The aim of the study is to explore and develop knowledge about how educational psychological counsellors' personal and private experiences appear in their counselling practice. We conducted four focus group interviews with twelve counsellors from Educational Psychological Counselling Service. Through Thematic Analysis four themes emerged. The first is that counsellors' personal and private experiences functioned as a backdrop for their counselling practice. The second theme is the counsellors' use of different types of stories. The third theme deals with how the counsellors were holding back relevant stories. Finally, the fourth theme comprises the purposes of counsellors' self-disclosure. The conclusion is that personal experiences form a backdrop for counselling practice and are relevant for how a counsellor makes sense of and understands a situation or a problem. Self-disclosure is in some situations used explicitly in the counselling setting. On the other side the counsellors sometimes consciously hold their experiences back.

While the interaction with parents usually starts immediately after the child is born, there are circumstances when the opportunity to establish early parent-child interaction is restricted or even non-existent. Some children cannot be reared by their biological parents and will need to form attachment relationships with other caregivers. Empirical evidence suggests that