At The Wellbeing Therapy Hut, we are all about making therapy affordable and accessible. That is why you have options when you choose therapy with us. You can choose to have sessions online or face to face, helping it fit with your life and your lifestyle. You can also choose to work with a qualified therapist or one of the trainee counsellors that is on placement with us, in order to get a reduced fee.
Being able to offer a reduced fee is something that we are very excited about so that counselling really is affordable for all.
Education and Training for counsellors
On average, counsellors will train for around six years before they are able to become qualified. The age of counsellors can vary, as life experience is often what can bring people to this point in their life to decide to become a counsellor. From a wealth of life experience, as well as other work experience, counsellors are highly skilled.
Counsellors have invested a lot of time and money into their training and will have worked for free for a number of hours in order to get qualified and to receive accreditation. For this reason, qualified therapists can charge a lot of money for their sessions. In order for us to be able to offer you affordable sessions, we need to work with trainee counsellors on placements. By doing this, we can offer a great variety of counselling models and rarely have long waiting lists.
Seeing a trainee counsellor
There are a number of benefits to seeing a trainee counsellor than just paying a lower fee. Trainees need to have more supervision hours for the number of clients they see and usually invest a lot of time in preparing for each of the client sessions. They usually see around 3-5 clients per week, which means they are often better able to retain client information, better at keeping notes and are less likely to have suffered with stress and burn-out.
It is important to know that the counsellors on placement aren’t just brand new to counselling, as they will have already completed at least two years of training. They are insured, members of Accredited Services, and they will be in their Final years of their studying. Not only this, but they are also interviewed and selected by the director of TWTH, Jess, to make sure that they are suitable and share the values and ethos of the The Wellbeing Therapy Hut, to make sure that sessions are client led.
What is the difference between trainee and qualified?
The difference is that a qualified counsellor has more hours of working with clients, and they will have passed their exams and assessments. The trainee counsellors on placement are in their final level of training. They have completed 2-3 years of training so far so have all the knowledge and theory to be able to pass their exams. They will also have some client hours too. They just need to do more and more and reach a certain number of hours, in order to pass.
A trainee can’t take on too many clients at a time, which is why we have a number of lovely trainees working with us at the moment. They also get supervision hours from their college and Jess, which checks their practice too.
If there is only availability for a trainee, then you will pay less, but you won’t be getting anything less during the sessions.
If you have any questions about who will work best for you, please get in touch with us.