My name is Dr Emma Gray, and I'm the Lead Clinical Psychologist at the British CBT & Counselling
Service. And in this video, I'm going to explain what
happens in the first counselling session. The prospect of starting counselling can be
quite daunting, but sometimes, if we know what to expect, it can take the edge off our
nerves a little bit. The point of the first session is for your
counsellor, or therapist, to understand your version of the problem—so your version
of anxiety, depression, the eating disorder. They will have seen other people with those
problems, but to properly help you, they need to know the specific details of your problem.
You need to be quite careful here because you don't want to just go to somebody who
is doing the same thing with everybody—offering an 'off-the-shelf' treatment—it's not going
to work. It needs to be individually tailored to what you need. So to do this, to individually
tailor the counselling to you, your therapist should ask you a selection of questions.
There are usually four types of questions. The first type of question is so that the
therapist can understand the severity of your symptoms—so they will ask you to describe
them, and what makes them better, and what makes them worse.
They will then move on to looking at the history of those symptoms; when did they develop,
what was happening around that time? They will ask you about similar problems that you
might have experienced in the past. And here, they're starting to try and understand why
you have these problems—why they developed in the first place.
The third type of question is building on the 'why' question—why you have these problems.
So they will ask more general questions about your life, friends, family, work, hobbies—these
sorts of things. And then finally, they will ask you a little
bit about the things that you've already tried. So maybe the professional help that you've
already tried, or maybe just some of the stuff you've tried at home, some of the things you’ve
read on the internet. And here, they're trying to think about, work out, what type of treatment
would be best for you—because different things suit different people.
Then, using all of this information, they will offer you an explanation for why this
is happening to you, and why it hasn't just gone away on its own. And then they'll give
you a plan of action, so what they're going to do, what you will do together, to make
things better—to make you start feeling, or to help you start feeling well again, to
feel like yourself again. In this first session, there also should be
plenty of opportunities for you to ask questions—and, you know, whatever questions you need to ask
to make yourself feel comfortable. It might be about the therapist themselves—their
experience. It might be about the different types of treatment. It might be questions
about things that you've read on the internet. So that's basically what you can expect in
the first session. Hopefully, I've answered all of the questions that you had, but if
I haven't, please post them in the comments below, and I will do my best to answer them.
In the next video, I'm going to talk about different types of therapy—in particular,
CBT. On this channel, I talk about everything to
do with mental health and therapy. So, if this is something that would interest you,
please subscribe, like the video, and share it with your friends.
I'll see you soon.