Clay: Hello and welcome to the Online Counselling Podcast. I’m Clay Cockrell, telemental health enthusiast, champion of online therapy, hopefully educator too. I kind of see us all learning together and hopefully I’m asking the questions that you maybe would be asking of our guests and exploring things that you want to know about, and if I’m not, tell me, send me an email, give me a call. I want to hear from you, all the contact info is on the site, onlinecounselling.com. If you don’t want to go to the site, my email is Clay@onlinecounselling.com. Let me know what you think. Criticism is accepted as well as compliments.
I just got an email the other day from Anthony Wisniewski of therapynotes.com. “Just saying hey, I listen to the podcast and like it. Learning a lot. Keep up the good work,” which is kind of cool. We didn’t have someone from Therapy Notes on this show. I met a few of their staff at this year’s Psychotherapy Networker Symposium in DC. Great guys, so maybe I need to see if they are available. Please let me know what you want to hear more of and what questions you have about all things online counseling. It’s a fascinating field. Probably if you’ve been listening to the podcast, you know how fascinated I am with it.
It’s growing, changing. There’s a lot of fear out there about it and I’m like this pied piper going around, “You can do it. Come in. The water is warm. Here’s what you need to know.” If you need to know something, tell me. We will find out, which leads me to today’s guest – drum roll please – Philippa Weitz. Now, I think in the journalist world when a journalist is able to nail down a big interview, it’s called a “get.” This is definitely one of the biggest “gets” I’ve ever had on the podcast. She is a leading voice in the field. You don’t get any bigger especially in the UK where she is based and a major voice for online counseling and therapy training in general.
Think of it this way, if I was a chef, this would be like me interviewing Mario Batali or Emeril Lagasse. If I was a movie director and this was a podcast about films, this would be like me getting to interview, I don’t know, Steven Spielberg. You get the point. I’m so thrilled to have her on the podcast. She is a wealth of knowledge. She is the founder of pwtraining.com, which is a training program for online counseling. It has incredible resources there. She is an online supervisor. There are only a handful of those in the UK where she gives clinical supervision to those therapists working online.
She is also the Standards And Ethics Officer for the Association for Counseling and Therapy Online and her newest book is Psychotherapy 2.0 – Where psychotherapy and Technology Meet. I can’t tell you how important this book is. If you are thinking about doing online counseling or are doing it currently, you need to read this book. It’s amazing. I’ve been doing this work for six years and it has gotten me to think of things in a whole different light. I can’t put it down. It’s just really good.
She collaborates with some of the leaders in the field such as Kate Anthony and DeeAnna Nagel, they contribute, Kate Dunn, the head of the UK Council for Psychotherapy, Martin Pollecoff, all rocks tars in their own right and all contributing to an amazing groundbreaking work that’s fun to read. It gets us thinking, it solves – you’ll hear us talking about it. You can tell, I’m a little in awe, but it’s not every day you get to talk to someone of this caliber and it’s cool to find out she’s really a great person. Kind, helpful, and like me, enthusiastic about online counseling and where it is going.
We are only able to touch the surface here in this podcast. We do get into some deep water subjects, kind of like when we talked with Roy Huggins and Rob Reinhardt. It’s stuff we need to know. It’s stuff we need to think about, but hang in there, stay with us, it’s totally worth it. Alright, enough. Let’s jump right in.
Welcome to the podcast. I am thrilled to have as our guest, Philippa Weitz, who is the author of Psychotherapy 2.0 – Where Psychotherapy and Technology Meet and also the founder of pwtraining.com. Philippa, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Philippa: It’s a pleasure.
Clay: Tell me a little bit about your journey toward online counseling and specifically how the book came about.
Philippa: Well, my journey, I trained as a psychotherapist counselor. That’s another whole debate, by the way, but I trained – let’s call it that – in 1985-87, so back in the dark ages, when I was still quite young. I qualified in 1987 at which point, my mother said, “You’ll be a rubbish therapist.” Well, in a way she was right because I was too young. I worked for about 10 years as a therapist and then I decided to stop working for a bit and to apply my qualifications to IRS. I was head of the conference unit, Mental Health Science Conference Unit at St. George Hospital Medical School and then went on to run my own company and also did a whole load of other things.
I’ve done loads and loads of stuff that was allied and ancillary to my original training. After that or around that same time, I started working for Karnac Books, karnacbooks.com, who specializes in specialized in psychoanalytic publications and then broadened its stable. In 2003, they asked me to go and work for them. I worked for them as commissioning editor for a couple of years and then I went on to United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy to do the same thing with them and set up their series, their book series. I did that until this year actually and while it was worth working at UKCP, obviously when you work for an association of psychotherapists, you’re aware of the politics are and you hear what’s going on and I’ve always been a bit of a [inaudible 07:12] person and kicks on tensed woman to go into the computer shop and ask to buy an Amstrad 8256.
Clay: I read that in your book. It’s great.
Philippa: I had to get a new peer physicist friend of mine to come help me set it up. I hate it if I can’t understand the instructions. It was like flipping complicated, but that was the beginning. I think I’ve always been a bit geeky and I felt for some time that we as psychotherapists were not paying attention to what was happening in the rest of the world in terms of technology, IT stuff, digital, blah, blah, social media, and it’s just coming in waves, every change and the technical stuff. That was the beginning and from there, I started to think about this and then I asked the editorial board, although I’m not a UKCP member, would I be eligible to put a book together on the subject, the subject of psychotherapy and technology, and they jumped at it. That is how the book came about. Now, I’m the series editor and we’re going on to produce other books. We’ve got three or four in the pipeline.
Clay: Oh, that’s good to hear.
Philippa: Yes. For example, I’ve got one on supervision coming through at the moment. I’m working with somebody on a child and a young person book, perhaps even one on autism and Asperger’s. I’m certainly looking at that at the moment. I’ve invited somebody and the next book that I will do will be around the online therapeutic relationship.
Clay: Yes.
Philippa: Because for me, that’s the heart of the matter. The rest is blah, blah. We need to get our security and our confidentiality and our contracts and all that stuff right, but once you’ve done that, that’s just practical stuff. That’s tick box stuff, getting that learning done and knowing what you’re doing. Once you’ve done that, the real matter is the online therapeutic relationship, whether it’s the same or different online. Do we even want it to be the same online? It’s a really big question.
Clay: What is fascinating to me in the book and I think the analogy that you gave was that you qualified to be a driver many years ago and that you don’t really think about some of the rules, and some people are approaching online counseling as, “I’ve been doing therapy forever. This is just I’m going to do it with my computer and let me jump right in” without realizing that there are some tweaks, there are some adjustments. It is different, different in a good way many times, but there is a training that can help therapists who have been doing this for decades adjust to this new medium.
Philippa: Yes. The conversation among those of us who are senior in the profession, who have all trained and reflected, and by training I mean a good six months training, not just on one weekend and making a promise, but really reflected on the training because that’s the thing, you need the time in between to do the reflection. We’re all very puzzled that very bright psychotherapists just go, “I’m an online therapist. I can use Skype,” and you just watched my eyeballs go around in circles because if they were an art therapist, a music therapist, or drama or dancer, any other, they change from being a CBT therapist to a [inaudible 10:58] therapist. They go and retrain or add to their training. It’s not retraining. It’s adding to your skills mix, isn’t it?
Clay: Yes.
Philippa: When I go in training groups and I often train very senior groups of psychotherapists, some of them in the NHS, on National Health Service, and some privately. I go in and the first question I say is, “Well, are you working online?” This is the last group I did, one hand went halfway up. “Very good and what about the rest of you?” They all shook their heads. I said, “You mean you never sent emails to your clients?” Up went six or seven hands. I didn’t say a word and they all went, “Aah,” because they haven’t even thought about the fact that the emails that they are sending may, in many occasions, have a therapeutic content.
Clay: Absolutely
Philippa: And that by sending them in an – and then the consequence of all that is that they are sending them in an unconfidential – to incorrectly use a word – unconfidential format, they are failing their clients. They are failing to maintain the confidentiality of their client. One of the things that’s quite clear is it is our responsibility as therapists to manage that relationship. It is not down to the client to say, “Yeah, I don’t mind if you send it on an email.” That’s under the HIPAA guidelines as well as the UK. It is our responsibility as therapists to maintain the boundaries of the therapeutic room, whether it’s an online room or whether it’s a real room. It’s like I shut the door. I put the sign up saying “Silence. Do not come in” when I’m in a room and online, there are boundaries to maintain and that would include the email protocol.
Clay: One of the spirits of the book, for those of you who have not read this, that you are enthusiastic about this medium. You are a champion of it with training, that with the proper information and I spoke with Roy Huggins and Rob Reinhardt, some of the leaders on the technology end of this, that it’s not about fear. It’s about being informed. Once you’re informed then the world is open to you. This is a wonderful adjunct. This is wonderful way to grow your practices, to have a global reach perhaps with your practice, but it’s about the information. I encourage those that have not read the book that this is not fear mongering. This is someone that is a real believer in this when it’s done correctly, and it’s not hard. This is not rocket science. These are simple things that you’re probably already doing in your practices, but tweaking it and applying it to a different medium. What has the reaction been to the book? It has been out for a little while now. What kind of reaction are you getting from the book?
Philippa: Well, they are very, very positive. For example, Prof. Tim Bones 14:12 who wrote the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy Working Online Guidelines last year, he said he drew extensively from the book when he was writing the guidelines and that was a great compliment to hear him say that. I think the thing that was the winner in the book is that it’s not all me. I’m not one to do myself out of a job, you know what I mean, but there are lots of other people in the UK who are far more experienced than me and who got different ideas and different specialties than me. What I tried to do in the book was to merge those together so that we got the best of the profession together for the sake of the profession. It’s an edited book. I’m not the author. I’ve written bits of it as will be clear from my particular style, but I think its strength is that we’ve called on people such as Kate Anthony, Ann Stokes.
Clay: DeeAnna Nagel, Kate Dunn.
Philippa: Absolutely.
Clay: Wonderful voice, leaders in the industry and they are all in there, which is so much fun to, from chapter to chapter, to kind of take a breath and hear from somebody else. The case studies are incredible. The chapter on email, email therapy, now it shows my own prejudice, I suppose, when someone would say, “Oh, I do email therapy.” I thought, “Well, that’s just kind of rubbish. That’s not real therapy,” but the description of how it was really impactful, this asynchronous was fascinating that there is value and I think that a lot of therapists are looking at the medium and going, “Oh, that’s not real therapy, whether it’s email or audiovisual.” I just kind of caught myself in that little prejudice, I suppose.
Philippa: Well, no. I think the prejudice is the first base of the training. I’ll tell you. I wrote the book before I did the training. Rule #1, do it the other way around. Having written the book, I thought the only way to do it would be the way we’re doing it now, by Skype video. Well, what was really interesting was I didn’t sign up to do a course. I had to do a 10-week course before I could go on and do the diploma. Anyway first night, January or whatever month it was, I think it was January. I was sitting at my computer. They told me to be online at 6 o’clock, the Monday concern, and suddenly, up in my Skype chat box comes, “Good evening everybody.” I said, “Good evening” and the whole course took place via Skype chat.
Clay: Oh.
Philippa: Do you know, that evening, the tutor had to take me out because I was so angry. “How could this be? This is a rubbish way of doing it. This is completely ridiculous. Why aren’t we doing it the proper way via video?” It just shows exactly what you said – assumption, assumption, assumption on my part. I have never used live chat in other way than the old mate saying, “How are you doing” or whatever. Actually, it’s being such a useful tool and of course, I had the exactly the same prejudice as you about email. I’m still not a huge fan of email but what I recognized is that other people are and it suits a certain person and Kate Dunn who is a very reflective writer, she talks about the success of email and the reflective use of writing in email. She’s been very, very successful, so I think it’s about personality types to some extent.
Clay: Yes.
Philippa: I’m not supposed to quote on therapists, but I had to eat an awful lot of humble pie after writing the book because I thought video was going to be the only way to do it and how wrong was I, and I absolutely love working with live chat for therapeutic purposes.
Clay: That’s incredible. There are wonderful things in the book including tips on camera angles and lighting, and things that we don’t think about, maintaining your background. There are even contracts, informed consents, and templates for people to use. It’s just there’s so much there, I think, for people who are considering doing this. It’s a must read. I think I was telling you before we started recording that I highlight when I read and the entire book is yellow because everything seems important. Thank you for adding to the bibliography out there for us to learn from.
Tell me a little bit about the UK and the market there. Are therapists embracing this? Do you see the field going in this direction?
Philippa: Well, I do and somebody was quoting some figures the other day that I can’t remember what they were, but basically, there’s a small group of us who are trained probably not amounting to more than 200 who are actually trained. Now, when you realize that it’s including psychiatrists, mental health graduate workers, and all that, we probably got about 100,000 mental health professionals in the UK. Having 200 fully trained online counselors is already a high number and of those 200, probably about 20, including me, have a diploma in online supervision.
We are, in some ways, in infancy and then we have this great other group of people and they are divided into two groups really and you’ve identified both of them, I think. One is the fair group, “Oh, no. That can’t possibly work. No, I can’t do that. No, I’m scared of that. I’m not doing that. My clients couldn’t possibly work online. There’s nothing that could work better than face to face. Full of fear and prejudice that group, and then there’s a second group that go, “I’m working via Skype. I‘m working online. I’ve been doing it for years. I don’t care what you say about training. I’m doing it. It’s fine and I love it” and whatever.
There’s quite a big group of those people who actually identify as being online therapists who have done their training and are making massive mistakes like using Skype for therapeutic purposes. Sadly, it will be the day that they have an official complaint against them. It will be the day that this all comes out. Until then, it’s Pip on her usual old hobby horse or “Oh, it’s Kate Anthony on her usual hobby horse” because there’s a group of us who has got a very firm view about platforms that are suitable and not suitable for example, but to talk in general terms, well, I’d say we’re on the cusps of some great things.
There are some fantastic things going on. The students coming through now and the psychotherapy students coming through, certainly in some of the training organizations are embracing some of these in their master’s dissertation. I see that because they interview people like me because they don’t have that many people to interview and I get to interview a lot of people and it’s really interesting because I see a lot of students as a result who are doing really interesting work in their research space. The BACP, British Association for Counseling and Psychotherapy, have produced some working online guidelines and have put together quite a lot of paperwork, but I don’t see them at the moment pushing it forward in any other way apart from producing some paperwork, which is really helpful.
The United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy has a new chair and his name is Martin Pollecoff and that name might ring a bell because he is in the case study chapter with some rather entertaining case studies. Martin is determined that UKCP should be the place to go for online work within a couple of years. He is really nailed his collars to his master, as we say, and is deemed to make sure that we are engaging with all therapists. You got two groups of therapists. First of all, you’ve got those who are working online therapeutically. They are online counselors and psychotherapists, but you’ve got a second much larger group that I call digital psychotherapy and this is what I mean by digital psychotherapy.
I mean that they are engaging somehow in the digital world without quite meaning to. For example, in the examples in the book, there are issues of Facetime. Alexandra Chalfont in Chapter 5 has a couple who are warring about Facetime. Now, the therapist is not taking online therapy, but there is a digital impact on the therapeutic relationship, like all this digital psychotherapy to differentiate it from online psychotherapy and this affects every single counselor psychotherapist face to face or online because whether you or I choose to have a social media presence or to work online is almost irrelevant compared with what the client is doing.
The client or patient is 99%, I’d say, likely to have some form of media and social media presence, and that impacts on our world, so therefore, we’re now moving to position where we’re asking all therapists and counselors face to face or online to have a social media policy, which starts to think about privacy settings on your Facebook, which thinks about how you use email, which thinks about boundaries, which thinks about how the client might or might not contact you and the ways are appropriate or inappropriate. What you will do if, for example, they also friend you on Facebook, which will be thoroughly inappropriate.
Clay: Of course.
Philippa: That’s why I coined this expression “digital psychotherapy and digital counseling because there is so much that goes on in our therapeutic relationship between clients and therapists that actually is impacted by the digital world.
Clay: Absolutely. I was fascinated that you kind of went into that direction in the book. I was thinking I’m going to learn the regulations, we’re not going to use Skype, how you connect visually, but then you bring in this whole other idea that we as therapists, our little island here, we’re not isolated. We’re going to be impacted by what’s going on online. What happened on Facebook, the wife that finds out that her husband is cheating because he was texting. It’s coming into the room, into our consulting rooms.
Philippa: Yeah.
Clay: We need to be prepared. We need to be prepared just as individuals and therapists that we’re out there whether we want to be or not and that our clients are going to Google us and they are going to perhaps see us on our social media. We need to be prepared and to think in that direction.
Philippa: That’s the point.
Clay: There’s so much.
Philippa: That’s what I call digital psychotherapy because for me, it’s the impact of all matters dished out on psychotherapy. It has gotten a wing in online psychotherapy, but it affects every single counselors and psychotherapists, and mental health worker for that matter more broadly, working all over the world.
Clay: Yeah. You’re saying that in the UK, there is a growing acceptance perhaps and certainly, a need for training, and this is why we don’t use Skype because I think I’ve lost you. That is one of the reasons we don’t use Skype is that sometimes, there are technological problems and that’s one of the things that you also cover is to have a plan B of have the cell phone number, have a plan when technology breaks out. What I was saying before we got cut off was that you see in the UK that there’s a growing acceptance of it, but certainly a need for training and from your governing bodies a recognition that they want to be part of the conversation and part of the guidelines.
Philippa: Yes. I’m on the executive for the Association for Counseling and Therapy Online. It’s known as ACTO and we’re currently working with other organizations in Europe to develop a European association.
Clay: Oh.
Philippa: One of the things that seems paramount to us, me and others, is that, well, we’re still in Europe, just.
Clay: Yes, I suppose so. You are, aren’t you?
Philippa: I don’t know which way it’s going to go. I have no idea, but for matters such as this, I can see the importance of Europe. For example, we have our own information commissioner’s office and every country has its own information commissioner’s office that deals with data protection issues. What is good is that it’s now all starting to work at a European level and one of the pieces of work that I’ve just done just this week together with colleagues is to put together a resume of the different platforms and their compliance for Europe or not and why we recommend them all to them. I’ve done it on a traffic light system.
Imagine that Skype comes out with a red traffic light, but this sort of thing is really important because people get so blinded by all the information and argument, and in the end, they go, “You know, Skype works for me. I’m fine with it. I don’t care. I’m going to ignore it. No use being fined or taken to prison or whatever for using Skype.” It will only take one complaint and that will all change. I hope that doesn’t happen to anybody, but that is it. The thing about it is there are really good platforms out there now that are compliant.
Clay: Let’s talk about that because what I was in the beginning, and I’m open and tell people that I jumped in as a cowboy and a maverick and just said I’m going to learn as we go, Skyping, going across state lines, all these other stuff, and then realizing that there are other reasons other than the encryption, other than the security for not using Skype primarily is that it’s not a good connection. Talk about some of the platforms that you do recommend.
Philippa: Before I do, what I want to just say was that, finishing off on the European stuff, is that Europe is just negotiating a US-Europe deal legislation, which will deal with the transfer of data by US soil or territory. What that means therefore is that all the platforms that went by the United States we had to say no to before, we can now say yes to. It will be signed in June, so we’re getting very close to it and it will be two years before it’s implemented, but as far as I’m concerned, I’m taking the view that those platforms, providing they are compliant, are counted American ones. For example, this means that zoom.us, I think is the best platform on the market.
Clay: Okay.
Philippa: It’s free for one to one. For groups it’s 40 minutes, you get free and then you have to pay, but it’s really the most stable of the platforms. I’ve been working with a company called iCam as well, icam.com or it might be icam.co.uk, I’m not sure, and they too have full compliance. Now, they are a UK-based company. Now, these are the two that I found that are the best. I’ve done this on the traffic light system for each of them and it will be on my website at some stage.
So for example, if we were to go for VSee, which is a would-be compliant because it runs by the state with this new legislation, but for me, VSee, the quality isn’t great and secondly, at all times, you can see the contacts list. If you have a client online via VSee, that person remains in your list unless you take them off it, which means that you’re working in your office, not online, but you’ve got your VSee on and let’s say somebody comes into your office and you’ve got your VSee open, they could see your contacts list. That would breach confidentiality.
Clay: Absolutely.
Philippa: Such a stupid little thing.
Clay: Right, right.
Philippa: It’s just a tiny little issue. It’s like having your screen by the window in a way, but it’s such a stupid little issue, isn’t it, whereas iCam and Zoom work without any contacts list. You get invited by a link to join the meeting, and that means, there’s no trail between the two. Now, imagine that you’re a big bad wolf. You were a beating up, nasty wife beater, let’s say. You wife, in fear of her life, had gone for some therapy online and you were very suspicious of her. You were tracking through her Skype and VSee. You’d see straight away that she was seeing me. That could have devastating consequences.
Clay: Absolutely.
Philippa: It’s just as simple as that. The same goes for the use of email. Email seems such an easy thing. We all use professional email addresses like info@ukcounsellingonline.net or whatever, well say the wife beating husband picks up their emails. “Oh, she’s seeing that therapist.” I have some suggestions particularly for the protection of the client. I think just any risk, I would suggest a very anonymous email address, info@123.com, so that there’s much anonymity about it. Actually, what I also recommend, the easiest way of dealing with confidentiality of all these matters, forget encrypted email because you could encrypt the client’s that come in but your clients are not going to do it, I just do a password protected file. I set it up. I tell the client through a separate route what the password will be and then that file just passes between as an attachment. They only open it using the password.
Clay: Fascinating.
Philippa: As it is, go in there and that way, nobody can read it. If somebody really wants to cut into a system, they will, but it will deal with the average abuser, see what I mean?
Clay: Absolutely and I would imagine, tell me a little bit about pwtraining.com. This sounds like a lot of the things that you in your training courses are teaching therapists. If somebody says, “I like the book. I like this podcast. I’ve gotten to know you. I want to know more.” Tell me a little bit and also include in there your online supervision and what that is going to be all about.
Philippa: Well basically, I’ve been in education and training for mental health workers since 1990. PW Training has been doing that on and off since it was formed in 1997 and more recently, since I qualified, I’ve been running training, mentoring, and supervision online. I think where we’re at in the UK is about sorting out what level of training is appropriate for being called an official online therapist as opposed to having some skills. The diploma title developed that we’re running at the moment or just about to run on the 13th of June. If you know anybody be interested in joining it, that is a professional qualification that will fully equip a therapist to work online.
It will think through all the practical bits, the things we’ve just spoken about now, but for me much more excitingly, we’ll look at the therapeutic relationship aspect. How you transfer your original modality training to your line setting. Do you have to transfer it? Will it work in the same way? How do you deal with issues of transference and counter transference? The whole thing is very exciting because what we have is groups of people who come from very different backgrounds and they learn from each other. You might have somebody who has a CBT training and psychoanalyst in the same class, and in some settings, that would be a problem, but in this one, it isn’t because they are not actually testing each other on each other’s systems.
What they are wanting to do is to learn and adapt for themselves how they might develop their online practice, but they learn from working with each other, different ways of working. It’s very, very much collaborative learning. Very important. That’s how our diploma runs and the certificate, when I do run it and I’m not running it at the moment, will be a much more basic introduction to the technology, if you like. Much less about the therapeutic relationship and much more about, well, this is how you make Skype work. This is what you need to do to ensure you’ve got confidential stuff and this is how you do a social medial policy, for example.
It’s much more nuts and bolts in line with the BACP curriculum for online working. We’re still negotiating around this and this is not cast in stone, but for me, there is a distinct difference between people who want to learn some counseling skills about how Skype might work online who have never used Skype, for example, before.
Clay: Yeah.
Philippa: Scary numbers of people. I’m forming a separate group to those who want to do the diploma who hopefully will have some IT skills because otherwise, they will get in the way of the people that do, but who really want to learn about the therapeutic input and how you can transform that in your online work and how you can create, get new clients, get different groups of clients in, and whether actually working online therapeutically is the same or different, and do we want it to be the same? There are lots and lots of questions. There are lots of gray areas, course. Nothing is black and white in this world.
Clay: I have to say that I have been doing this for six years. I’ve been doing the podcast for the last 6-8 months thinking about online counseling and there were things that came up in your book and in our conversation today that I had never even thought of. I can’t recommend highly enough what you bring to the table, not just the PW Training but the Psychotherapy 2.0 is the name of the book and I’m going to have all that in the show notes for anybody that’s interested. One final question and you alluded to this at the beginning and I’ve always wanted to ask someone from the UK. Apparently there is, I guess in the syntax, the world counseling, the word therapy, the word psychotherapy, in the US, it’s all the same. It’s just a catch-all phrase for talk therapy. In the UK, there’s a nuance there. Could you just quickly kind of speak to that?
Philippa: Certainly. Well, the BACP in their definition, describe it as being the same activity; however, UKCP would not. They’d say that psychotherapy is different to counseling and actually, what’s really interesting and this comes into play in Europe, is that in some European countries, it’s illegal to work online as a psychotherapist but it’s not illegal to work online as an online counselor. Yeah, it’s really, really quite complicated and when I went to talk at a conference in Nuremberg last September and I trotted out my throwaway comment, and they went, “ha, ha.”
It created a really interesting conversation and I had hoped that we might call the New European Association as European Association of Counseling and Psychotherapy Online, but I think that would be a challenge to many of Europe. It’s being dumb down to the accounting online or Counseling and Therapy Online. I can’t remember which it is now, but because there is a huge debate about whether counseling and psychotherapy are the same and I think it’s like a Venn diagram. There will a part that is the same and there will be a part where it’s more counseling skills or more goal focused and the psychotherapist will probably view their relationship as much more important and the relational and the use of transference and counter transference, etc. whereas counselors might not go there. That’s a really very brief rather….
Clay: Oh, so this is a much more complex question. I just threw out a quick question going, “What’s the difference?” and you go, “Ooh, this is complex.” What I’m getting from you is maybe counselor is goal oriented, short term versus therapy is more relational, psychoanalysis. Am I going in the right direction?
Philippa: I think if we would give a short answer, that would probably upset everybody about being the right answer.
Clay: It’s so good. I like that I’m going to upset everyone.
Philippa: Actually, the reality is most of us do both and it’s about the setting you do it in what you’re doing.
Clay: Wow.
Philippa: And I talk about myself as a psychotherapist. Well, it’s a perfect thing because I’ve got a master’s from the University of Surrey in Psychological Counseling because the University of Surrey is a very scientific university and at the time when my master’s was being put together, they didn’t think psychotherapy was a significantly scientific enough, so it got called Psychological Counseling, which of course, in a way, is completely dumb down on psychotherapy. You can see where this is going. To be honest, I call myself a psychotherapist because that is what I do in my work, but there are some times when I apply my work in more counseling type settings.
Clay: But it also highlights, and you speak about this in the book, the differences in language and the importance of language, and that things that we hear in the USA and just take for granted, in the UK, in Australia, in Europe, it’s just a different connotation. There are challenges out there working internationally, working with different cultures, even different cultures within the US, and you say different cultures within the UK. That’s where we have to be on our toes, I think.
Philippa: I think we realize that between nations, we have to be on our toes, but I think we need to be on our toes absolutely as you say even within our own nation. We’re very, very diverse community in the UK these days and being thoughtful about – I don’t like diversity as a separate subject. I think the moment you single out diversity is like making into a specialist topic that goes only on the curriculum for one week of the year as a source of tick box. For me, diversity, culture, language, and all the things that go around diversity must be at the root of everything we do. It’s not a specialist subject, it cuts right through the whole thing.
Clay: Well, I want to be cognizant of your time. This is a subject that I could talk about for hours. I’m sure you could too. Neither one of us have the amount of time to delve into this, but I hope that I’ve whetted the appetite of people to go get the book, to learn more about this, and also what I say all the time, it’s not about fear, it’s about being informed. This is something that people can do with their practices. You can grow in this direction. It’s just about getting the right training.
Philippa: It’s actually really exciting. It’s a wonderful world to be in at the moment because it’s all new and all growth and all exciting.
Clay: Exactly. That’s a good place to end. Philippa, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
Philippa: It’s a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.