Your data

When you make an appointment, we know your name and your email address. That is the only personal information that we need so that we can get together – so it is the only information that we ask for. We keep your name so that we know that it’s you and the email address in case we need to get in touch with each other. It can also be helpful to have your mobile phone number, in case either of us need to get in touch about a change of appointments.

We are required by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy code of ethics to keep notes and for the notes to be accurate and appropriate. We keep a short note of our sessions, usually a few sentences, that summarise the main topics and areas that we spoke about. The notes will never include names of other people or analysis of what you’ve said.

All of your data is kept on a private Google Drive, that only your counsellor and the counselling service manager has access to. Your counsellor will access this to keep notes about you and the counselling manager will access it when its necessary to record how many sessions your counsellor has completed with you.

Your sessions are confidential. There are only two people that your counsellor will talk about them with. One is the counselling service manager and the other is their clinical supervisor. They are bound by the same confidentiality. If your counsellor does talk to them about your sessions, they will be doing this as part of a process to assess their own practice or check on your wellbeing. They meet with the counselling service manager once a month and if you have any concerns or compliments about my practice that you don’t feel able to share with your therapist, you can contact hello@hopefulspaces.org and the service manager will get back to you.

Looking after you and other people
Counselling isn’t the best place to get support with an ongoing crisis.

If there is a point during the conversation where your therapist thinks that you or someone else is at risk of immediate harm, they will say so. When that is the case, for example if you tell them things that sound like a specific plan to complete suicide or the abuse of a child, they will slow things down to make sure that you both understanding what is happening.

This is one of the two circumstances (the other is below) where they counsellor will take charge of the conversation. That’s because they don’t want have information about an immediate risk of harm to you or others and do nothing with it.  

Your counsellor might stop the session and talk together about who else needs to come into the conversation – that could be a doctor, the police, a person who cares for you, the service manager or someone else. They will then bring them into the conversation. They will work really hard to make sure that you do this together and to give you opportunities to be involved in the process of keeping yourself and other people safe.

Keeping right by the law

If you tell your counsellor about the ongoing abuse of a child, money laundering or a terrorist plot – they are compelled to tell the police. They will face criminal charges and lose their accreditation if they don’t pass information on. If these things come up, you will always know that your counsellor is going to take the information elsewhere because they will slow the conversation down and check what they have heard with you. The law is clear that they do not need your consent or permission to break the confidence in these instances. Your counsellor will still work hard to make sure that you know everything that is going on in the event that this happened.

Social Media

Your counsellor won’t follow you on social media and there are three main reasons for that. The first is that it risks your confidentiality, in a way that you might not realise or agree too. The second is that your counsellor wants to understand you on the basis of what you talk about in the therapy space that you have together. The third is that creating new links brings the potential for the parameters of the relationship you have with your counsellor to become unclear - when your therapy pauses or stops, our relationship does too.

Practicalities

Your counsellor will meet you in the main area of the Tannahill Centre a couple of minutes before you start. The main area is the big space with lots of tables and chairs, plants and concrete seating. The counselling room is tucked away in the back - once you’re comfortable with where it is, you can feel free to head straight there for future sessions.

The position of the room means that there can be a little bit of noise with people walking past - if what’s happening outside becomes too loud during a session, your counsellor will pause the session and address this.

What to expect from your first (and other) sessions

You can expect to be offered a hot drink and a biscuit (we’ve got a pretty good selection).

Your counsellor will always be trying hard to understand what’s brought you to counselling and how you’re feeling right now. Building a relationship can take time and what you talk about depends on your level of comfort and where you want the conversation to go. The conversation will move at your pace and go to the depth that you allow it to. Your counsellor might ask you questions to understand you better, but they won’t probe and take charge of the conversation.

Please do put an overview of what has brought you to counselling below. Things can change and you may end up talking about or working on something else, it can be helpful however to have a sense of what you’d like to talk about and work on.

Cancellation

We don’t expect you to never cancel appointments and we don’t expect you to give a reason for the cancellation. Things happen last minute that make us change our priorities and we get that. If you’re running late, or not coming, a text to your counsellor can help us plan and shows mutual respect in the relationship.

If we can’t make a session, because of a holiday, closure of the centre, illness or an emergency - we will tell you at the earliest possible moment.

Respecting your decisions is central to the counselling relationship - that’s why if you stop coming to sessions and don’t tell us, we won’t check up on you or ask if you want to come back. If you have not turned up for two weeks in a row, and don’t get in touch, we will assume that you

To agree to this contract, please fill in your details below. If you haven’t completed this, we will contact you before your session to let you know. Our session won’t go ahead until we have confirmation that you agree to the contract.