What role will your values play in the counseling process

• What role will your values play in the counseling process? Select a specific value that you hold and discuss how that value might work for you or against you (and your client). Discuss a specific value conflict, which could arise between you as a counselor and a client, and discuss in depth the issues that are involved in resolving and dealing with this value conflict.

• What role will your reaction patterns (ways that you respond—your thoughts, feelings, and actions—to particular kinds of situations) play in the counseling process? Describe a particular reaction pattern that might prove a challenge to you as a counselor.

The Skilled Helper: A Problem-Management & Opportunity-Development Approach to Helping

Eleventh Edition

Chapter 9

The Three Tasks of Stage I: Help Clients Tell the Story, the Real Story, and the Right Story

1

The Skilled Helper Model: Stage I

Stage I Tasks: Help Clients Explore Their Concerns

Three Tasks of Stage I: To Help Clients Understand Themselves, their Problems, and their Unused Opportunities (1 of 2)

Task A:

Help clients tell their stories in terms of problem situations and unused opportunities. The questions here are, “What’s going on?” “What are my concerns?” “What are the issues?”

Task B:

Help clients develop new perspectives and reframe their stories. Help clients identify and clarify the critical elements of the problem situation or unused opportunity. This often means helping clients identify blind spots, develop new perspectives, and reframe the story itself. The questions here are, “What’s really going on? What are my real concerns? What am I failing to see? What are the critical elements of the story?” A judicious use of challenging skills is needed here.

Three Tasks of Stage I: To Help Clients Understand Themselves, their Problems, and their Unused Opportunities (2 of 2)

Task C:

Help clients stay focused on issues that will make a difference in their lives. Clients often have multiple problems. If that is the case, help clients work on substantive issues. The questions here are, “What are my key concerns?” “What should I work on?” “What will make a difference in my life?”

Solution focused: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T33j_ZETzUs

Task I-A: Learn Ways of Helping Clients Tell Their Stories (1 of 2)

Help the client feel safe in the helping encounter.

Learn to work with all styles of storytelling.

Start where the client start

Assess the severity of the client’s problems.

Help clients identify and clarify key issues.

Help clients explore the context of their concerns.

Help clients talk productively about the past.

Help clients talk about the past to make sense of the present.

Task I-A: Learn Ways of Helping Clients Tell Their Stories (2 of 2)

Help clients talk about the past to be reconciled to or liberated from it.

Help clients talk about the past in order to prepare for action in the future.

Right from the beginning, help clients spot unused opportunities.

Help clients see every problem as an opportunity.

As clients tell their stories, help them search for unused resources.

Help Clients Talk Productively About the Past

Help clients talk about the past to make sense of the present.

Help clients talk about the past to be reconciled to or liberated from it.

Help clients talk about the past in order to prepare for action in the future.

As Clients Tell Their Stories, Help Them Search for Unused Resources

Skilled helpers are quick to spot clients’ resources, both within and around them.

Resources they are using

Resources they are not using

Resources they are misusing

Resources they are abusing

The storytelling process should always include helping clients find the opportunities embedded in any problem situation.

Guidelines for Stage I

Establish a Working Alliance

Help Clients Tell Their Stories

Build Ongoing Client Assessment into the Helping Process

Help Clients Move to Action

Establish a Feedback and Evaluation System

The Skilled Helper: A Problem-Management & Opportunity-Development Approach to Helping

Eleventh Edition

Chapter 5

Empathic Responding: Work at Mutual Understanding

1

Responding Skills

Helpers respond to clients by sharing their understanding, checking to make sure they got things right, probing for clarity, summarizing the issues being discussed, and helping clients challenge themselves in a variety of ways.

The ability to express empathy is important because we all want to be understood and we function better when we are understood.

Rogers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_yGBnZXFFA

Empathic Relationships

The therapeutic alliance should be an empathic relationship. The skill and practice of communicating empathy to clients should not be a means to an end, but an integral part of the therapeutic relationship throughout the helping process.

Empathy now can be seen as a value, as a communication skill, and as a mode of treatment in itself.

Three Dimensions of Responding Skills

Perceptiveness: Accuracy of perceptions

Know-How: Ability to translate perceptions into words

Assertiveness: Delivering responses into the therapeutic dialogue

The Basic Formula for Communicating Empathic Understanding

You feel . . .

[here name the correct emotion expressed by the client].

. . .because . . .

[here indicate the correct thoughts, experiences, and behaviors that give rise to the feelings].\

Respond Accurately to Clients’ Feelings, Emotions, and Moods

Use the right family of emotions and the right intensity

Distinguish between expressed and discussed feelings

Read and respond to feelings and emotions embedded in clients’ nonverbal behavior

Be sensitive in naming emotions

Use variety in responding to clients’ feelings and emotions

Neither overemphasize nor underemphasize feelings, emotions, and moods

Respond Accurately to the Key Experiences, Thoughts, and Behaviors in Clients’ Stories

Key experiences, thoughts, and behaviors give rise to clients’ feelings, emotions, and moods. They are also important parts of clients’ stories in themselves.

The “because…” in the empathic-response formula links all of these elements together.

More on communicating empathy

Respond selectively to client messages

Sometimes you must pay attention to one or two messages even though the client communicates many. This can help clients identify their core issues.

Sometimes you focus on experiences OR actions OR feelings rather than all three.

Respond to the context, not just to the words

Take into account not just the client’s immediate words and nonverbal behavior but also everything that “surrounds” and permeates a client’s statement.

The context modifies everything the client says.

Learn How to Recover from Inaccurate Understanding

The Shadow Side of Responding

No response

Distracting questions

Clichés

Interpretations

Advice

Parroting

Agreement and sympathy

Faking it

The Skilled Helper: A Problem-Management & Opportunity-Development Approach to Helping

Eleventh Edition

Chapter 4

Therapeutic Presence: Tune In to Clients and Listen Carefully

1

The Skills of Physically Tuning In to Clients

SOLER

S: Face the client Squarely

O: Adopt an Open posture

L: Remember that it is possible at times to Lean toward the other person

E: Maintain good Eye contact

R: Try to be relatively Relaxed, or natural, in these behaviors.

Nonverbal Channels of Communication of Helper and Client in the Therapeutic Dialogue (1 of 2)

Bodily behavior: posture, body movements, and gestures

Eye behavior: eye contact, staring, eye movement

Facial expressions: smiles, frowns, raised eyebrows, and twisted lips

Voice-related behavior: tone of voice, pitch, volume, intensity, inflection, spacing of words, emphases, pauses, silences, fluency

Nonverbal Channels of Communication of Helper and Client in the Therapeutic Dialogue (2 of 2)

Observable autonomic physiological responses: quickened breathing, blushing, paleness, pupil dilation

Physical characteristics: fitness, height, weight, and complexion

Space: distance a person chooses to be during a conversation

General appearance: grooming and dress

Examples

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH2tF8oB3cw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQOrzyBuAi8

Self-Questions for Helpers on Visibly Tuning In to Clients

What are my attitudes toward this client?

How would I rate the quality of my presence to this client?

In what ways am I distracted from giving my full attention to this client?

What am I doing to handle these distractions? How might I be more effectively present to this person?

Forms of Poor Listening

Non-listening

Partial listening

Audio-recorder listening

Rehearsing

Carl Rogers’s Definition of Empathic Listening

It means entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it. It involves being sensitive, moment by moment, to the changing felt meanings which flow in this other person, to the fear or rage or tenderness or confusion or whatever that he or she is experiencing. It means temporarily living in the other’s life, moving about in it delicately without making judgments. (1980, p. 142)

Listen Carefully to Clients’ Stories

Clients talk about:

Clients’ Experiences

What happens to them

Clients’ Thoughts

The way they think, their points of view, what thoughts go through their minds

Clients’ Behavior

What they do and don’t do

Clients’ Affect

Their feelings and moods associated with their experiences and behavior

Listen to clients’ nonverbal messages and modifiers

Confirming or repeating

Denying or confusing

Strengthening or emphasizing

Adding intensity

Controlling or regulating

Distorted Listening: The Shadow Side of Helping

Filtered listening

Evaluative listening

Stereotype-based listening

Fact-centered rather than person-centered listening

Sympathetic listening

Falling for myths about nonverbal behavior

Interrupting that does not promote dialogue

What role will your values play in the counseling process

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