A Portfolio of Academic, Therapeutic Practice and Research Work: Including an Investigation Of: ‘Closing the Gap’: Personal Meanings among Psychotherapists Working with Clients with Long-Term Health Conditions.

This is a portfolio of academic, therapeutic practice and research work. The portfolio consists of three dossiers that reflect my professional and personal development as a counselling psychologist across three years of training. The academic dossier is comprised of three theoretical essays. The first essay explores the concept of psychological contact with clients within the person-centred model through a review and critique of a book chapter on this subject. The second essay discusses working psychodynamically with a client experiencing grief who was diagnosed with Generalised Anxiety Disorder, drawing on Klein’s theory on primitive defences and Freud’s paper on Mourning and Melancholia (1917). The final essay examines the clinical implications of the differences between traditional CBT and ACT when working with clients with chronic pain. The therapeutic practice dossier presents an overview of my three clinical placements and the client populations I worked with during my training as a counselling psychologist. It also contains my final clinical paper, which is a narrative of my personal and professional development throughout this course and how it has shaped me as a person and as a practitioner. Finally, the research dossier contains a literature review and two empirical research studies. The review explores and critiques the available literature on the different conceptualisations and uses of hope in counselling and psychotherapeutic practice. The first empirical piece is a Grounded Theory (GT) exploration of the experiences of people who were diagnosed with a chronic illness when they were young. The second empirical piece is an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) of how therapists working with clients with long-term conditions make sense of their clients’ experiences and their therapeutic work together