1. Man! This is a long page! Why can't you say it in a short paragraph or two? Can't I just skip all this boring crap and get on with the juicy stuff? I don't have a lot of time.
If you want to have a good session you need to know all this stuff. Sorry. If you want to try it without knowing what you're doing, well, don't expect it to work at all. There's a YouTube video I put online that will show you a RoboCounsellor session in action, that might help too.
2. Isn't this session stuff just for crazy people, wimps and losers?
Some people think so, sure. But it was mainly developed so that the normal, fairly intelligent layman ("man" in this sense and as used on this website includes women in standard English) can improve his outlook on life in the comfort of his own home in his own time with very minimal expense. And to do so without having to "get therapy" or "seek professional help" or even "go and talk to someone." If you think you really should seek professional help, by all means go and do so. How could using a simple website like this be a substitute for dealing with a trained professional in person?
3. If I were to have a session, how could this Robo-thingy possibly work? This is just a website with a limited number of responses, and I won't be interacting with another live person in the session. We're talking about a real person's life here — mine! I'm not a movie character following a pre-written sceenplay.
Good question. What really underlies the success of this automated approach is the "self-actualising" factor, that innate drive one has to be the best one can be, to be able to solve problems, to know the right thing to do, even if this drive gets hidden sometimes. Plus, without getting into the nitty-gritty of how these session modules are designed, all I can say is that these procedures seem to work well as presented.
While a person's responses to real life situations vary a great deal, there are only a very few different types of response that seem to appear in a RoboCounsellor session. Each of these very few types of response dictates a specific next action to take. While there are many things a person driving a car can do, when she approaches a crossroads she can basically turn left or right, go straight across, do a U-turn and go back the way she came, or get stuck in the middle or something. Almost all the time she does one of the first options, and only rarely stalls. It is similar in a RoboCounselling session. There is even a Troubleshooting Add-On for the occasional stall. But don't take my word for it. Look at the dozens of testimonials from satisfied clients. Try it out for yourself (but make sure you follow the instructions!).
4. How does this RoboCounselling thing know what topic I should address? If it just says I should choose the topic, how would I know what topic to pick? I'm not a professional in this area. Is there a list of topics I follow, or something?
To start with, unless your life is unusually calm, the session procedure will isolate what topic is uppermost in your mind and should be addressed in that session. It will vary from individual to individual and be very intimate to you personally. After many sessions, when you have been able to cool off all the hot topics, then you will have a bit more free choice on what to address. At that time, you will be able to pick and choose out of what seems interesting to you. But to begin with, there won't be much choice at all. Your topic will pretty much be forced upon you. You don't have to use that topic in the session, of course — there is no-one standing over you with a gun demanding it. But if you try and do the session on another topic it won't work out so well because your mind will keep straying back to that first topic you should have taken up and didn't. . . .
5. Why is it so important to be "sessionable"? Why can't I just get five hours sleep the night before and drink beer for lunch like I always do?
Basically because you won't get much out of a RoboCounsellor session if you are not prepared for it, with quality sleep and food and so forth, as detailed in the relevant series of pre-session pages here. Just as it won't work to try and paint a wall or your nails if the surface is rough and covered with dust, so it won't work to try and have a session here if you are tired or hungry or under the influence or too distracted, etc.
6. What's this "PaulsRobot" thing about? "Rub & Yawn"?
RoboCounsellor first went online early November 2009. It aims to deliver counselling sessions in line with mainstream counselling approaches, namely the Psychodynamic, Cognitive/Behavioural, Humanistic, and possibly Transpersonal schools of thought. PaulsRobot first went online in August 2006, but delivering counselling sessions in line with various alternative schools of thought. Sooner or later there will be a third website that delivers hybrid counselling sessions, mixing both mainstream and alternative elements, but it is not online yet. RoboCounsellor delivers only mainstream counselling sessions — at least, its highly-innovative automated counselling procedures are based on mainstream counselling practices as far as possible — with the one single exception of the Troubleshooting add-on.
The reason that one small part of this RoboCounselling site uses a 21st century alternative therapy is quite frankly because in the site creator's view Rub & Yawn is the best procedure available for rapidly sorting out counselling sessions when they have gone wrong and nothing else seems to work to fix them. To stick with the purist approach at such a distressing time in order to possibly avoid giving offence seems wrong-headed.
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7. Whoa! Hold on a minute. If this "Rub & Yawn" therapy is so good, why are you bothering with this mainstream stuff?
Shhh. It's a secret. We don't want to rock the boat now, do we?
8. Why should I keep a written record of my session?
Two reasons. Most people find it useful to have a report to refer back to after the session, to see the dates and times of the sessions and how they were doing before and after, what changes happened regarding that particular topic, what realizations they had, and so forth. But there is another very important reason, quite apart from the record-keeping aspect of it. It can be very therapeutic to write things down about your life, especially when the topics are "charged", hot, i.e. they have harmful mental energy attached to them. In order to write down the details you have to hold the events out away from you to some extent in order to look at them in enough detail to describe them, and doing this helps you to sort things out in your own mind. Many people who keep a daily journal or write posts to message boards on the Internet have noticed this.
9. Surely these free sessions aren't any good? I have to pay for the good stuff, right?
The Rogerian module, the first of the free Standard modules here, is surprisingly effective at cooling off a wide variety of topics, as long as you follow the instructions. But it won't work on everything. Similarly for Transactional Analysis and Tabletop Psychodrama here. Try them out and see.
10. What's with all this "All right", "Good" and "Fair enough" stuff? How do you know if what I did was good or not?
Obviously I don't know what you did or how you did it. All the application "knows" is that you clicked on a link. The acknowledgment is there because the session works better for the user than if such acknowledgments were absent. If the session command is "Think of a pink cat" (there isn't such a command here), and you click on a link saying "I thought of a pink cat", and the next screen says "Good. Imagine the cat purring," then all the "Good" means is "Thank you for carrying out the command" and nothing more. Similarly for the other acknowledgments here like "OK", "thank you", "fair enough", "all right", "fine", and whatever else may be used. It would be very distracting to hear "thank you for carrying out the command" each time.
11. I was having a great session — I discharged a hot topic and felt wonderful. I figured on keeping the momentum going and started on another topic that I usually have trouble with and the session went lousy after that. How come? I was doing the procedure exactly the same as before.
Once you've discharged a hot topic and feel great for now, end off and enjoy your "win". It just doesn't work to try and work on another hot topic when you're in such a good condition. It is known as doing a session "over a win" and is a big mistake. So lay off it for a bit. Enjoy the win and do another session when you feel like one, the next day or next week or whenever.
12. Why do I need written instructions, a "session plan", for each of my sessions before the session starts? Why can't I just wing it as I go along?
You will possibly be dealing with intense, life-changing stuff in your sessions. In the middle of such a session, your mind will tend to be rather occupied with the subject matter, and you won't have a lot of spare thinking power to make sensible decisions about other things you maybe could be doing in the session. If you simply follow the overall strategy of your written instructions from before the session, the regular session procedure will provide the necessary tactics, and all should be well. If for some reason the session is not going well, then click on the "troubleshooting" link available in the session and follow the instructions there. If you just want a nice, quiet, gentle approach to your life that won't change things very much, well, it's not really worth your while to stay on this site and you might as well have a beer and watch TV instead.
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13. omitted
N/A
14. Is the RoboCounsellor an accredited member of any professional counselling or psychotherapy bodies, like the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy or the American Counseling Association?
You're kidding, right?
15. Am I covered by the RoboCounsellor's professional liability insurance? Does this site even have professional liability insurance?
See 14.
16. So what qualifications give Paul the right to do all this?
I do it simply because I can. No-one else on the planet has put such websites online, have they? It's not like there is an established way of doing this that anyone with a _____ qualification knows about. I actually first started working in the alternative counselling field in 1972, but the real question is, does RoboCounselling work? And the answer to that one is to try it and see. A free session or three won't cost you any money. If it works for you it works. If it doesn't work for you it doesn't. And if it doesn't work for you and you followed the instructions exactly e-mail me as I would be very interested in hearing about it!
17. Well, can I sue this website or this Paul guy and say you all screwed with my mind?
Sure. But note that per the terms and conditions you must agree to before registering a free user account here and accessing the session module pages, you said you would take part in all this on your own responsibility. Also note that unless something major changes, you probably make much more money than I do, so you wouldn't even get your legal costs covered.
18. How about Data Protection and privacy issues? Equality issues? Diversity issues?
Obviously the RoboCounsellor is accessible by anyone with an appropriate Internet connection who speaks English. There is no personally-identifying information asked for by this site, beyond the email address required when first registering. And you can use a throwaway email address for this if you wish.
19. This isn't a real artificial intelligence bot like at robocounselor.com (-selor not -sellor), is it? You're cheating.
As you wish. A proper working AI counselling interface is perhaps decades away. But these researchers are focused on the AI aspects, not the counselling. I've spent 37 years working with counselling and self-development procedures. My online counselling interfaces work surprisingly well, and since they are automated I don't think it is improper of me to use the robo- label. If you do, fair enough.
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