Foundations in Counselling and Spiritual Care Practice for Helping Professional

This course will combine lectures with experiential learning to provide helping professionals with the foundational skills of building rapport, empathic listening, effective questioning, interviewing and responding skills, structuring a session, and spiritual care giving. The students will practice the skills of building the therapeutic relationship based on Person-Centered, Family Systems and Psychodynamic theories. We will explore active and passive listening/responding skills alongside of safe and effective use of self in the therapeutic relationship. The course will also address the need for students to understand how to offer multi-cultural support and on-line counselling. The principles of documentation in a variety of settings (congregational, private practice, healthcare) will be discussed. Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (a goal-directed collaborative approach to psychotherapeutic change), a Constructivist theory, will be explored and the skills of solution-focused therapy will be applied in small groups. The sensitive integration of spiritually-oriented questions into the therapeutic conversation will be discussed as well as spiritual care interventions and practices that promote healing and wholeness. And finally, students will develop introductory skills in group facilitation.