You’re out at a trendy new restaurant, excited for a nice meal with friends. Everything seems perfect – great company, a relaxing atmosphere, and you’ve heard wonderful reviews about the chef. Your meal arrives and it’s plated exquisitely – definitely Instagram worthy! You can hardly wait to take the first bite. After the first forkful, you’re immediately disappointed. It’s too salty, over cooked, and just not what you expected. The server checks in a few times throughout your meal, but you decide not to mention how you felt about your food. At the end of the night you leave, unhappy with your experience and unlikely to return.

But what if you had spoken up? What if you had said to your server that your meal was not what you expected? Honest feedback could have changed your experience for the better

The same concept of feedback and openness is a critical part of counselling; one that can help ensure that your goals are met and the changes you are looking to make become tangible.

The client counsellor relationship is key

Counselling can help with many of life’s challenges – stress, anxiety, grief, self-esteem, relationship problems, to name just a few.

The relationship between you and your counsellor and the connection you make in your sessions with each other might be one of the most important factors for counselling to be effective. This relationship is more important than the methods that the counsellor uses to help you and the tools they give you to help yourself.

Like any relationship, you and your counsellor may misinterpret each other at some point. You might not feel comfortable with questions they’ve asked, maybe you don’t feel that the “homework” they’ve suggested is working, or they could be talking about things in your life and you don’t see how they connect with the problem at hand. There are a lot ways that this relationship can potentially be derailed, but when you’re open and honest throughout the process, you have a much better chance of getting the results you want. Giving your counsellor feedback can help fix misunderstandings and steer the relationship in the right direction.

Giving your counsellor feedback can dramatically improve your counselling outcomes

Giving less than positive feedback or expressing dissatisfaction is not easy. It’s perfectly normal to feel uncomfortable giving negative feedback or expressing your concerns. Think of it this way: your counsellor’s purpose is to help you meet your goals. Whatever they are; building your self-esteem, improving your relationships, overcoming addiction, coping with grief, etc. They are there to help you and they know the relationship between you two is crucial to achieve results. So, they want your feedback – they are trained to receive feedback, both positive and negative, and use it to improve their practice. If they can make changes that will help the relationship and the way counselling is progressing, they want to know.

At Calgary Counselling Centre, we use a tool to help giving feedback to your counsellor a bit easier. It’s called a Session Rating Scale, or SRS. The SRS is a survey of the counselling process that encourages clients to pinpoint concerns they have with the relationship with their counsellor so that the counsellor can make alterations to what they are doing to better meet the client’s expectations. The survey is filled out at the end of every session and you assess things like how understood and respected you felt, if you felt your goals were well understood and given importance by your counsellor, and if you felt the treatment that was discussed is right for you.

Your counsellor wants to make sure your needs are being met, your experience is positive and you achieve the best results possible. Counsellors are just as human as anyone else – they don’t know everything and they need you to point out any areas where they need to improve or change. Giving feedback gives your counsellor the opportunity to change and improve and make sure you feel positive with your counselling experience.

If you’re comfortable giving feedback, you don’t need to wait until the end of your session. Feel free to provide feedback at any point during the session. The more honest and direct you are about how you’re feeling the better. If for example, your counsellor suggests a method or tactic that you’re not comfortable with, feel free to say “I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t think that will work for me, or I’m not comfortable doing that. Do you have other tools or strategies that might help?” The sooner you provide feedback to your counsellor, the better aligned your relationship will be and the more likely it is that the counselling will be beneficial.

Finding the right fit

The reality is that not every relationship is going to be a perfect fit. Sometimes some people just don’t click with each other. That’s okay. If you don’t feel you “click” with your counsellor or counselling sessions are not progressing, it is perfectly fine -- and encouraged - to ask for another counsellor. Calgary Counselling Centre has over 25 registered psychologists and social workers along with dozens of highly supervised counselling students. If your counsellor isn’t the right fit, we want to match you with someone who is.

You deserve the best, most effective counselling possible.

If you’re interested in counselling that will meet your unique needs, register online anytime.

Information for this blog was provided by Cathy Keough and Becca Anderson, registered social workers, and Iain Dolan, registered psychologist.

This blog post sites information from The Session Rating Scale: Preliminary Psychometric Properties of a “Working” Alliance Measure.

Duncan, B. L., Miller, S. D., Sparks, J. A., Claud, D. A., Reynolds, L. R., Brown, J., & Johnson, L. D. (2003). The Session Rating Scale: Preliminary psychometric properties of a “working” alliance measure. Journal of Brief Therapy, 3(1), 3–12.