THEORY AND PRACTICE OF COUNSELLING

COUNSELING
A noble and altruistic profession.
Parents, teachers, friends, ministers, nurses, social workers, layers, as well as a
host of other people give counsel. Their purpose and methods differs
enormously
Some are trained counsellors and others not, but all of them concerned with
helping other people solve their problem. It’s a continuing process since
problems can arise at any time.

Major objective is to help individuals become self-sufficient, dependent and

self-directed
Individuals are provided to enhance their personal, social, emotional and
intellectual development.Counsellors services are preventive, developmental
and therapeutic in nature
In order to assist the clients the counsellors should understand their needs,
motives, perceptions, defences etc. Counselling emphasises growth as well as
remediation over the course of a life span in various areas of life: childhood,
adolescence, adulthood, and older adulthood.
Individuals, couples, groups, families, and social systems are helped.Emphasis
on prevention and purposefulness-finding meaning, direction, and fulfilment.

Definition
“Counselling is an interactive process conjoining the counselee who needs
assistance and the counsellor who is trained and educated to give this
assistance” ​(Joseph F. Perez).
Blocher explains it as ​“ helping an individual become aware of himself and
the ways in which he is reacting to the behavioural influences of his
environment”.
The Commission of Rehabilitation Counselor Certification (CRCC) and Chi
Sigma Iota (counselling honor society international defines ​“Counselling is a
professional relationship that empowers diverse individuals, families, and
groups to accomplish mental health, wellness, education, and career goals”.

Carl Rogers ​describes counselling as “

​ the process by which the structure of
the self is relaxed in the safety of the client’s relationship with the
therapist, and previously denied experiences are perceived and then
integrated into an altered self”.
Pepinsky and Pepinsky​state that “counselling is that interaction which (1)
occurs between two individuals called counsellor and client, (2) takes place
in a professional setting, and (3) is initiated and maintained to facilitate
changes in the behaviour of a client”.
The definitions of Counselling contains the following points:
Ø ​Counselling deals with wellness, personal growth, career,
education, and empowerment concerns.
Ø ​Counselling is conducted with persons individually, in groups,
and in families.
Ø​ ​Counselling is diverse and multicultural-diverse groups
Ø ​Counselling is a dynamic process- means it not only focus on
their clients’ goals, but they also help clients accomplish them.

According to 20/20: A Vision for the Future of Counselingconsortium ,

Counseling is a professional relationship that empowers diverse
individuals, families, and groups to accomplish mental health, wellness,
education, and career goals.

This definition contains number of implicit and explicit points that are
important for counsellors and groups:
Counseling deals with wellness, personal growth, career, education, and
empowerment
Counseling is conducted with persons individually, in groups, and in families.
Counseling is diverse and multicultural
Counseling is a dynamic process (not only focus on their goals of clients, but
also help them to accomplish them.
Helping someone toward change to reduce ‘disturbance’ in behaviour,
emotions, adjustment, stress-related etc
Personality and Background of the Counselor
A counsellor’s personality is at times a cruicial ingredient in counselling
Negative Motivators for Becoming a Counseor:
Emotional distress- ​(individuals who have unresolved personal traumas)
Vicarious coping- ​(persons who live their lives through others rather than have
meaningful lives of their own.
Loneliness and isolation- ​who do not have friends and compensate through
counselling
A desire for power- ​people who feel frightened and impotent in their lives and
seek to control others
A need for love
Vicarious rebellion- ​people who have unresolved ganger and act out their
thoughts and feelings through their clients’ defiant behaviour

Personal Qualities of an Effective Counselor

Curiosity and inquisitiveness
Ability to listen
Comfort with conversation
Good theoretical knowledge - ​on theories of counselling, psychological
mechanism and the ability to make use of the knowledge.
Empathy and understanding
Emotional insightfulness-​comfort dealing with a wide range of feelings, from
anger to joy
Introspection –​ability to see or feel from within
Capacity for self-denial
Tolerance of intimacy- ​ability to sustain emotional closeness
Comfort with power​-acceptance of power with a certain degree of detachment
Ability to laugh

Ability to engage in ‘alonetime’ – an intentional practice of devoting periods

in their lives to silence and solitude and reflectivity. (it helps counsellor to
overcome ​burnout​)
Intellectual competence- ​desire and ability to learn as well as think fast and
creatively
Energy​-ability to be active in sessions
Flexibility​- the ability to adapt what one does to meet clients’ needs
Support-​capacity to encourage clients in making their decisions
Good will- ​the desire to work on behalf of the client
Self-awareness- knowledge of self, including attitudes, values, and feelings and
the ability to recognize how and what factors affect oneself
Ability to work from a perspective of resolved emotional experiences that has
sensitized a person to self and others in a helpful way is what becoming
a–(​Rollo May​ characterizes as being a ​wounded healer.

Some misconceptions regarding counselling need to be changed:

Counselling is not:
Giving information though information may be given.
Giving advise, making suggestions and recommendations.
Influencing the client’s values, attitudes, beliefs, interests, decisions etc, with or
without any threat or admonition
Interviewing clients

Counseling is concerned with normal people

Emphasizes personality ‘strengths’ as assets of the counsellees.
Emphasizes cognitive ability involved in choice and decision making
Counseling concerned with aiding normal people to achieve better adjustment
skills.
Performed in many setting by different kinds of persons with varying
backgrounds.
It lays stress on rational planning to solve problems of adjustment
Counselling is recognized an instrument of self-actualization.
It involves positive ways thinking, feeling and acting about oneself and in
relation to others.
Maslow suggested that to be a self-actualized person one should be a ‘fully
functioning individual’.
Counselling involves understanding of the concept ‘self as an instrument’ and
regards ‘becoming’ as essential to it.

Counsellor takes the initiative to move the counselee independent and

self-reliant
Client needs ​should be the focus of counselling
A positive view of self is a source of strength and power.
The counsellor is concerned with client’s resources to use them as teaching
tools.
The psychotherapist is concerned with problems involving deeper dynamics.
 The counsellor helps students with problems of underachievement and
emotionality.
Problems may arise in the developmental process of personality or in the
failure of personality to cope with demands of role performance.

Counselling and Related Fields

1. Counselling and Psychotherapy

Perhaps the most acceptable definition of Psychotherapy given by ​Wolberg
(1967), which is as follows:
"Psychotherapy is the treatment by psychological means, of
problems of an emotional nature, in which a trained person
deliberately establishes professional relationship with the patient,
with the object of: Removing, modifying or retarding existing
symptoms; Mediating disturbed patterns of behavior and Promoting
positive personality growth and development.

Psychotherapy may also be defined as the healing the mind by

psychological methods that are applied by suitably trained and
qualified practitioners.

Counseling usually refers to a brief treatment that centers around behaviour

patterns.
Psychotherapy is concerned the treatment of problems of an emotional nature by
psychological means.
Psychotherapy focuses on working with clients for a longer-term and draws from
insight into emotional problems and difficulties.
It is concerned with the reconstruction of the individual at both conscious and
unconscious levels.
Alleviating pathological conditions.
psychotherapy focuses on working with clients for a longer-term. It draws from
insight into emotional problems and difficulties.
It utilizes psycho-analysis, hypnosis and such other psychological approaches for
therapeutic purposes.
In psychotherapy, treatment is started with the establishment of a professional
relationship between the therapist/counsellor and the patient/client.
The objective of this relationship is to remove, modify or retard (lessen) the
existing symptoms and promote positive personality growth
In psychotherapy, the goal is to overcome certain weakness by any practical
means. The counsellor on the other hand is concerned with the identification
and development of positive strengths in the individuals.
It is commonly believed that therapy should aim at bringing personality change
In therapy, when the client has a personality problem, the aim is to bring about
a change in him/her. (for eg., psychoanalysis aims to bring about personality
change in the client).
Focuses on serious problems associated with intrapsychic disorders (such as
delusions, hallucinations)
Long term relationship b/n therapist and the client
More associated with inpatient department

2. Counselling and Guidance

Guidance is the assistance given to individuals in making intelligent choices
and adjustments.
It is helping someone in need or difficulty by offering advice to make ‘choice’
of direction and reduce/overcome difficulty – eg. Vocational or career choice
It is based on the conception that it is the duty and the right of every individual
to choose his/her own way of life.
Every individual is capable of achieving his goals.
Guidance is essentially a helping process that comprises providing material or
non-material assistance to solve a problem to an individual.
It helps make the individual self-dependent and self-directed.
It ​promotes utilization of one’s own potentials
A guidance counsellor helps facilitate educational and occupational choices.
Guidance counsellor tries to help the counselee discover for himself some
blocked path, so that it enables him/her to move forward. Client’s expectations
and goals are taken into account.
Helps the client to make his/her choices on the basis of self and situation.
Enhance counselee's freedom of choice, responsibility, and commitment to his
choice.
Guidance focuses on helping individuals choose what they value most, whereas
counselling helps them make changes.
In guidance, mostly in schools and career centres an adult would help a student
make decisions, such as deciding on what course of study or a vocation.
It is considered to be a relationship between ‘the unequal’s.
Children receive guidance from parents, teachers, religious leaders, coaches,
and so on.

3. Counseling and Clinical Psychology (CP)

CP is concerned with the description, classification, diagnosis and prognosis of
psychological illnesses.
CPs usually functions in a clinical setting
CPs work in close association with the psychiatrist
Usually concerned with severe psychological disorders schizophrenia,
depression, mania, severe anxiety disorders etc.
CPs provide assistance the psychiatrists usually in the diagnosis and evaluation
of psychological disorders.
 Psychiatry is concerned with severe psychological disorders requiring
institutional care.
Psychotherapist deals with less sever psychological disorders that do not require
hospitalization but seriously affect ease of adjustment
Counselling is concerned with normal individuals exhibiting transient problems
of maladjustment of a less severe nature

4. COUNSELLING AS HYGIOLOGY
Hygiology is the study of the problems of normal people and the prevention of
the incidence of serious emotional difficulties.
Counselling could be more appropriately concerned with hygiology than with
psycho-pathology of behaviour

Counselling as a Helping Relationship

It is a helping relationship. People often seek to satisfy one’s personal needs.
The commonly observed relationship such as between teacher and student,
husband and wife, mother and child, parents and children, counsellor and
counsellee could all be considered helping relationships.

Counselling as a Helping Relationship is characterized by certain essential

features.
1. Is meaningful because it is personal and intimate.
2. Is affective in nature involving mild to strong emotional relationships
3. Involves the integrity of the helper and the helped and is sustained
voluntarily
4. Involves mutual consent of the counsellor and the counselee either
explicitly stated or implicitly inferred.
5. Takes place because the individual in need of help is aware of his own
limitations and inadequacies.
6. Involves confidence reposed in the helper
7. Is often achieved and maintained through communication and interaction
8. Involves certain amount of structure
9. Is marked by the desire for change in the existing condition of the client,
that is concerned with the improvement of the client.

Counselling as a Solution to Human Problems

Counselling aims at helping the clients understand and accept themselves “as
they are’
Helps to work towards realizing their potential
It is achieved through modification of attitudes, outlook and behaviour.
The counsellor accepts his clients and has unconditional regard for their
personality or self-worth
Counselling involves the feelings of clients
Counselling has a cognitive dimension through which behavioural change is
sought to be achieved.
The client is helped to state his problems and explore the possible solutions (it
is not the counsellor who solve the problems)
The client is helped to discover for himself/herself her strengths and weakness.
The self-understanding is reached through the use of objective psychological
instruments.
Scope of Counselling
Helping for “developmental problems” to make a person more self-actualizing
in a continuous (lifespan) growth process.
 Focuses on the imbalances of counselee's cognitive aspect.
Focuses on the behavioural problems and behaviour modification of the client
It focuses on problems related to child counselling, marriage counselling,
interpersonal relationship, adjustment problems, age-related problems, family
counselling, group counselling, person-centered counselling, and crisis
intervention counselling.
Scope of counselling is also all pervading in various fields of life-eg.,
education, career related counselling in office and industries.
Focuses on life challenges – such as sexual harassment, alcoholism and
substance abuse; counselling the disabled and their families, counselling
suicide-prone persons; counselling the terminally ill persons.
Assumptions and Issues in Counselling
1.Counsellors must have firm faith in human potential for self-growth in
every counselee
2. Every individual has basic usage for forward growth and move up toward
‘self actualization’.
3. Counselee must be given ‘freedom of choice’ for their own action plans
for self growth.
4. The ‘freedom for own choice’ also puts the onus of responsibility for
outcome of action on the counselee, thus the counselee learns to indulge in
‘responsible actions’.
5. Counsellor must have faith in possibility of ‘behaviour modification’.
a). In most rigid and/or resistant persons also
b). As well as in most rigid and long duration problems and habits
also.
6. Every person has the potential to learn a true sense of ‘Existence’ as his
‘Being’.
Every person has the capacity to grow more and more mature and to
become a “fully functioning person”.