Current Trends in the Practice of Counselling

The term guidance denotes explicit directions given by an informed person regarding
any subject. An expert in career guidance can impart information regarding different
career possibilities. He may also be able to tell us where the careers are open and
even the possible openings at the time of consultation. In imparting such information
the guidance expert can give pieces of information irrespective of the suitability of
the client for the job. However, he has also the option to test the suitability of the
client using suitable psychological test.
Counselling, on the other hand is more dynamic. It aims at the solution of clients
problems. Counselling is a much-misunderstood concept. To the laymen it is an
occasion where an expert solves the problems of others. Laymen believe that the
expert has ready-made solutions for all the problems of human beings. Most
counsellors say that this is far from the truth. Counselling is a process between the
counsellor and the client in which solutions emerge as a joint venture of the two.
Characteristics of counselling
1. Is expected to be a process.
2. Counselling is usually for normal people with problems.
3. It is essentially a dynamic interaction between the client and the counsellor.
4. Client is expected to be frank and forthright in his approach.
5. It is the duty of the counsellor to keep confidentiality regarding the client.
6. Counsellor is to show warmth and sympathy while listening to the clients
problems.
7. Counsellor is expected to be non-judgmental and non-critical.
8. The relationship between the client and the counsellor is expected to be
genuine.
9. Counselling usually works at the level of rapport and not at the level of
transference.
10. Clients conscious motives are explored rather than the unconscious motives.

Common to all these perspectives are the notions that,

Counselling is aimed at helping people make choices and act on them,

Counselling is a learning process, and

Counselling enables personality development

Current Trends in the Practice of Counselling - It may be observed that

the approaches closely parallel the three aspects of personality viz., cognition,
affection and conation (i.e. knowing, feeling and doing as given by the ancient
Philosophers).
I. Cognitive Approaches
The process of counselling is the curing of unreason by reason;
i.e., to help clients eliminate most emotional disturbances by learning to
think rationally;
To help them get rid of illogical, irrational ideas and attitudes and
substitute logical, rational ideas and attitudes.
It is believed that this process helps the client to attain rational behaviour,
happiness, and self-actualization.
For example Transactional Analysis (TA) aims at the internal dialogues of
individuals, which occurs between the various ego states and the struggles
between the real parts of their behaviour;
Whether the same is productive or counterproductive) and the
behaviour of others by identifying which ego state is in power at any
given time.
TA thus gives the clients information about the various types of
transactions that occur among individuals and to help them identify the
kinds of behaviour in which they are involved.
The goal of TA is to help clients review their past decisions and make new
decisions about their present behaviour.
It is assumed that this would change their life direction into developing an
autonomous life style characterized by awareness, spontaneity.
This, it is believed that would, eliminate a life style characterized by
manipulative game playing a self-defeating neurotic tendencies.
Directive teaching is the core in all the cognitive approaches.

II.

For example in Rational Emotive Therapy (RET) the counsellor takes up an

active teaching role to educate clients.
The RET counsellor makes the client understand that the latters
internationalized sentences are quite illogical and especially the current
illogical thinking are self-defeating verbalizations of the client.
The success if the counsellor lies in bringing illogical thinking forcefully to the
clients attention.
He must also show to the counselee how these thoughts are maintaining his
unhappiness and how a rethinking and maintenance of logically and
rationality make him happy and contented.
In reality therapy, the meaning of reality and the necessity to act responsibly
are taught by the counsellor.

Affective Approaches

 The affective approaches in counselling focus their attention to what is going on

inside the individual, and particularly what the individual is experiencing at a
given time.
Client-centered counselling of Rogers is perhaps the most well-defined
technique in the affective approaches.
It also highlights an issue in counselling; namely, how much responsibility can
be placed on the client for his own problem solving?
Rogers believed that when the individual perceived himself as behaving in a
manner consistent with his 'picture' of himself, he generally experiences
feelings of adequacy, security, and worth.
If on the other hand, he acts in a manner different from the way he defines
himself, he experiences what is known as "threat" and feels insecure,
inadequate, or worthless.
Under pressure and with no other alternative, he may then defend himself
against this threat using one or more of the commonly described "defence
mechanisms".
Unless counselling eliminates this defensive chain reaction and strengthens
his self-concept, the defensive behaviour would increase vulnerability to
further threat, guilt, thereby creating more distortion and more self-defeating
mechanisms.
The role of the therapist is not just eliminating the defence mechanisms.
Rogers highlights the importance of 'Congruence'.
It means the close 'matching of awareness and experience'. In this context, the
client centered counsellors emphasizes the importance of accurate
communication.
If a client is aware of communicating a feeling which he is genuinely
experiencing, his behaviour is said to be congruent or integrated.
In incongruent communication the awareness and experience of the client are
two different if not opposing things.
So also the recipient may experience an awareness of phony communication.
The implication here for the counsellor is that the counsellor should help the
client to face courageously the incongruence between awareness and
experience so that communication of his real experiences is in full awareness
and not distorted with defence mechanisms and neurotic constrictions.

The 'self-theory' of Rogers also assumes a perspective called

'phenomenology'.
According to this perspective, people's 'reality' is that which they perceive.
The way to understand individuals is to infer the 'phenomenological field'
from their behaviour.
In other words, the 'internal frame of reference' of the client is used in
counselling with the implication that counsellors must attempt to perceive
client's perceptual worlds as closely as they can.
This is known as the empathic skill of the counsellor.
Individual client's need to strive for wholeness is the focus in Gestalt
therapy and counselling.

This school of counselling gives importance to the internal world of the

individual.
Striving for the gestalt or the wholeness is actually a striving for an
integration of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
The key concept here is awareness.
It is believed that the counsellors help the clients work toward a total
awareness of his experiences.
Gestalt psychologists point out that such awareness permits self-regulation
and self-control in the direction of increased integration and creativity.

Unlike Psychoanalysis, existentialism is a temperamental way of

looking at life.
It is basically a philosophy of experiences which need not necessarily be
categorized into cognitive compartments.
Man is essentially an emotional being rather than a rational animal!
The existence of man is unique because he is the only being who reacts to
the fact of his existence.
The awareness of one's own existence and the possibility of non-existence
alters the inner world or the phenomenology.
These new premises create new experiences and needs that are yet to be
known.
The predicament of human beings is such that it includes the individual's
capacity for increased self-awareness, the search for unique meaning in a
meaningless world, being alone and being in relation with others, freedom
to choose one's fate, responsibility, anxiety, finiteness and death, and a
basic urge for self-actualization.
As a theory existentialism is sound and appealing, but the practice of
counselling on the basis of this theory is difficult.
However, the existential counsellor tries to understand the client as 'a
being' and as 'a being in the world'.
Counsellors are supposed to expose his own inner reality and at the same
time be human.
This according to existentialists enables clients to become aware of similar
conditions and qualities in themselves.
It is pointed out that through this process clients come to recognize their
potentialities and achieve self-growth by accepting it as their
responsibility.
In a nut shell, it can be said that making the client accept responsibility for
him is the aim of existential counselling.

III.

Behavioural Approaches

The dynamically oriented theorists try to understand conscious and

unconscious through inference

The behavioural counsellors concentrate on objective study of client

behaviour and the learning process.
As the emphasis is primarily on overt behaviour, the first emphasis is to
discover how the behaviour was acquired and how it can be changed.
The second emphasis, which is a later addition, is on precondition for
behaviour change.
This approach is characterized by (1) a focus on overt and specified
behaviour; (2) a precise and well spelt out target behaviours called goals;
(3) a formulation of a specific and objective treatment procedure to the
problem at hand; and (4) an objective assessment of the outcome of
counselling in terms of the degree of approximation to the target
behaviour.
In the behavioural approaches well defined counselling goals are of
central importance.
The much talked about counsellor-counselee relationship in other
approaches is of secondary importance only.
The main aim of this relationship to the behaviourist counsellor is to
facilitate greater understanding of the client's view of the problem.
This helps to formulate a more successful behavioural plan for bringing
about change in the client's maladaptive behaviour to one of adaptive
behaviour (target behaviour).
The behavioural approaches base their understanding of human
behaviour through the theories of learning

IV.

They use very specific techniques like behaviour contracts, social

modelling, systematic desensitization and assertive training.
Personal Theory of Counselling

The three basic approaches (Cognitive, Affective, and Conative) with their
differing foundations vary in their theory and practice of counselling.
The practicing counsellors were undergoing transformation as the clients were
not interested in theories and their subtleties but were interested only in
immediate problem solving.
This demand of the client to the counsellor had made many counsellors to
abandon their dogmatic approach.
Orientation of the counsellors started changing towards a pragmatic approach.
The client and his needs became more important than the counsellors theory and
dogma. This was how personal theory emerged.
Here it is absolutely necessary to point out that training in some known approach is
better than no training. Corey (19977) recommends the eclectic approach as a
framework to begin with. However, George and Cristiani (1981) point out that
although beginning counsellors need a firm understanding of all the major
approaches, they should start first with a thorough grounding in one theoretical
approach to counselling. It is further pointed out that judicious integration and
assimilation of techniques from other approaches could be done with experience.
Caution has been sounded in developing a personal view of counselling. Counsellors
must know their own assumptions about the nature of people, they must explore in

depth their own values, attitudes, and beliefs about what constitutes a good life, what
people are like, and what they themselves are like. Counsellors should also identify
their own models of mature, well-functioning individual so that they can keep this as
a goal. (A summary of the above is given as appendix).
The present authors personal opinion is that here in the cultural setting of India, let
us start with the behavioural approach. The advantage of this approach is that it is
sufficiently objective. It is based on sound principles of learning. The process
involved is clear and well defined. The tangible alone are taken into account. There is
high accountability for the behaviour of the client and counsellor. The goals are
operationally defined and free from philosophical overtones.
In conclusion I wish to quote this important paragraph form Brammer and Shostrom
(19977) as guidance to all of us who are interested in the area of counselling practice.
"Each counsellor and psychotherapist must ultimately develop a point of view which
is uniquely his or her own. Freud was not a Freudian, Jung not Jungian, and Rogers
not a Rogerian. Each of them was himself most fully and completely, while building
upon the wisdom of the past. Each practitioner must feel that his counselling practice
reflects such individuality. This is the reason why no one text or school is fully
adequate, and why we try to exemplify an approach which we have termed 'creative
synthesizing'. This approach is not an arrogant attempt to put down predecessors.
Ideas are rarely developed in solitary efforts. Usually, they are the results of many
years of cumulative cross-fertilization of numerous minds. Isaac Newton is alleged to
have said on this point, 'If I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the
shoulders of giants'. ".

Appendix

Established
Eclectic
single theory Approaches

Creative Synthesis

Main
Characteristic

Integrated set
of assumptions
related directly
to strategy and
method

Strategies
and
methods from several
approaches applied
selectively to clients

Application of broad and

varied strategies and
methods related to a
synthesized
theory
evolved and "owned" by
the practitioner

Examples

Freud's
Psychoanalytic

Thorne's Integrative Assagioli's

Psychology
Psychosynthesis

Rogers's Client Lazarus's Structural Shostrom's

Centered
Eclectism
Therapy

Actualizing

Advantages

Ready-made
Collection of various Continuous synthesizing,
system
of methods
Extendeding
and
assumptions
amplifying
personal
and concepts
Flexibility of choice system
on methods
Extensive
Discourages competition
experience and Wide
agency
database
application
of Fosters
therapist's
methods
identity with own views
Consistency of
theory
and
method

Limitations

Tendency
Encourages uncritical
towards
picking and choosing
restricted view
of data
De-emphasizes
integrative theorizing
Often a closed
system
Tends toward fadism

A continuous
task

lifelong

Tends to be idealistic
Futuristic -- ahead of its
time

Encourages
hero worship

Additive collection of Requires

what works for now
creativity

Fosters
competition
and
divisiveness

Imitative, and tends Requires trust in self

towards
limited
creativity
Risky
-requires
standing on one's own

Illustrative
"Clientcomments by centered
practitioners
theory"

"I use what works"

continuous

"I'm
constantly
reevaluating my ideas"

"I'm flexible"

"I develop my own theory

"Speaks to me" "I like TA methods to fit me"
but not the basic
"Ellis is my assumption"
"I try to keep open and
here"
take some risks"
"Everyone
says
"I dig Freud"
something
"I
trust
my
own
observations
and

"I am analytic"
"I stick with
the tried and
true"

important"

judgements"