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An Incomplete Guide to using Counselling Skills On the Telephone - Pete Saunders |
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"..on the telephone.
Pete Saunders (2007, 3rd edition)
The third edition of this book will be published almost fifteen years after the first. Communications technology has moved a long way in the intervening years; telephone helping has developed into a sophisticated branch of counselling and counselling skills, partly I hope, because the first two editions have been so popular.
Telephone helplines now have a thriving organisation, the Telephone Helplines Association, where they themselves can turn for advice and support. This really is a far cry from 1993, when many practitioners thought that the telephone should only be used to book appointments or as a method to entice the caller into the centre for the ‘real’ therapy, which took place face to face. Even in 2007, we still find some practitioners thinking that therapists should limit their use of email to such administrative support work.
There are new chapters and some of the old material has been re-worked and developed—this is a ‘revised’ edition. The major difference in this edition is the new material on what I call ‘computer-mediated counselling’. Some practitioners use the term ‘online’ to describe this work, but I think that my term honours both the origins of the technology and the work in psychology and computer science which adds to our understanding of how humans interact with technology. The chapter on research is included more to encourage agencies to conduct or commission evaluations and research than to give examples of good work. I have included more examples of research in this third edition to bring the whole area of helpline applications up to date.
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