage in their career how to treat most people most of the time. In an era of increasingly specialized modalities, the PCS is a foundation series that students can implement today. Each of the 6 courses can be taken as part of the entire series, or as a standalone. The PCS is delivered in its entirety over the course of ~6 months.
Course Format
Synchronous Online
Certificate Level
Completion
Each course is 18 hours of teaching time, spread over four days. The first 2 days are 6 hour interactive workshops, designed to learn new material. The third and fourth days are each
3-hour seminars and group supervision sessions organized to implement the materials learned.
Cost
The cost of an individual course is $775. 15% discount for groups of 3 or more & for CityU Alumni
Courses
The Discipline: The Modern Stance
Dates: Nov 17, 18, 24, Dec. 1
Effective counsellors work with confidence, authenticity, and ease. Their techniques
feel like an extension of themselves and their interventions are supercharged,
because clients respond to clarity and genuineness.
This course offers a systematic method for building internal clinical alignment, no
matter who you are. Imagine feeling conviction and clarity in your clinical technique.
Imagine feeling a clear direction towards the approaches that “fit”. Imagine
transforming multi-modal eclecticism into a coherent practice in your own unique
voice. Clients can feel the difference.
In “The Stance” you will learn to:
- Understand how our beliefs and experiences interact—positively/productivelyor negatively/counter-productively—with various clinical treatments;
- Uncover your personal alignment and create a clinical practice that ischaracterized by a feeling of flow;
- Alleviate clinical insecurity and demonstrate courage, confidence, presence,and ease to your clients;
- Reconcile your deeply held political, philosophical, and spiritual viewpoints
- with your clinical style.
The Counsellor: Developing the Self
Dates: Jan 12, 13, 19, 26
Being an effective counsellor requires therapists to have the personal capacity to engage in hard conversations hour after hour, year after year. This course is about more than self care, it’s about a journey towards therapeutic self-mastery. Students will begin with personal care needs and practices, but the course quickly expands to tackle emotional capacity, therapeutic neutrality and attachment, therapeutic discernment and choice, lived experience and self disclosure, and uncertainty and insecurity. Students will learn precisely how and why to orient themselves to the ordinary difficulties of counselling therapy in ways that are maximally effective. They will learn a process for navigating these personal tensions against the highest ideals of the job and our fiduciary relationship to the client.
Talk Therapy: Mastering Therapeutic Language
Dates: Feb 9, 10, 16, 23
Imagine the capacity to create change if every word in therapy was understood to be an intervention?
More and more therapeutic practices rely on noncognitive parts of experience: the somatic, the emotional, the affective, and so on. But despite changing content, counselling therapy is bound by language. This course goes beyond narrative therapy to teach therapists to leverage this embeddedness in language.
In this course students will learn the special grammar and syntax therapists use, how to use language to constitute things instead of just representing them, how to modulate even content that appears factual, and how to use the power of speech acts to create powerful change. Students will learn to make every utterance an intervention and will learn the surprising capacity of the best therapists to hold reality fluidly.
Therapeutic Problems: Common Factors
Dates: March 8, 9, 15, 22
Are our various problems in living and illness experiences really so different from each other to need entirely unique psychological theories and intervention approaches?
In this course, students will learn about therapeutic problems in their common forms, rather than by their distinct content. Becoming a capable general practitioner requires counsellors to collaborate with clients not only on solutions, but on the creation of the very problems that bring them to counselling originally. Students will learn this hidden skill and from there will learn about the oscillations between simplification and “complexification,” the critical differences between disease and illness (and the role of diagnostics), how to expand problem-solutions laterally to encompass more territory, and how to deepen problems to take clients from micro-solutions into macro-projects.
The Lifespan of the Therapeutic Relationship
Dates: April 5, 6, 12, 19
How do you carry therapeutic relationships into the future?
Even the most willing clients need different things at different points in the therapeutic relationship. This course will explore each major phase of the therapeutic relationship to give students the confidence to know what to do in Session 1, Session 5, and Session 25.
Students will begin by learning about the construction of a caseload, and from this essential structure, the course will provide you with the diverse skills needed during different phases. Beginning with intakes, students will learn about developing something that has become a bedrock of practice at Nightingale Counselling, namely A Welcoming Practice. From there, students will learn to attach larger therapeutic projects to presenting problems, sustaining and building motivations to change through the arc of the process. Finally, students will learn about transitioning from solution- and change-based therapies into the relational work that defines longer term client engagement.
The Client: Entry Points for the Whole of the Client
Dates: May 3, 4, 10, 17
Most psycho-therapeutic modalities focus on single aspects of clients, which limit their access to “the whole of the client.” Somatic therapists privilege what they think of as “the body.” CBT therapists focus on cognitions. EFT therapists are most interested in the emotional lives of their clients. Etc.
In this course students will learn 11 entry points to client problems. The course begins with an overview of experience and subjectivity as gateways into the therapeutic encounter. We will address the contributions of various specializations — including CBT, EFT, AEDP, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and Depth Psychology — as defining and implementing diverse points. We will then problematize the notion of specialization from humanistic/posthumanistic and decolonizing perspectives.
The course then moves into a detailed exploration of both the theory and application of 11 “Entry Points.” Participants will learn how, why, and when to probe across these diverse spectra of human experience and will develop an understanding of the meanings to expect from these distinct orders of information. At the end of the course, participants will have gained a broad, non specialized toolkit that can serve as a sound foundation for any client with any problem.