Theories of Counselling
Name
Institution
Date
Theories of Counseling
Many times, humans tend to engage in situations that may demand the help of a counselor. These include drug abuse and addiction, stress management, anger management, anxiety, grief relationship, gender identity, social orientation, sexual assault, just to mention but a few. The America Association of counseling defines ‘counseling’ as a professional relationship that entitles various individuals, families, and groups to achieve proper mental health (Brady-Amoon & Keefe-Cooperman, 2017, p.41-62). It entails assisting people in making the necessary changes in their lives, whereby through it, individuals are presented with a new opportunity to think, feel, and even act differently. Counseling is a collaborative process as it involves mutual efforts from both the client and the counselor. The ethics behind the process is the counselor remaining non-judgmental and supportive. The attributes are paramount to allow the client to tell of their story and set the necessary goals. The most critical part of the counseling process is confidentiality. A counselor gets expected to maintain the privacy of the information discussed during a session where no one else can have access to it, save for a few circumstances. The concept of counseling has got various approaches. My essay will discuss the approach of Person-Centered Therapy and Feminist Therapy.
Person-Centered Therapy
Person-centered Therapy is also known as Rogerian Therapy. It got initiated by an American Psychologist, known as Carl Rogers. Rogers held that everyone is unique, thus making them hold different views of their worlds, and their ability to manage it should be trusted (Behr et al., 2013, p.266-281). He believed that everyone had the authority to get the best solutions and, thus, make the required changes in our lives. Person-centered Therapy involved the movement towards a process where clients were permitted to utilize their understanding of their experiences as their platform for getting better since Rogers believed that we are the best experts of ourselves.
The Person-Centered Approach emphasizes the client’s current view on how we live in the present moment. The theory gets centered on the idea of self-concept. Self-concept involves the beliefs and perceptions that we hold concerning ourselves. It values the individual perception of what a client is and what they can do. Further, the approach’s regards to the total experiences that one has, which influences their understanding of the world. For instance, if one sees herself as a person may lead to her acting with confidence, s a result, the client would view their actions as having been acted out by a strong and confident individual. Ideally, the notion of self-concept is oblivious to reality since it doesn’t fit in. Reality is not applicable since the way we view ourselves is different from the way others see us. For instance, a person may have had great charisma and a charming personality to others, yet they view themselves as uninterestingly boring.
This Therapy is unique since the client has the sole responsibility of improving their own life, not the therapist. Substantially, the client gets to make decisions for themselves in a conscious and rational state regarding what is wrong in their perception, and what should get done about it. In this case, the therapist poses more like a friend to the client who listens and encourages them, viewing them as their equals.
The approach exerts changes to the clients by liberating them from their pasts and helping them self-actualize themselves to achieve the much-required personal growth. Ideally, the counselor gets to understand the client’s challenges through the techniques of listening, accepting, understanding, and sharing. To achieve the clients’ help, the approach calls for three conditions: congruence mostly referred to as genuineness, whereby the therapist remains authentic throughout the process. The therapist is also expected to have an unconditional positive regard to the client even in intolerable circumstances, and empathy, whereby the counselor understands the feelings of the client. The above conditions significantly help in understanding the clients’ problems. Similarly, changes occur through the help of the clients themselves and their perception of themselves.
Strengths of the Person-Centered Therapy
Person-centered Therapy gives the client a good feeling through its providence of unconditional acceptance. Many of these clients have never experienced unconditional acceptance, so giving them such an offer makes them feel good. The therapeutic relationship also provides a new form of connection to the clients and hence gives them a platform where they self-actualize themselves and even achieve personal growth. Additionally, since the theory focuses on the client’s view on oneself, they get granted the opportunity to better trust themselves by giving them a chance to overcome their problems, all on their own. The approach also reduces the immense tensions and anxieties experienced between the client and the counselor. The counselor allows them to have their opinions regarding themselves and their actions confidently.
Correspondingly, Therapy can primarily help patients to recover from depression due to the self-actualization concept it offers to them. As a result, the clients also tend to develop an immense increase in their self-esteem since they are encouraged to have a favorable view of themselves. Lastly, it gives them a platform to express their personal feelings and opinion on the basis that everyone is different; thus, we all have different views of our unique worlds. This kind of view circumstantially also enables clients to feel less guilty over the mistakes they may have committed in their past.
Limitations of the Person-Centered Therapy
The Therapy is a non-directive form of Therapy since the clients tend to speak heir feelings to the counselor without any interruption continually; this situation is bound to create an unavoidable bias from the therapist. Further, the clients who visit therapists go with the notion that they may receive some kind of advice from the counselor, a situation which doesn’t happen in this approach. The client is allowed to reflect on their issues while the therapist only rephrases their statements. No advice is issued as the client is given a chance to come up with their solutions to themselves; this may not augur well with clients expecting to benefit advice from their counselors.
The person-centered approach may also be beneficial to individuals who are educated. It expects the clients to realize their problems without help and come up with solutions as well. An uneducated individual may not be fit enough to make such decisions. Lastly, the belief that people can just change deems to be overly generous, mainly due to its context of a non-directive approach. This is because therapists fail to gather sufficient information from the client that would be vital in helping them achieve their goals.
Why the Person-Centered Therapy Resonates With Me
I chose the person-centered theory mainly due to the quote that Roger stated, “the curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I change,” which I mainly reasoned with me in the advent of my career study as a counselor. To date, the quote still rings in my head numerously. I particularly feel that the person-centered theory is a description of my overall approach in Therapy since it provides a reasonable aspiration and a boundary between the client and the counselor, which is so ethical. Through the moral boundary, I have a free space where I get to impose my values on my clients, thus issuing an overlying framework for developing a work coalition.
I also chose this Therapy due to the conditions it poses on the counselors, with one of them involving being genuine. Personally, the art of being genuine implies that I have a balance between being a professional and being an average human. He is prone to making mistakes, which would also mean getting to admit when I even go wrong and not covering up with the therapeutic stances that are rigid. Rogers gave a crystal indication that genuineness has the will to behave per our feelings depending on the kind of emotions and attitudes that one experiences at the present moment. I always feel that I can efficiently achieve this through my responses of care to my clients’ expressions of the various feelings they undergo from day to day when things take a left turn for them. In turn, I would get to develop a meaningful and in-depth exploration of my client’s emotional states. These are the main reasons why I valued, chose, and resonated with the person-centered approach in counseling.
Gestalt Approach in Counselling
The proponents of Gestalt Therapy were Fritz and Laura Perls, who established it in the 1940s. The Therapy’s approach is that people do not get made up of separate components of the mind, body, and soul (Brownell, 2019, p.7). Instead, humans work as a whole. By so doing, one gets the sense of oneself by choosing to respond to environmental interactions. Gestalt is a word that describes “a whole, configuration, integration patter form or norm.”
Gestalt therapy has got two main ways in which it understands the problems that patients may possess. The concept of wholeness and integration are the key ideas in theory, where wholeness involves the entire mind and body of an individual. In contrast, the notion of integration entails how people fit the parts of the whole of the human body, mind, and body together and how they get to integrate into the environment. Ideally, Gestalt therapy concerns itself with the facilitation of clients to integrate themselves as whole people, thus helping them restore their environmental balance.
The second concept entails awareness, which is a critical element in Gestalt therapy. It gets considered as the goal of the treatment and the hallmark of a healthy person since when individuals have self-awareness, they as well have the ability to regulate themselves in the environment. Gestalt therapists focus on the particular area in the body where the energy is, how it gets utilized, and where it may cause a blockage. Blocked energy entails resistance. This helps in the therapists’ understanding of their client’s problems. They also consider the verbal and nonverbal communication of their clients, whereby the non –verbal communication helps in giving more information concerning the client’s real essence. Therefore, the Gestalt therapists concentrate on the client’s body language, such as the voice, posture movements, and even hesitations to understand the challenges that the client may be going through.
The clients may get to experience change during the therapy sessions through having contact with the environment where they look, touch, talk, move smell, and taste. This enables them in their environment by reacting to the changes in their surroundings. The client may also develop consciousness of the present moment and no worrying about the future or the past. Finally, they may achieve change by taking responsibility for their own lives rather than blaming others.
Strengths of the Gestalt Therapy
Gestalt Therapy tends to increase self-awareness and acceptance among its clients through its primary goal of fostering awareness. Clients get encouraged to having contact with the environment, development of conscious living, and responsibility-taking. It also enables their clients to fully live in the present moment where they get trained not to always worry about the future or whatever is bound to happen tomorrow. Since therapists of this theory focus on their patients’ body language, their communication skills get developed. Finally, it enables the patients to consciously understand their behaviors better, thus helping them establish meaningful and satisfying relationships with others.
The weakness of the Gestalt Therapy
One of the gestalt therapy limitations is the temptations it poses to counselors to use the gestalt techniques such as empty chairs and exaggeration. The processes may be of little help to the client. Additionally, some of the methods may provoke intense emotions, which may be harmful to the client if misused by an inexperienced therapist.
Another limitation it poses is that some counselors may use Gestalt Therapy and also incorporate other techniques into a form of counseling that doesn’t sit well with the Gestalt theoretical umbrella. While some therapists believe that the patient’s cognitive process is essential in the advice, some do not recognize this cognitive aspect and thus focusing on the client’s emotions more.
Why I chose the Gestalt Therapy
I chose the Gestalt therapy theory since its main focus s on the client where they are encouraged to concentrate on the present moment more. I resonate with it as an individual since I can, on a personal level, understand what it feels like to spend most of the time all coiled up, tensed, worried and panicked of a future that you don’t know and a past that you can barely control. I went through this as a youngster. Through the gestalt therapy, I developed a sense of awareness in which I discovered the negativity in my thoughts blocked me from getting my pure self-awareness, thus leading to my unhappiness.
With a personal encounter, I could relate to other patients’ feelings. I could also quickly read their body language, which makes it easier for communication to take place between the client and the therapist. The virtue of being able to understand and help others in their state of anxiety, depression, and other daily challenges because at one point I also received the same help, is what makes life satisfying and meaningful, thus explaining why I chose this approach.
Conclusion
Conclusively, we all face challenges as humans that may require us to seek counseling here and there. Gestalt Therapy and the Person-Centered Therapy are some of the approaches used during the counseling sessions. Both of them still get utilized today for patients to change their behaviors and feelings. They both focus on self-acceptance through self-awareness, a virtue that is quite essential in life. While they may possess some challenges on the clients’ side, the strengths weigh heavily since they all aim to achieve a change in their patients’ lives. Nevertheless, therapists must strive to find the best method to help their patients efficiently. They may also have to change or incorporate different approaches to assist their clients; therefore, they need to remain flexible.
References
Behr, M., Nuding, D., & McGinnis, S. (2013). Person-centered psychotherapy and counseling with children and young people. The Handbook of Person-Centred Psychotherapy & Counselling, 266-281. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-32900-4_18
Brady-Amoon, P., & Keefe-Cooperman, K. (2017). Psychology, counseling psychology, and professional counseling: Shared roots, challenges, and opportunities. The European Journal of Counselling Psychology, 6(1), 41-62. https://doi.org/10.5964/ejcop.v6i1.105
Brownell, P. (2019). Handbook for theory, research, and practice in gestalt therapy (2nd ed.). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.