COUNSELLING

Counselling provides an opportunity for you to progress towards a more satisfying and resourceful way of life. It opens the door to solutions to personal emotional problems. All that takes place between therapist and client is confidential.

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Person-centred therapy is based on the fundamental belief that human beings are essentially trustworthy, social and creative. The practical expression of this belief is the willingness of the therapist to vacate the position of expert and instead to work to enable a client to realise their own resources and self-understanding. Person-centred counselling emphasises our internal perceptual and emotional world as the source of understanding for our thoughts, feelings and actions. The approach is humanistic and also contains existential elements.

Although person-centred therapy stresses the importance of individual experience, in essence it is a theory of relationships, it acknowledges our interdependence in a way which provides a route to deep and acceptant communication with others.

Integrative counselling is a term used to describe either an integration of two or more therapies or an integration of counselling techniques (the latter may also be called technical eclecticism), or an integration of both therapies and techniques. Integrative counselling is not tied to any single therapy since its practitioners take the view that no one single approach works for every client in every situation.

While integrative counselling is usually pragmatic in content and has no qualms about borrowing useful concepts, skills or techniques from any source, provided the application of these benefits the client, this does not mean the approach is ad hoc or piecemeal in practice. Each client’s problem is tackled systemically, typically in three or more stages, and the counsellor is obliged to be disciplined and thorough, but still flexible, in interacting with clients.

An overall structure is essential but is not slavishly followed since counselling is not a mechanical process. The therapy must fit the client, not vice versa. Research indicates that the most probable factors determining a successful outcome to therapy are the personal qualities of both therapist and client and the relationship between them, rather than the particular approach used.

Life skills counselling, otherwise known as life skills therapy or life skills helping, is an educational approach that has as its starting point the ‘problems of living of’ ordinary people rather than those who have been seriously emotionally deprived or possess a psychiatric disorder. To live effectively and affirm their existences all people require life skills

Life skills counselling's philosophical basis is humanistic and existential - humanistic in terms of the value placed on the individual, in a sense a leap of faith about the improvability of humans; existential in terms of its emphasis on choice and on creating one's existence within the challenges presented by death, suffering, change, meaning, isolation and freedom. On top of this life skills counselling uses insights from 'cognitive-behavioural' approaches to counselling, those focusing on altering thoughts and actions, to sharpen the humanistic-existential message and provide clients with the skills they require to be more effective both now and in the future.

Problem-focused counselling is a method of teaching or training individuals to identify current problems in their lives and then to learn a series of steps in order to overcome them. These problems can be of a practical nature (e.g. making a career decision) without any overlapping emotional difficulties (e.g. anxiety about making the wrong decision), but frequently these two elements, the practical and the emotional, are found together in clients' presenting problems.

Psychodynamic/Psychoanalytical counselling is concerned with how we deceive ourselves as to our intentions, desires and beliefs and how these deceptions create conflicts between our expressed goals and our actions. The term psychodynamic means 'of/or pertaining to the laws of mental action', and its use presupposes that there are some principles that determine the relationship between mind and action and that these can be formulated as a basis for therapeutic intervention. Traditionally, the principles underlying psychodynamic counselling are presented as derivations of the ideas of the psychoanalytic school founded by Sigmund Freud, a doctor, neurologist and psychoanalyst. Current psychodynamic counselling draws from a much wider range of theoretical influences. One of the most fundamental tenets is that we are unaware of many of our motives and that if these are known to us we are able to make better, less conflicted choices. However we are often resistant to or defended against recognising these hidden motives, termed unconscious by most psychodynamic theorists, and hence are unable to change - indeed we seem to have a compulsion to repeat past behaviour. These repetitions are thought to arise because of earlier experience where our behaviour successfully enabled us to cope by ignoring or repressing difficult feelings. Psychodynamic counselling thus has theory of why we are unable to change, how this inability arises, and how it affects our lives.