ABSTRACT
She had regular supervision and she needed it. Now, she sat in the kitchen area at the counselling centre which specialised in helping people who were, and still are, the victims of war and torture. Her new client, Ania, was due any time. She had already been assessed and Debbie had seen the report. She always found it difficult knowing things about her clients before the client had told her. She didn’t want to spend the first session telling the client what she knew, although she knew that would be appropriate to a spirit of open ness. What she wanted was to give her client the time and the space to tell her own story, in her own way, at her own pace, something which didn’t always happen in assessments. For Debbie, the process of hearing a client’s story was a key element in the therapeutic process, and so she had decided some while back not to rob her clients of that by telling them what she had read. She would concentrate on building the therapeutic relationship, offering the ‘core conditions’, and thereby facilitate what she considered to be a heal ing process.
