Technology for Counselling Session Note Keeping
This past week through GCAP I was introduced to Keeney’s (2001) work in tracking client issues and galleries. A simplified description of Keeney’s gallery idea is that clients present content of therapeutic sessions as if taking you through a tour of their life gallery. The first is the presenting gallery that would include descriptors of current thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. The second are bridging galleries that contain openers that can be followed up on to further explore the content of the presenting gallery. Bridging galleries may involve stories the client uses to illustrate the sources of their emotions, thoughts, or behaviors. A third component of a counselling session is the therapeutic gallery wherein change work can occur.
We were given the following case study to analyze:
A female client presents to you with some apprehension regarding a fairly new relationship. She has been dating and spending time with someone that she thinks might be worth a longer-term commitment. On the one hand, this person shares many of the same values and beliefs as your client. The two of them enjoy time together watching movies, taking walks, and eating out. They also share some core beliefs about religion and education and the value of on-going self-development. Your client says that she is really developing feelings of fondness and caring in the relationship. On the other hand, your client is worried because her last relationship started well but ended badly and unexpectedly. She describes the last relationship as starting in much the same way, and after a period of closeness and intimacy, her last partner left unexpectedly. Now she fears that this may happen again and is scared that her reluctance to connect further might be a kind of “catch-22″ – she fears going deeper because it might fall apart, but the fear of going deeper might be the thing that leads this relationship to fall apart.
Here is a graphic depicting how the information can be tracked using Keeney’s gallery approach.
Taking this further, yesterday I entered my notes from sessions with clients into a hosted form very similar to this sample immediately following or during session. (Don’t mind the Japanese formatting on the form, its because of my region) Try punching in some details into the form. Go ahead… I made a sample to goof around with, you can’t hurt anything. The button at the bottom should say “submit” but reads in Japanese for me here so I’m not sure what you’ll see exactly.
Once information is entered into the form it automatically gets put into this spreadsheet. Obviously the spreadsheet with my client notes on it is password protected so that only I can view it, but for this demo I hosted the form so you could see how it works. I put in the “Pierre” information just so it wouldn’t be empty.
I can keep a weekly or daily log using the spreadsheet and it gives me an automatic time stamp. Like any spread sheet it enables me to sort the data by name etc as I want. We use a separate database at work but it wasn’t hard to cut and paste the content from these cells into the fields at work.
What suggestions or feedback do you have? Do you think this would be useful for you? We have wi-fi everywhere and heaps of bandwidth. I am on a MacBook so it is dead simple to open and use wherever I am. It might not work without that infrastructure..other issues?
Keeney, B.P. (2001). Improvisational therapy: A practical guide for creative clinical strategies. Guilford Press.
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