Towards Empowerment: Narrative Study of Counselling Psychology Trainees and How They Make Sense of Their Personal and Professional Development in the Context of Their Past Experiences

The discipline of counselling psychology continues to grow and change in response to social, economic and political pressures. It has been argued that its quest for a coherent and distinct identity, which emphasises the possibility of the coexistence of multiple approaches, creates an inherently uncertain and dilemmatic training environment that may hinder the development of trainees’ professional identities. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the issue at hand, the aim was to explore how final year trainees and newly qualified counselling psychologists constructed and made sense of their emerging professional identities and what experiences, past and present, they drew upon in the context of their training to shape those identities. Applying narrative inquiry to analyse eight open-ended interviews, eight preliminary themes were originally identified in participants’ narratives, which with further refinements lead to stories of struggle and marginalisation, growth and discovery, and power and resilience. Participants’ stories of struggle and marginalisation emerged in reference to early family dynamics and stressful life experiences, which seemed to also foster a strong identification with the counselling psychology profession, while stories of growth and discovery focused on the importance of having supportive figures, who helped to instill a sense of security and create an atmosphere of openness. It was in this learning environment that participants felt it was possible to develop a more resilient, empowered professional self, which allowed them to shed an earlier sense of struggle and vulnerability. However, where more of an emphasis was placed on power and resilience, there seemed to be less room for participants to express other feelings that came into conflict with their preferred sense of professional self. While there seems to be a need for a ‘safer’ climate, in which trainees could voice and acknowledge anxieties, vulnerabilities and limitations, addressing concerns around power and vulnerability that may be contributing to the silencing of particular voices and identities may be equally important if trainees are to develop coherent and distinct counselling psychologist identities.

Constructions of Clinical Psychology in Adult Mental Health: A Discursive Thematic Analysis

In face of the current economic-political changes facing the UK and its State institutions and of the new evidence about the impact of social inequality on human distress, this study attempts to understand the increasing practice of delivering psychological therapy by the British clinical psychology profession. A review of the critical histories of the profession in the UK identified the need for a more detailed study of the “history of the present” to reveal the discursive operations that construct professional practice. A discursive thematic analysis (DTA) based on the theoretical concepts of the late post-modern scholar Michel Foucault was used to explore public available documents produced by British clinical psychologists between 2010 and 2014. Two dominant professional discursive themes were identified: alternative and leadership. These themes were found to be supported by the discursive sub-themes of applied science, well-being, Cognitivism and therapy which align the aspiration of the profession with those of the State. The tension between the applied scientist and the therapist role - specifically the need to establish simultaneously the profession’s scientific credibility and its therapeutic abilities in order to respond to market pressures – showed recurrences of the conflicts of the early history of professionalization of clinical psychology. The positioning of clinical psychology against the use of functional psychiatric diagnosis and the challenges and opportunities identified by the opening of the NHS market to ‘any willing provider’ revealed how professional discourses operate to maintain the status quo. This study recommends that the socio-historical construction of the profession should be investigated further, in particular through the subjugated discourse identified here