About Your Counsellor Dr Greg Mulhauser

Scope

A separate page About the Managing Editor provides a brief synopsis of my broader background, while this page specifically focuses on my relevant professional and educational details as they relate to counselling. My full Curriculum Vitae -- including lists of publications, presentations, media appearances, honours and awards -- is available at Mulhauser Consulting.

Educational Background

My educational background includes a BA, awarded Summa Cum Laude (with Highest Honors) in Philosophy and Mathematics from Willamette University, which I attended 1987-91 as a National Merit Scholar. I subsequently completed a PhD in Philosophy of Mind at the University of Edinburgh, which I attended 1991-94 as a British Marshall Scholar. My PhD research, which addressed fundamental questions about self-awareness and the nature of consciousness, drew on a wide variety of material ranging from theoretical cognitive science to chaos theory. Immediately after completing the PhD, I held a one-year Gifford Research Fellowship at the University of Glasgow 1994-95.

After taking time out to re-write my doctoral dissertation as the book Mind Out of Matter, and after five years in research and industry, in 2002-03 I completed an intensive one-year, full-time Postgraduate Diploma in Counselling at the University of East Anglia. (The page on Selecting a Counsellor includes some information about comparing counsellor qualifications.)

This BACP-accredited Postgraduate Diploma included roughly 190 hours of theory, roughly 150 hours of skills training (also incorporating group and peer supervision), roughly 115 hours of group 'community meeting' time covering a range of topics, and roughly 60 hours of personal development time. Clinical contact time at two different supervised placements was over 100 hours, with 23 hours of individual clinical supervision. Total scheduled time for the course amounted to approximately 650 hours. In addition, I completed around 39,000 words of written work. (For comparison, my PhD weighed in at around 100,000 words.) The Postgraduate Diploma itself focused primarily on the person-centred approach to counselling. I simultaneously undertook independent study in a range of other areas, focusing particularly on cognitive behavioural therapy and existential counselling. During this time, I also began developing this site, CounsellingResource.com.

Following the diploma, I continued seeing face-to-face clients for several months both at the university and at a local general medical centre.

Experience With Electronic Communications

Before training in counselling, I worked for five years in various parts of British Telecommunications, including their research and technology subsidiary, known at the time as BTexact Technologies. Originally employed as a technologist and researcher and later in business strategy and marketing, I worked in an environment permeated by some of the most advanced communications technology available anywhere in the world. The culture, the training, and the standard operating methods of the business all treated effective electronic communication as central and indispensable. I also spent most of my time with BT as a 'teleworker', meaning that I relied on electronic communications to work effectively with geographically dispersed teams. (At the time, BT had -- and perhaps still does have -- the single largest contingent of teleworking employees anywhere in Europe.) Having managed 'virtual teams' of up to a dozen people using electronic communications technology, I feel at home with a wide variety of electronic communications tools. Of particular relevance to my internet-mediated counselling practice, my most recent post with BT focused on communications security.

In addition to my formal working background immersed in communications technology, I have used the internet since the 1980s and the worldwide web since it was a relatively small CERN research project, dwarfed in size by the now-extinct text-based system called gopher.

Client Diversity

I have worked with male and female clients covering an age range from 18 to nearly 80. The scope of concerns which my clients explore grows continuously, but just to give some idea with a non-exhaustive list, my previous clients have shared details of experiences like depression; sexual, physical and psychological abuse; dissociative identity disorder; obsessive thoughts and behaviours; pronounced mood swings, including manic depression; family chaos resulting from problems including infidelity, divorce, unplanned pregnancy and psychiatric illness; relationships and self-esteem; self-described paranoia; physical disability; anxieties about instabilities in relationships and living circumstances; career plans; the meaning of life; exam anxiety; anger; acute sleeping and eating disruptions; and many other topics.

In addition to this wide range of concerns I am happy to explore with clients, I also have particular personal interests in counselling for bipolar disorder (manic depression) and the less severe cyclic mood disorder cyclothymia; cognitive approaches to anxiety, including panic attacks, or 'anxiety attacks', and obsessive-compulsive disorder; counselling and chronic pain; and fundamental questions about existence.

Professional Counselling Organizations

I am a Member (MBACP) of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and am bound by its Ethical Framework for Good Practice in Counselling and Psychotherapy and its Ethical Guidelines for Researching Counselling and Psychotherapy, and I am subject to the organization's Professional Conduct Procedure. I am conscientiously not a member of the International Society for Mental Health Online. Because I believe they provide the most well thought-out guidelines for the online provision of mental health services, I also voluntarily abide by the internet counselling ethics guidelines of the United States National Board for Certified Counselors.

I hold Enhanced Disclosure from the UK's Criminal Records Bureau, a clearance level "reserved for positions involving the greatest degree of trust". (See the Disclosure Service or the main CRB site.)