BASIC COUNSELING

PRINCIPLES
Counseling Theories and Techniques 2
Myla Pilar S. Pamplona, PhD, LPT, RPm, RGC
• Counselling is not a process of giving advice, but it is a
process of helping your patient who is genuinely in need.
• It aims to help an individual to help himself to overcome
his problem.
• Counselling is different from a casual conversation as it
builds a professional relationship with the patient.
• It is totally FOCUSED, SPECIFIC and PURPOSEFUL.
• Counselling is a long-term process and consists of
professional communication.
• Counseling is a process, as well as a relationship,
between persons. Contrary to what some people believe,
counseling is not concentrated advice-giving. The aim of
the counselor is usually to assist the person or persons
(client or clients) in realizing a change in behavior or
attitude, or to seek achievement of goals. Often there are
varieties of problems for which the counselee may seek to
find help.
• Some forms of counseling include the teaching of social
skills, effective communication, spiritual guidance,
decision-making, and career choices. Counseling may
sometimes be needed to aid one in coping with a crisis.
Other types of counseling include premarital and marital
counseling; grief and loss (divorce, death or amputation);
domestic violence and other types of abuse; special
counseling situations like terminal illness (death and
dying); as well as counseling of emotionally and mentally
disturbed individuals. Counseling could be short-term
(brief counseling) or long-term.
• The counseling setting is of extreme importance. It is not
necessary to have a large, expensively furnished office.
What is of extreme importance is privacy.The constant
ringing of the telephone or knocking on doors can be
distracting and may cause difficulty in establishing
rapport.
• One may counsel in a home, a park, a chapel, vestry, or
any available vacant room. While privacy is very
important, it is not wise to choose an out-of-the-way
location where there are no humans in sight for miles. A
feeling of emotional and physical safety is necessary.
• While simplicity of furnishing is acceptable, comfort is
necessary. If the room is pleasant and comfortable, the
counselor and counselee will feel more relaxed and the
sessions will be more productive.
• Arrange the chairs in the room so that the client may be
able to choose their seat. Avoid placing chairs in a
position where the counselee cannot see you clearly. You
also need to be able to see him or her. Try to present a
calm, pleasant, and prepared appearance. This will put
your client at ease.
• Listening skills: Listen attentively to the client in an
attempt to understand both the content of their problem,
as they see it, and the emotions they are experiencing
related to the problem. Do not make interpretations of the
client's problems or offer any premature suggestions as to
how to deal with, or solve the issues presented. Listen
and try to understand the concerns being presented. Most
people want and need to be heard and understood, not
advised.
• Resistance: Changing human behavior is not usually a
linear, direct, and logical process. It is very emotional and
many habits of behavior and thought that are
dysfunctional are difficult to break. People invest a sense
of security in familiar behavior, even some behavior that
causes them pain. Changing this is often a difficult and
tangential process. Many threads of behavior are tied to
others and when one thing is changed a new balance
must be established, otherwise people couldn't function.
• This means people change at different rates depending
on how well they can tolerate the imbalance that comes
from change. So, when people resist certain changes that
one hopes will occur in therapy it is important that the
therapist not take this personally and recognize the
stressful nature of the process for the client. Some
resistance to therapeutic change is quite natural.
• Respect: No matter how peculiar, strange, disturbed,
weird, or utterly different from you that the client is, they
must be treated with respect! Without this basic element
successful therapy is impossible. You do not have to like
the client, or their values, or their behavior, but you must
put your personal feelings aside and treat them with
respect. In some institutional settings you made observe
some slippage in this principal among staff which is both
inadequately trained and overstressed and overworked,
but you must try to keep this principal in mind at all times
in you want to be an effective counselor or therapist.
•
• Empathy and Positive Regard: Based in the writings of
Carl Rogers, these two principles go along with respect
and effective listening skills. Empathy requires you to
listen and understand the feelings and perspective of the
other person (in this case your client) and positive regard
is an aspect of respect. While Rogers calls this
"unconditional positive regard" it may be a bit too much to
ask that it be "unconditional." Treating the client with
respect should be sufficient.
• Clarification, confrontation, interpretation: These are
techniques of therapeutic intervention that are more
advanced, although clarification is useful even at a basic
level. Clarification is an attempt by the therapist to restate
what the client is either saying or feeling, so the client
may learn something or understand the issue better.
Confrontation and interpretation are more advanced
principles and we won't go into them except to mention
their existence.
• Transference and Countertransference: This is a
process wherein the client feels things and has
perceptions of the therapist that rightly belong to other
people in the client's life, either past or present. It is a
process somewhat related to projection. Understanding
transference reactions can help the client gain
understanding of important aspects of their emotional life.
• Countertransference refers to the emotional and
perceptional reactions the therapist has towards the client
that rightly belong to other significant people in the
therapists life. It is important for the therapist to
understand and manage their countertransference.
• THE SIX STAGES OF THE COUNSELING PROCESS A
counseling session is therefore sometimes referred to as
the 50-minute hour. It takes place in a session depends
on the client's needs and the counselor's personal
approach to counseling. Although there is some variation
during a session, there is a basic structure. That structure
was described by Cormier and Hackney (1987) as a five-
stage process: relationship building, assessment, goal
setting, interventions, and termination and follow-up.
These stages have been expanded in the following six-
stage model of the counselling process
• Stage one: Relationship building
• Stage two: Assessment and diagnosis
• Stage three: Formulation of counseling goals
• Stage four: Intervention and problem solving
• Stage five: Termination and follow-up
• Stage six: Research and evaluation
• Counseling can be conceptualized as a series of stages
or steps that lead one through the counseling process. A
typical counseling session can involve all six stages
except termination. The focus of counseling may shift as
the counseling process progresses over time. For
example, during the first few sessions with a client, a
counselor may place the primary emphasis on building a
positive
• Avoiding Counselor Burnout While Seeking
Resilience: An Interview with Thomas Skovholt,
University of Minnesota Counseling Psychologist
• Work-life balance—maintaining this can be a challenge
for any working adult, but especially for those of us who
are counselors. It’s not easy spending every work day
delving into clients’ serious personal problems and trying
to help the clients work through them. The clients’ pain
and suffering can become the therapists’ pain and
suffering, and even the most dedicated counselors can
find the daily grind to be emotionally exhausting.
• “How do you enter the world of the other person without
losing yourself? You have to be present in the persons’
life, but also present in your own life,” says Thomas
Skovholt, counseling psychology professor at the
University of Minnesota.
• Many counselors find themselves drained and
overwhelmed. For some, the novice years are the most
difficult, for others being a seasoned counselor is more
challenging. At times, they come down with many of the
same symptoms that their clients suffer: depression,
anxiety, frustration, and feelings of helplessness and
futility.
• Bonding and Separating
• One contributing factor, according to Skovholt, is the sheer
emotional investment—the affective attunement required to be
a master counselor. A counselor has to listen to client after
client retell the traumatic experiences that he or she lived
through: sexual assaults, drug or alcohol addictions, domestic
or family violence, and so on. It can be hard to endure these
stories all day, every day, without becoming a little traumatized,
in turn.
• Skovholt has been there himself. Entering your clients’ worlds
is scary and unpleasant sometimes. The key is to not become
too deeply enmeshed. A good counselor firmly separates the
client’s personal life from his or her own. From his own
research, a term “Boundaried Generosity” has emerged to
describe this intense focus on the wellbeing of the other while
maintaining oneself.
• Compounding this is the difficulty of measuring success. A
teacher sees students’ test scores rise and the students
eventually graduate, and the teacher knows that he or she is
making a difference. But how does a counselor know if his or
her counseling is succeeding? Client’s don’t “graduate,” per se;
they just stop coming, either abruptly or and in a planful way.
• And some clients continue suffering from the same behavioral
or emotional problems throughout their lives. Often the human
change process is slow and erratic. Other times people have a
readiness when they begin counseling and, in these situations,
there can be rapid progress. Skovholt says “People come to
counseling because they have unsolveable problems that must
be solved and this demands counselor patience as together
counselor and client do the counseling process
• It hits many counselors especially hard when clients do not
progress as hoped. Those counselors spend large quantities of
time interacting with the clients person-to-person, and they
have become personally invested in the clients’ problems. This
can be especially difficult for practicum counselors who tend to
tie their feelings of success to rapid reduction for clients in
affective distress—less anxiety, less depression, less anger.
Seasoned counselors tend to have a more complex way of
thinking about their own counseling performance.
• This, too, is a matter of boundaries, Skovholt points out. A
counselor must accept that the clients will ultimately make their
own life choices, and that those won’t always be choices that
the counselor will like.
• “When the client is less stressed or less depressed, the
counselor may feel joyful, but when the client doesn’t get
better, the counselor can get demoralized,” he says. “So it’s
learning to separate oneself from the other person’s efforts.”
• The Cycle of Caring
• Skovholt makes a point of discussing burnout with his students and sharing with
them ways to avoid it. One of his lessons centers on the “Cycle of Caring,” a
circular process that a treatment process for a client will ideally follow:
• Empathic attachment phase. The counselor empathizes with the client and forms
a personal bond of trust with him or her.
• Active involvement phase. The counselor dives into the client’s personal problems
and works with him or her on them.
• Felt separation phase. The counselor experiences the end of a human
relationship and reaffirms his or her own identity and separation from that of the
client.
• Re-creation phase. The counselor is reenergizing the self in order to
enthusiastically enter another cycle of bonding and separation with the next client.
• This Cycle is about being present and separate at the same time. Counselors
have the challenge of attaching to one client after another, and then letting each
one go. . The Cycle of Caring is a model Skovholt has developed to describe the
essence of, what he calls, the Relationship-Intense Professions ( e.g. helping
professions, health care, teaching etc.) where the interpersonal process is central
to client /patient/ student success.
• © Thomas M. Skovholt
• This process can be hard. A counselor has to care about each
client, to an extent, or else he or she won’t put in the time and
effort to really understand them and help the client—and
besides, most clients can tell if their counselor doesn’t care,
and it will turn them off. But getting overly attached to clients
will be draining, all the more so when many of them don’t
recover or progress as hoped.
• While it’s not easy, counselors must learn to do it. Otherwise,
their own well-being will suffer, and their clients’ well-being will
suffer in turn, according to Skovholt, who adds that he will be
writing a book on the topic later this year.
• “How often do you hear a client say ‘you seem totally
disengaged and totally unable to help me, but 10 years ago
you helped a lot of people, so I am grateful for that.’ You don’t,”
he says. “We’re as good as the person we see tomorrow.”
• The Inspiration to Keep Going
• Once in a rare while, a counselor may get a note from a
former client expressing gratitude for the counseling and
explaining how much better his or her life is now. Skovholt
encourages counselors to celebrate those notes, and
even save them in a box—but make it a small box, he
says, because those notes do not often get sent. It’s
one—one of the only—concrete proofs they can give
themselves of personal success.
• “Counselors love getting these notes and they wonder
why they don’t get more. And I tell them, when‘s the last
time you wrote to your dentist to say thanks for the dental
work? When’s the last time you wrote to an author about
an article that you liked?,” he says.
• Caring for Oneself and One’s Clients
• Above all, counselors must make efforts to keep themselves
emotionally healthy, Skovholt says: Only then can they truly be
present and effective for their clients. Here are a few pointers that he
shares toward this end:
• Join counselors associations and support groups. Spending time with
other counselors is a great way to share the ups and downs of the
work with others who are going through them with you.
• Consider getting some counseling for yourself. Counselors, like
anyone else, can find it help to talk to a professional therapist about
things that are troubling them on the job—or off the job, for that
matter. “People have to be good at dealing with their own tragedies,
their own losses their own grief—partners leaving them, children
growing up and moving out, parents dying. Then they have energy
and ideas to help their clients with losses,” he says.
• Get additional training and certification for other kinds of counseling
and research.
• Have more sources of positive energy in your life: fun,
friends, and family. We all need recreation, hobbies, and
down time with the people who are close to us. Those
non-work experiences refresh our minds and relieve the
stresses of work. Also important, they give us chances to
make tangible accomplishments—something that all
counselors could use more of, in Skovholt’s opinion. “To
have concrete hobbies, such as weaving, gardening
painting walls, a collection of this or that—you can work
hard with clients all day, and then you go home and paint
a wall, and you can say, ‘It was yellow, and now it was
blue. Look at that. I really accomplished something,’” he
says.
• Hard Work, But Meaningful Work
• Having treated clients himself, Skovholt has known firsthand
the exhaustion, frustrations, disappointments, and tensions that
counselors experience while working with clients. But he’s felt
other things, too: joy and purpose. A counselor helps people to
make tremendously positive changes in their lives, from ending
destructive substance addictions to overcoming a mood
disorder such as depression. While it’s not always obvious to a
counselor, great things do happen as a result of his or her
work.
• Skovholt reminds himself of this and encourages other
counselors to do the same. Relish the fulfillment and the
meaning that drives counseling, he explains. It can be a source
of positive energy in itself.
• “In my view, counseling is one of the great
inventions of the last half of the twentieth
century. We have a method to help people
transform their lives,” he says. “It can give
great meaning and be very gratifying to be
part of that process.”
• Skovholt, T. M. and Trotter-Mathison, M. (2011). The resilient
practitioner: Burnout
prevention and self-care strategies for therapists, counselors,
teachers, and health
professionals. Second Edition. New York: Routledge.
• Ronnestad, M.H. and Skovholt, T. M. (2013) The developing
practitioner: Growth and
stagnation of therapists and counselors. New York: Routledge.
• Skovholt, T. M. (2012). Becoming a therapist: On the path to
mastery. New York: John Wiley
and Sons.
• Trotter-Mathison, M., Koch, J., Sanger, S. and Skovholt, T.
(2010). Voices from the
field: Defining moments in counselor and therapist development.
New York:Routledge
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