A qualitative exploration into therapists' use of personal rituals in relation to their therapeutic work and the meanings they make of these

My name is Melanie Cross and I am in my final year of my MA in Integrative Counselling and Psychotherapy at Roehampton University. As part of my studies I am conducting a qualitative research study that aims to explore the individual rituals that experienced counsellors use in relation to their therapeutic work and the personal meaning they attribute to these rituals.

I am looking for counsellors or psychotherapists with a minimum of 3 years post qualification experience who use some form of personal rituals in connection with their therapeutic work. You need to be working in a relational model of psychotherapy (i.e. not manualised) and be working with clients on a 1:1 basis (as opposed to group or couples counselling).

Participants need to be willing to give up 40-50 minutes of their time to complete a semi-structured, online interview exploring this subject.

To take part in this study you need to make use of ritualistic behaviour (as outlined below) on either a regular or semi-regular basis. These rituals may be big or small, they can be religious, spiritual or secular in nature as long as they are related to your therapeutic work in some way.

For an action or set of actions to count as a ritual it must contain the following three elements:

  1. A specific action or set of actions that you repeat either regularly or semi-regularly.
  2. These actions hold particular symbolism or meaning to you beyond any functional purpose.
  3. These actions must contain elements that are not purely serving a practical function (although may be functional in part).

An example of this might be, I regularly make a cup of tea between counselling sessions, in a very specific way which is different from how I make my tea at home. This represents letting go of the previous session and absorbing strength and resilience for the next session. Since this action has particular symbolic meaning, this would constitute a personal ritual. If you engage in any sort of ritual such as this, I’d love to hear from you!

If this sounds of interest to you or you would like more information about the project, please email me at crossm1@roehampton.ac.uk

I look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards,

Melanie Cross