How is the counseling process going?
The traditional counseling process includes the following six important, yet separate components:
The traditional counseling process includes the following six important, yet separate components:
- Opening: The opening process is one of the most important parts of the interaction with a client. It is your chance to get to know your client and for them to get to know you. It is also where you will set the tone for the rest of the relationship.
- Exploring Client's Understanding: The exploration process is where you will begin to understand your client. You will explore their past and evaluate their current concerns. Here, you will together establish goals and set expectations.
- Understanding: Important in developing a strong relationship with your client, you can demonstrate understanding by using verbal and nonverbal cues, as well as reflections and paraphrases.
- Intervention: The intervention process is about choosing the appropriate counseling techniques that will encourage growth within your client.
- Exploring Problems: Exploration is the process of learning more about your client and why they have come to counseling. Exploration is necessary in truly understanding a client’s thoughts and feelings in relation to their pressing problem.
- Empower to Create Own Solutions: Empowering your client is not about providing them with all the answers. It is about empowering them, with your counseling skills, to find their own solutions.
What skills do we need so as to provide counseling services?
These are some of the most important counseling skills and techniques you are likely to use in your counseling sessions:
These are some of the most important counseling skills and techniques you are likely to use in your counseling sessions:
- Listening/Observing: Listening is one of the most valuable counseling skills in the therapeutic relationship. It can be used in three ways:
- Attending: Attending is the ability to be physically present for the client. It means giving them your undivided attention and making appropriate eye contact, mirroring body language, and nodding. These attending behaviors show your client that you care. Approximately 80% of communication takes place non-verbally.
- Active listening: Active listening occurs when you are listening with all of your senses. Active listening involves listening with your body, heart, ears, eyes, and mouth.
- Verbal listening: This is a form of showing you are listening through the words that you use. These verbal cues are used to show attention and to encourage more exploration from the client. This can be as simple as ‘yes’, or ‘go on’. It can also be in the form of paraphrasing or repeating a word of emotion that the client has just said.
- Asking Questions: Questions are helpful in the therapeutic environment because they allow you to learn more about your client. The type of questions that you ask will set the tone of the session and the entire counseling process. Questions occur in two forms.
- Closed: A closed question is the practice of asking a question that can be answered as a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Closed questions should generally be avoided in the counseling relationship, as they do not encourage deeper exploration.
- Open: An open question is necessary to gather information. An open question is one that cannot be answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and it requires reflection or exploration on the client’s end. Every open question should be intentional and therapeutic. The best open ended questions begin with ‘how’ and ‘what’.
- Reflection: Reflections are used in the counseling process to accurately describe the client’s state from their verbal or nonverbal cues.
- Feelings reflections: Reflections allow clients to hear the feelings they have just expressed. Sometimes you have to look for the descriptive feeling in a client’s statement. It can also be helpful to look at a client’s nonverbal feeling cues.
- Restating/Rephrasing: Restating and rephrasing can build a stronger client relationship. Rephrasing a client’s statement allows you to better understand what a client has just said and to gain further clarity, if you have gotten it wrong.
- Affirmation: Affirmation is a form of encouragement that is used to affirm behaviors or life choices. Affirmation is important for empowering clients. A few common affirmations include affirming progress that a client has made toward a goal or encouraging a client to do what is important to them.
- Empathy: Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. It is much more than sympathy in that you are able to show your understanding of your clients feeling surrounding an experience.
- Genuineness: Begin genuine is creating congruence between yourself and your words. Every therapist is different and will provide a different therapeutic process. It is important to remain genuine in all counseling techniques and verbal and nonverbal cues.
- Unconditional Positive Regard: Demonstrating unconditional positive regard is the idea of accepting your client for who they are. It is a means of expressing warmth and respect.
- Counselor Self-Disclosure: This is a tricky counseling skill to maneuver. A general rule to follow is to only share personal information that is beneficial to the therapeutic process. It might also be used to help the counselor relate better with their client.