Introduction to my Counselling pages

Diagram: the vicious cycle driving a client’s problem gambling.

Counselling pages

These counselling pages present:

  • An example counselling session in which the counsellor presents to the client a vicious cycle driving the client’s presenting problem. This page illustrates how I used my ideas about vicious cycles in my counselling work, why I’m enthusiastic about them, and worked to develop them.
  • An understanding of human behaviour grounded in systems theory and its feedback cycles. This emerged from my counselling practice and aligns with, or integrates, elements of other counselling theories.

 
I titled my article “Feedback Loops in Clinical Practice: An Integrative Framework” because it integrates, in various ways, a range of standard approaches to counselling and beyond. Separate pages examine this frameworkfrom the perspective of:

These pages are both practical and theoretical.

System Theory Pages

Feedback cycles organise climate change and human behaviour, so feedback is critical to the main focuses of this site: (1) Climate change and action to minimise it, and (2) Human behaviour and the use of cyclic interventions in counselling. For these pages, see:

The Cyclic intervention in brief

To give you an idea of where we are going …

Here is a brief overview of the self-reinforcing feedback cycle that emerged during my example counselling session with client Zed.

This diagram shows the dynamic driving this client’s problem gambling.

Towards the end of the session, I summed it up, saying to him:

  • There is a cycle here.
  • The more you gamble to feel respected while you’re winning,
  • the more money you lose and the less respect you get at home and at work, so
  • the more you need respect, and
  • this throws you back to gamble more.
  • This vicious cycle is making life difficult for you.

The method for generating and using the cyclic intervention is critical: the page describing the example counselling session details this.

Relevant to any problematic habit

I developed and used these interventions during my ten years working as a problem gambling counsellor; however, the theories underlying the intervention are generic, suggesting that this sort of intervention could assist counsellors working with any problem, including drug and alcohol addictions and compulsive behaviour.

The development of these ideas

I developed my use of these cyclic interventions by:

  • working as a problem gambling counsellor for ten years;
  • using the evolving ideas in my daily work;
  • trying to understand the madness of problem gambling;
  • working with other counsellors each week as a reflective family therapy team. They saw how I worked, encouraged me and guided me. One counsellor lent me a book on family therapy. She was right. Systems theory supported the cyclic logic that I was using;
  • presenting at three family therapy conferences;
  • completing a master’s degree based on research into my counselling practice (Gunner, 2002);
  • writing a journal article (Gunner, 2006); and
  • preparing these webpages in 2025.

The Victorian Gambling Research Panel

The Victorian Government’s “Gambling Research Panel” report, “Best Practice in Problem Gambling Services” (June 2003, p. 87), included a section on my Master of Social Work research into counselling problem gamblers with cyclic interventions. In part, the report stated:

Theory Building from Clinical Practice: Developing the Feedback Framework for Problem Gambling Development and Recovery.

… The framework appears to offer practical concepts and interventions for problem gambling counsellors and their clients, based on the solid foundations of systems theory (Maruyama, 1968) and recognised therapists such as Weinberg (1995) and Malan (1979).
 
The Framework incorporates and supports Cognitive behavioural ideas on relapse prevention, as well as ideas derived from psychodynamic theory, suggesting that problem gambling can repress worries and become a defence against these worries; it provides a theoretical basis that encourages problem gambling counsellors to attend to their client’s worries, from conscious boredom to unconscious dread. …

In practice, the framework provides a structure for understanding how cognitive therapy, behavioural therapy, and psychodynamic therapy can influence problem gambling. It suggests that each therapy tackles problem gambling by breaking the amplifying loops underlying it in different places. Cognitive therapy strategies tackle the pro-gambling mentality, denial, and self-tricking thinking, and thereby the gambling and the worries. Behavioural therapy strategies tackle the gambling behaviour, and thereby the ideas and worries. Psychodynamic therapy strategies tackle the dread, and thereby the ideas and gambling. 

One achievement of the framework is this capacity to integrate various therapeutic theories within the one intervention, as psychodynamic theory is often seen to conflict with cognitive and behavioural therapy.”
 
(Jackson, Thomas, and Blaszczynski: 2003, p 87, 88)

One of these authors, Professor Alun Jackson, was my academic supervisor at the University of Melbourne for the three years of my master’s degree research.

Comment from a neuropsychiatrist.

Dr Georges Otte, a Belgian clinical neuropsychiatrist, supported my article (Gunner, 2006) via a now-defunct internet forum called the “Society for Chaos Theory in Psychological & Life Sciences.” He wrote:

  “Here, we have a single concrete explanatory framework of many concepts that we, as clinical therapists, use in our daily clinical practice. It has the huge merit of presenting this clearly and being biologically plausible, theoretically valid, and practically oriented. One does not need a 500-page manual; the journal article is sufficient. This framework is ready for use with the next patient, whatever the problem presented.”  

Wind up

My description of one counselling session shows how I used cyclic interventions with my clients. I used these interventions because they gave me a constructive way of viewing and assisting my clients’ problem gambling.

I am now retired and have been writing this because the ideas always excited me, and I hope that other counsellors will find them helpful. In the past few months, these ideas have developed, unfortunately, not now supported by my counselling practice, and I am sure there is still plenty of room for improvement.

Your comments on this

I welcome constructive comments about these pages.

All Counselling References

These are the references for all the counselling pages.

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Capra, F (1997). The Web of Life: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter, London: Flamingo/HarperCollins.

Gunner, A. (2002). Problem Gambling Development and Recovery: A Reflective Counsellor’s Practical Construction Based on Feedback. An unpublished MSW thesis, School of Social Work, University of Melbourne.

Gunner, A. (2006). Feedback Loops in Clinical Practice: An Integrative Framework: Australian & New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy. Volume 27, Number 3.

Jackson A, Thomas S & Blaszczynski A (2003). Best Practice in Problem Gambling Services, Melbourne, Victorian Government Gambling Research Panel.

Malan D (1979). Individual Psychotherapy and the Science of Psychodynamics, Cambridge, Butterworth.

Maruyama M (1968). The Second Cybernetics: Deviation Amplifying Mutual Causal Processes, in Buckley W, Modern Systems Research for the Behavioural Scientist, Chicago, Aldine, page 304.
See the Maruyama article.

Moreno, J. L., (1964). Psychodrama, Volume 1, New York, Beacon House.

Nichols, M. P. (2008). Family Therapy: Concepts and Methods, 8th edition: Boston, Allyn and Bacon.

Watts, D. (2003). Six Degrees: The Science of the Connected Age, London, Heinemann.

Weinberg G (1981). The Pliant Animal, New York, St Martin’s Press.

Weinberg, G. (1995). Invisible Masters: Compulsions and the Fear That Drives Them, London, Sphere Books.

Weinberg G (1996). The Heart of Psychotherapy, New York, St Martin’s Griffin.

Senge (1990). The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organisation, Sydney, Random House

Related pages

Links to all the counselling pages and systems theory pages are at the top of this page

First loaded: 19 Dec 2025: Updated 27 Jan 2026