This core integrative module will enable students to review and build upon their previous and current learning and experience across the fields of psychology, counselling and psychotherapy, and consider how to develop a dialogue between this learning/experience and Christian theological understandings of human beings.

Students will be enabled to critically review theological and practical issues relevant to the Waverley Integrative Framework of Counselling and their own developing personal integrative philosophy of counselling.  They will also be assisted to reflect to the person of the counsellor, and of the therapeutic relationship as a means to further integration for the person of the client, and their own ongoing journey in the areas.

This module is designed to deepen the student’s understanding of the Systemic Therapy approach and to develop awareness of clinical interventions with families, couples and individuals.  The module will assist students to critically review the body of knowledge of Family and Systemic Psychotherapy (FSP).

This module builds on students’ previous training and clinical experience, and looks at common areas of potential struggle, avoidance, blocks, ruptures and difficulty relevant to counselling practice.  It is intended to offer students a supportive yet challenging setting to expand and deepen their capacity to learn, reflect, practise and work clinically in these areas.

Supervision is a formal arrangement for counselling practitioners to discuss and evaluate their work with someone who is external to the counselling relationship in order to maintain the standards of therapy.  The overall aim of this module is to equip students with the necessary skills, knowledge and professional development to enable them to provide competent supervision to counsellors in clinical practice.

The counselling profession recognises that practitioners are expected to have gained approximately 350 hours of client work before commencing supervision training.  This is therefore an optional module and students will be required to provide evidence that they have reached the level of clinical experience necessary in order to undertake this module.

This module aims to build on and deepen the students’ previous learning and experience of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.  The module will enable students to gain an in-depth understanding and critical awareness of the skills and strategies utilised in CBT for a variety of psychological disorders and recognise the complexity of their use in the clinical setting.  In addition, this module will assist students to critically review the body of the knowledge of CBT.

This module builds on students’ previous learning and their client experience.  Since issues of trauma, abuse and dissociation are quite common in counselling clients and may not always be apparent at assessment, this is an important area in which all counsellors require awareness, knowledge and skills.  This module is designed to assist the student critically develop their knowledge base: theory, approaches and skills.  For some counsellors, trauma, abuse and/or dissociation are or have been personally significant, but by this stage in their development, the risks of training and working in more depth in this area should be balanced by more highly developed self-awareness and mature self-care.

Counselling and psychotherapy practice requires adaptability to work across cultures.  Those from minority cultures may be more likely to face socioeconomic and other difficulties, which sometimes make them more vulnerable and more likely to seek counselling.  In most settings counsellors will regularly need to work across cultures with clients and/or in supervision, and in some settings, such in work with refugees and displaced persons, transcultural work may predominate.  Additionally, particularly in Christian contexts, travel to or return from volunteer or mission work contexts sited among other cultures with whom they may have strongly identified, sometimes in unplanned ways, may create particular difficulties which may benefit from counselling.  This module therefore aims to build on and deepen the trainee’s previous learning, experience and reflection in this area, to build their transcultural competence.

This module enables the student to build on their knowledge and clinical practice by framing a research question of interest and relevance to them personally.  It requires them to build on their knowledge and understanding of research methods, their advantages and limits, in order to evaluate the literature, choose an appropriate methodology and carry out a substantial empirical research project at the forefront of the field of counselling and psychotherapy.  The student will critically assess and form a systemic understanding of the knowledge base in the subject area in a literature review, and demonstrate how their research relates and contributes to this.