Counselling and Psychotherapy as a Form of Learning: Some Implications for Practice
- Resource Type
- Journal Articles
Reports - Evaluative
- Authors
- Rose, Theresa; Loewenthal, Del; Greenwood, Dennis
- Source
- British Journal of Guidance & Counselling. Nov 2005 33(4):441-456.
- Subject
- Psychotherapy
Experiential Learning
Educational Practices
Counseling
Counseling Techniques
- Language
- English
- ISSN
- 0306-9885
This paper explores counselling and psychotherapy as a form of learning. Previous experiences may create distortions in meaning-making perspectives, distortions that create templates for evaluating future experience. These templates act as barriers to being open to experience; thus there is an inability to learn from experience. The process of therapy can provide a learning milieu for the exploration and working through of these barriers, with a potential outcome of a return to learning from experience. It is suggested here that intrinsic to the learning milieu created in therapy there are elements of significant, transformative and emotional learning. Therapy is thus a reparative discourse that facilitates a return to learning from experience. A deconstruction of this concept is provided here as a way of developing the exploration of counselling and psychotherapy as a form of learning.