The Informed Consumer
If you’re visiting this site, chances are you already have some informed ideas about counselling and psychotherapy, and if you’ve visited the section “Types of Counselling and Psychotherapy”, you may already have narrowed down the search to one or two approaches to counselling which could benefit you. Once you have located some possible counsellors, this section is designed to help you evaluate the services which different practitioners might offer.
Not all of the following questions will necessarily be relevant to every person, and some people will find certain questions relevant but comparatively uninteresting or unimportant. Each one, however, is a reasonable question which any counsellor or psychotherapist should be happy to answer — or if they don’t have an answer, they should at least be happy to explain why. Many of the questions will probably be addressed by individual counsellors’ practice leaflets.
It is possible that a counsellor approached with every single one of these questions could find it a little odd: most clients do not ask anything like this range of questions. Some, possibly including therapists from psychoanalytic traditions, might even begin to form hypotheses about the unconscious motivations of a client prone to asking so many questions. But on the other hand, it is your right to ask anything you want, and it is your right to ask for clarification of anything that you do not understand. You should never be made to feel uncomfortable for asking questions, however distinguished or authoritative or self-confident your counsellor might seem.
Some of the resources in the annotated bibliography (“Counselling, Psychotherapy & Mental Health Bibliography”) — particularly including the 1995 book by Dryden and Feltham, Counselling and Psychotherapy: A Consumer’s Guide — may prompt more questions, but here’s a start…