Psychological counseling training

The core logic of choosing psychological counseling training has never been "the certificate is valuable" and "it guarantees employment". It depends on "whether the course system matches your current ability, whether there are enough real case practices, and whether the instructor has no less than 1,000 hours of front-line case experience." The rest of the marketing gimmicks can be ignored directly.

Xiao Nan, a girl I met at an industry salon last year, had just graduated and wanted to change her career to be a consultant. The first thing she encountered was the certification trap. More than 20,000 people signed up for a training course that is said to be "internationally certified and applicable nationwide". There was a thick stack of recorded lessons in which the teacher recited concepts from PPT. After half a year of training, I didn't even know how to start a first consultation or how to react when a visitor cried. The certificate I got in the end couldn't even pass the resume test of a formal consultation center, let alone practice.

Many people who are just getting started don't know that the content of psychological counseling training is very different. The essence is that the practice logic of different schools is completely different. For example, most counselors who work in psychoanalysis/psychodynamics will agree that "you must first do at least a hundred hours of personal experience to get through your unfinished issues before you can catch the emotions of the visitor." This type of training is basically long-term starting from 2 years, and the tuition fee is more than 100,000 yuan. It also has fixed weekly experience and supervision fees. It is suitable for people who want to do long-term personality growth consulting and plan to work in the industry for a long time.

However, many practitioners who are engaged in cognitive behavioral (CBT) and short-term focused solution-oriented approaches will feel that novices do not need to spend so much money at the beginning: first learn standardized assessment frameworks and intervention techniques, receive basic cases of emotional distress and workplace stress, and supplement personal experience and in-depth courses while doing it, they can still be very professional. The CBT introductory class I enrolled in before was a half-year course with a tuition fee of less than RMB 8,000. Half of the time was spent practicing skills in groups, and the other half was spent on real-life public welfare cases in the community. After each class, the supervisor would go over the questions in the consultation records verbatim. When I took a case for the first time, my hand holding the pen was sweaty. After it was over, the supervisor smiled and nodded at me: "You are more nervous than the visitor. I just have a little insomnia, but you are making me panic." ”

If you are just starting out and don’t have a budget, you can first go for public welfare or affordable training offered by local mental health centers or university psychology departments. When I first entered the industry, I took a one-year basic course offered by the local Jingwei. I was only over 2,000 years old. The lecturers were all clinicians who received cases every day. There were not so many fancy marketing, and they were all about real-life assessment, ethics, and basic intervention content. It was much more useful than many packaging courses that cost tens of thousands of dollars.

There is actually no right or wrong in either statement. It all depends on your own career plan: if you want to take on complex cases such as trauma and personality disorders, long-term training and personal experience are definitely unavoidable hurdles.； If you just want to get started first, or plan to provide short-term services such as corporate EAP and youth emotional counseling, short- and medium-term technical training is much more cost-effective.

As for the "case and employment guaranteed" promoted by many organizations, don't believe it easily. I have seen "assigned cases" from many organizations before. They were either simulated exercises by fellow students or "supporters" hired by them. They could not even get close to the real visits. No matter how many times they practiced, they could not grasp the rhythm of real consultations. If you really want to judge whether the practical part of this training is reliable, you have to ask two questions: First, are the cases provided genuine visits? Second, is there any supporting supervision after the case is completed? If the other person's answer to these two questions is vague, then it can basically be crossed out.

It doesn’t mean that expensive training is an IQ tax. I know a counselor who does trauma intervention. The year before last, she spent 60,000 to sign up for a trauma training for mature counselors. The teacher was an expert who has been doing psychological assistance in disaster areas for more than ten years. During the class, she directly used real crisis intervention cases to practice. Even the details of how to communicate and how to make referrals when a visitor wants to commit suicide were meticulous. After she came back, her stability in handling trauma cases went to a new level. It was well worth the money. But there’s really no need for a novice to join in the fun. You haven’t even figured out the basic principles of confidentiality and ethical boundaries, and you won’t be able to use the advanced techniques you’ve learned. Otherwise, you might cause secondary harm to the visitors.

In fact, if you have been in this business for a long time, you will find that training is always just a stepping stone, and there is no magic lesson that "you can practice after studying". I have been working as a consultant for five to ten years. I spend tens of thousands of dollars on training and supervision every year. I make up for my shortcomings while taking on cases. There is never a day when I "learn enough."

After all, what you have to deal with are real people, not a fixed list of symptoms in a book. Those tiny emotions, sudden silences, and unspoken subtexts that cannot be learned in class are the most challenging and interesting part of this job.