Figure 1.1 House Repair Analogy
Your client resides predominantly on one of these levels and typically seeks counseling to make that level more comfortable or to move up to the next level. All of the
reasons people need to see counselors exist somewhere within the framework of this house. Children, or immature adults with immense problems in negotiating the basic
demands of daily life, might be seen as residing at Level 1, the ground floor. Those for whom questions of life meaning and self-realization are paramount live at the top
floor of the house, Level 3. Most adults living self-sustaining, self-supporting lives are in the middle, at Level 2 of the house.
The counselor is like a building contractor who works with the client to improve the livability of the levels of the house where he is already residing and ultimately to
build a staircase to higher levels of the house. The counselor’s working tools are the essential relationship development and enhancement skills that we will examine in
this book. These are fueled by the “facilitative conditions”—the empathic regard, the respect, and all of the other interpersonal ways we support our clients. As the
building and repair work proceeds in counseling, the counselor is simultaneously teaching skills to the client so that eventually the client will be capable of doing routine
house maintenance and repair without the counselor’s help.
This analogy of house repair is really a developmental approach to the use of counseling skills. As any student who has taken undergraduate psychology courses will
probably recognize, this levels of a house analogy is similar to, and compatible with, Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs model, as well as other developmental models
(Ivey, Ivey, Myers, & Sweeney, 2005), Piaget’s model of cognitive development (1955/1923), and Kohlberg’s model of values or moral development (1962, 1981). This
way of conceptualizing client problems and goals in counseling work, which builds on Maslow’s ideas about the hierarchy of needs (Bruce, 1984), has been developed
schematically as a foundation for planning effective counseling interventions. This developmental model of counseling interventions and its implications for helping
counselors to understand and respond to specific client concerns will be developed in later chapters.
You will need to choose approaches for working with your clients that fit their specific needs and capacities for responding to what you do. Thus, although you will
naturally gravitate to using interventions that fit your theoretical orientation, you should also give serious consideration to the skills and deficits your clients bring to
counseling. Assessment is the focus of much of Chapter 5, and the specific ways in which your clients’ needs are represented in this “house” and the types of tools (that is,
skills) you will choose to help your client deal with these needs are addressed there in detail.
Some Fundamental Reasons for Seeking Counseling
The reasons many people who have at least made their way out of the “basement” of the house—meaning that they are not in crisis and seem to manage life maturely—
seek counseling can typically be reduced to two primary motivators. Assuming that basic physical and safety needs have been met, people want to reduce the level of fear
they carry in their lives, and they want to increase the love they feel and their sense of belonging and connection with other people. They want to decrease the fear and
increase the love. For many of the people we serve, responding to these two needs is what the counseling business is all about. When people cannot satisfy their basic
needs for love and belonging, anxiety, stress, and sadness are often the result (Teyber, 2000). These basic unmet needs become layered with complicated feelings and
behaviors.
The counseling and psychotherapy literature is not exactly overloaded with the language of love, and it cloaks the word fear in diagnostic garb. The words love and fear
are global, imprecise, and loaded with potential for misinterpretation. Diagnostic language is more comfortable to the professional community, and it is also more
descriptive. “Phobias,” “dysfunctions,” and “anxiety” describe the strange forms into which fear can constellate itself. The language of the diagnostic manuals is helpful
because its description assists appropriate intervention.
Behind the diagnoses and the treatment planning, however, the fundamental problem is oftentimes some variant of that fear theme. As Deikman (1982) suggests, “It is
hard to find a neurotic symptom or a human vice that cannot be traced to the desire to possess or the fear of loss” (p. 80). Greed and the fear of loss are simply two
variants of the theme of fear. The antidote to fear that counselors supply is compassion and unconditional positive regard. Your job is to help to reduce the fear, thereby,
increasing the capacity to comfortably encounter self and others. This may sound simple, yet it takes great wisdom and experience to do this well, clearly, and cleanly.
There are many small steps, behavior changes, and insights to be made along the road to a life that is less fear based.
You will want to be able to respond effectively to your clients, and this will require both thoughtful reflection about what is needed and compassion for them as people. It
is a challenge to do this work with both heart and head. Developing this capacity to work on these multiple levels is a life’s work. It is difficult to conceive of any work
that is more relevant or important, whether our clientele be CEOs or grocery store clerks, young adults in college or children in public schools, imprisoned drug addicts or
patients hospitalized with mental illness.
A Personal Case Example
Maybe we remember our first clients most vividly. One of my first counseling clients has always been representative of the remarkable potential for joy and reward in this work, as well as for serving
as an example of how a client’s fear can be diminished if met with steadiness, understanding, and appropriate affection. Many years ago, I was a fresh and green doctoral intern at SUNY Buffalo’s
College Counseling Center. Claire was my first client, an attractive, bright student in the fine arts program.
Her first question to me was, “Are you just a graduate student?” Right off the bat, here was a question about my competence, a challenge to see how I’d respond, and behind it a fear that I might not
be up to the task.
Our beginning sessions were filled with more of her confrontational challenges to my age, to my competence, and with comments about my lack of experience. She danced around any attempts I
made to get her to talk more personally about herself, or even to cogently talk about what she was looking for by coming for counseling. All of this was coming from a place of fear, the fear of
judgment and rejection—fear that I wouldn’t be able to handle what she yearned to reveal.
Her critical comments, intelligent and sharply to the point, often reflected my own concerns about my competence. I was acutely aware of my inexperience. Her comments were cuttingly effective,
sometimes hurtful. I recall not becoming overly defensive, at least with her, and saving my complaints about Claire and my lack of experience as a counselor for sessions with my clinical supervisor,
Faith. I just rode through the sniping and bluffed not being hurt on more than one occasion. Not incidentally, I enjoyed Claire’s wit.
My supervisor was terrific at helping me separate my doubts about my own competence from the defensive posturing that Claire was obviously using to keep me at a distance. Faith was supremely
skillful in helping me see the ways in which Claire’s attacks were thinly disguised attempts to test my ability to hang in with her: tests of my ability to be trusted, fear of letting someone get too close,
too much under the slick veneer, and her great desire for contact and intimacy. Faith was also helpful in defining ways I could respond more effectively and truly become more competent. Letting off
steam in supervision sessions, as well as sharing my fears about whether I could do a good job, allowed me the latitude to be present and nondefensive with Claire.
Eventually, Claire began to drop her edginess, and she became more forthcoming about having some big “secrets” that were of critical concern to her. You will find that many of your clients have
these kinds of secrets, usually aspects of themselves about which they are ashamed or embarrassed (Kelly, 1998). She talked at length of her concerns about my not liking her if and when she chose
to divulge the secrets. I assured her that I had no investment in her doing anything and that I had great respect for her intellect and ability to choose whether or when to share more personal material.
The paradox was that by not being pressured to talk of more personal material, she began to talk of more personal material. This was a great lesson I learned early on. By not pushing her, by not
buying into her jibes and challenges, by simply being solidly present (which is actually not “simple” at all), I helped Claire allow herself to let down her guard. Eventually, when the secret concerns
about her sexual identity and some stories of past physical abuses were aired, it was almost anticlimactic.
Then began the considerable work of allowing her the time and space to negotiate her way through her ideas and feelings about those past and present difficult people and situations, but that work
was all done on the foundation of respect and trust that now existed between us.
In this process of helping clients become more trusting, and more forthcoming, lies the beauty of this work. Much of the process exists within the evolution of the relationship between client and
counselor. The “beauty of the work” is what this book is about. Behind their fear of trusting us, most of our clients have an abiding desire to be known. Part of your job lies in creating the context in
which your clients can allow themselves to be seen, to be known more fully.
Counseling and the Promotion of Personal Responsibility
Just as the problems our clients bring to us can often be identified as some variation of fear, many of the best outcomes can be thought of as being our clients’ increased
ability to manage life more responsibly. We all are free to choose our own courses of action and paths in life, and it is easy to appreciate the essential counseling role of
helping people recognize their freedom and their right to choose based on that freedom. However, our role in helping people assume responsibility for the choices they
make in their lives is sometimes less clear. The famous existential psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl (1963) once suggested that we should have a Statue of Responsibility to
complement the Statue of Liberty as a way of demonstrating our collective commitment to enhancing personal responsibility.
The avoidance of personal responsibility can take many forms and may not be particularly obvious. Sometimes, even the most conventional, apparently functional people
may be avoiding taking real responsibility for themselves. Many, perhaps most, of the clients with whom I’ve worked begin with some variation of the notion, “I don’t get
enough _____.” You can fill in the blank. Typically, it is “recognition” or “respect” or some variant of “affection.” But the basic attitude is one of desire for the world to
pay better attention to what the client wants and of blaming others when things do not go well. They have probably searched in all kinds of ways, often in all the wrong
places, to find the love, the attention, or the recognition they are looking for, but have come up short. Sometimes, they may have passed by another’s love that begged for
their attention, available but unacknowledged, and missed it. This search for love and attention can also be incredibly destructive, sometimes getting people into big
trouble, particularly if it’s expressed with minors or with violence. It is, nevertheless, important for the counselor to remember that it is the drive for love that fuels the
fire.
Regardless of what clients want, successful counseling outcomes hinge on the development of more personal responsibility. It is about a shift from being a victim (“I don’t
get enough”) to being an agent of action (“What can I do?”). It is a move away from blaming others to accepting responsibility for what one has and what one has to give.
When a client has made the shift from “No one loves me” to “How may I be more loving?” the client has really grown. One of counseling’s finest functions is to help
people, in this safe and controlled setting, experiment with trying to reach out in different and more constructive ways (Casey, 1996). It is your job to help this growth, to
help your client give birth to a new sense of personal responsibility. In a sense, you are the midwife to this kind of emotional development.
The Relationship: Counseling’s Vital Ingredient
The counselor–client therapeutic alliance, this connection between people, is key to ensuring a successful counseling outcome (Brodsky, 2011; Gelso, 2011). Some writers
have suggested that the counselor’s theoretical approach, as well as the techniques offered up during the process of counseling, is secondary to the relationship itself
(Horvath & Symonds, 1991; Orlinsky, Grawe, & Parks, 1994). While most experts in the fields of counseling and psychotherapy may disagree with such an extreme
position, they generally do agree that it would be difficult to overstate the importance or central role of the counseling relationship between client and counselor (Gelso &
Carter, 1985; Jordans, Komproe, Tol, Nsereko, & de Jong, 2013).
In what was a revolutionary position of his time, Carl Rogers (1951) suggested that if counselors, or therapists, could supply their clients with a steady stream of certain
basic human ingredients, the clients would solve their own dilemmas and feel better. In his writings and lectures, Rogers named three ingredients that counselors give to
successful therapeutic relationships: congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding.
Other writers have maintained that while those ingredients might be necessary, they are probably of themselves insufficient to accomplish the broad goals and behavioral
changes typically sought by our clients. Nevertheless, nearly all in the helping professions agree on the importance of those central factors to positive therapeutic
outcomes. As a counselor, it is essential that you learn how to be personally genuine (congruence), to give your clients total acceptance without judgment (unconditional
positive regard), and to develop a great capacity to see the world as they see it (empathic understanding). This is the nature of the empathic relationship. It is in this
nurturing context that your other activities with clients will work best.
Counseling, Psychotherapy, and the Range of Helping Roles
Many of the beginning students in graduate counseling programs like to refer to themselves as “therapists” in training. Why do they shy away from being called
“counselor” and prefer to be called “therapist”? This is a question my students and I take up at the beginning of our introductory counseling skills course. We talk about
differences between professional helping roles, between social workers, marriage and family therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric nurses, and the varieties
of counselor roles in schools, mental health, and drug treatment settings. We talk about educational training requirements, credentialing, and licensure requirements. (If
you have not yet had this discussion in your counselor or other human services training, you will. These are issues with which you will need to become familiar,
particularly in regard to requirements in the state within which you live and plan to work.)
It appears that many of the distinctions between “counseling” and “psychotherapy” cited by my students have less to do with what actually happens in the work between
client and professional and more to do with perceptions of power, prestige, and money. The counseling profession, springing from its earliest days of social activism and
work with the disadvantaged in Boston (Bond, 2000), through the years of its work with veterans and its focus on vocational training (Sweeney, 2001), and into its further
diversification to include broader issues of human growth and development (Gladstein & Apfel, 1987), has now emerged as a complex service field. The counselor must
now respond to a range of complicated issues in a changing, diverse population. In its modern form, counseling has become a form of talking intervention that deals with
a wide spectrum of personal growth issues as well as helping people deal with an array of pathological problems (Smith, 2001). It is continually broadening its scope to
include previously underappreciated problems—as with addiction issues, for example—and it has in recent years become much more sensitive to the multicultural,
diverse world in which we operate (Ivey, D’Andrea, Ivey, & Simek-Morgan, 2002). As the newer professional “kid” on the block, the field of professional counseling has
had to carve out its own identity and role definition. This business of making a separate, distinct identity has been difficult because of the significant overlap and
similarity between counseling and other related psychotherapy activities. The public may not distinguish between these kinds of activities, and even many professional
texts make little, if any, distinction.
Some basic assumptions may differentiate psychotherapy activity from counseling activity, however. Central to the therapy model is the widely held belief that the
“therapist” is in a helping role designed to “treat” some aspect of the “patient” that needs readjustment. The therapist is the technical expert, the patient one who needs
treatment. This is very much a psychological adaptation of the old doctor-patient medical model, a hand-me-down from the medical psychiatric tradition.
The counseling model is more generally egalitarian. The counselor is viewed as a client’s fellow traveler on the road of life, not that different or removed from the person
who has come for help (Yalom, 2002). In this model, the helper may be a bit farther along the road, but is a traveler nonetheless, and is one who also experiences many of
the same problems in living. Clients are not so much to be treated as understood and assisted in finding their own solutions to those life problems. This is particularly true
for school counselors or others who work with essentially “well” populations.
In practice, certainly, the distinctions blur. Counselors find themselves working with difficult, seriously disturbed people, and psychotherapists often explore those shared
life problems with great humility and a sense of social awareness. Social workers in clinical practice, for example, may operate with little visible distinction in the ways
they work from clinical mental health counselors working in the community. Addictions counselors work with people with mental health issues, and mental health
counselors work with people with addictions issues.
One can have a difficult time, when looking from the outside, differentiating between these varieties of “psychotherapy” activity and “counseling” activity, except in how
the professionals define it.
Each professional identity has its own means of ensuring a level of quality service provision. Psychologists, social workers, and marriage and family therapists have
standards set by licensing boards. Professional counselor licensing, coupled with mandated insurance reimbursement for counseling services (in nearly all states), has
helped to make the counseling profession a publicly recognized, legitimate healing activity. If licensed (typically achieved by having obtained a master’s degree in
counseling plus meeting supervised practice and examination requirements), the community or agency counselor is usually able to access insurance reimbursement for
services. School counselors, with their own licensing procedures, are certainly visible and prominent service providers in schools. These licensures, coupled with public
acceptance of the profession, have helped to ensure that a baseline of quality care will be provided.
The Joys and Challenges of Counseling
Learning to be a counselor involves building a repertoire of assessment, responding, and helping skills. It involves, in other words, developing tools to help you help your
client repair the mental and emotional house in which she lives. But it is much more than that. It is the development of wisdom; it is about learning how to connect
effectively with people. It requires that you learn about yourself in the midst of assisting others (Guindon, 2011; Reinkraut, Motulsky, & Ritchie, 2009). It is both science
and art. You should find particular joy in a profession where learning about yourself is prerequisite to learning how to do the work with others. What other professions can
make such a claim? Moreover, learning to do this work has the tremendous potential for reaching into the other realms of our lives and enriching them. There is distinct
potential for improving the general quality of your relationships with others, particularly your most intimate relationships, as a side benefit of becoming an effective
counselor. Again, what other profession can offer such rewards?
This work is not without its difficulties and challenges, however. It can be emotionally draining and difficult, particularly when you deal every day with people who move
from one crisis situation to another. It can at times be difficult to not take your clients’ problems home with you.
I oftentimes suggest to my graduate counseling students that they interview counselors working in the field, either as part of a formally assigned experience or more
informally for their own education. They sit down and talk with counselors working in schools, mental health agencies, and drug clinics and ask them about their joys and
frustrations with the work. They come back with interesting reports of these interviews. Invariably, the graduate students talk of the delight many of these counselors take
in watching their students, or their clients, grow and experience their lives. They talk of how these counselors themselves report that they grow and learn from their
interactions with their clients. My students are inspired by these stories. It is confirmation of their own initial desires to enter the field.
But there are also the stories of overwhelming caseloads, of a parade of difficult clients, of unresponsive agency administrators, and of unending paperwork. Some school
counselors talk of dramatically difficult student behavioral and emotional problems coupled with diminishing community support. Sometimes, my students interview
counselors who seem deadened by their work, who are not particularly fond of their clients or their colleagues, and are ready to work elsewhere but unwilling to go out
and look for another job. A general lassitude, lack of energy, almost a depression surrounds these counselors—and students cannot help but wonder about the toll
counseling takes on those who work in this field. They correctly wonder about the degree of help these counselors can afford their clients and speculate about the
motivations that will continue to keep them at work in a field where adequate interpersonal payback has ceased. Words like “burnout” come into play in these discussions.
Ongoing counselor self-understanding and personal examination is more than a casual, self-indulgent preoccupation with self, or ego gratification. It is an ethical,
professional obligation that you manage your relationship matrix variables, your own history, and your current emotional life so that full attention can be paid to your
client’s relationship variables, history, and emotional life. You are also obliged to come to grips with counseling work itself should it ever become stale and unrewarding,
for whatever reason, so that you can either quit and move on to something else or find ways to become revitalized and enthusiastic.
For myself, I cannot thank this profession enough for giving me the tools and wherewithal to deal more effectively with my own family, friends, and other close
relationships. I am not the perfect listener and still have lapses in how closely I attend to friends and family, but I do at least know the difference between good and poor
listening, the importance of solid emotional contact, and the need for give and take in a relationship. It is my fervent hope that this work benefits you in a similar fashion. I
am convinced it has that potential. As much as this work is about helping others, it is also about helping yourself. You will become involved in reciprocal learning
relationships with your clients, and they may teach you significant things about life.
There is even more about this work that is compellingly important, however, and these aspects have global implications. If we are concerned about the fate of the world,
about the enormous problems that confront the planet, what better arena in which to work than that which emphasizes improved interpersonal communication (Davis,
1996)? If we think of our own work as having the possible rippling effect of sending our clients, our students, and our colleagues out into the world with a greater
appreciation of good communication and solid relationship skills, a greater sense of our shared humanity, we could consider ourselves pioneers for global connection.
Toward the end of his life, the renowned psychologist Carl Rogers dedicated himself to the application of his principles of empathic, nondirective communication skills to
international peace conferencing. There is no reason those of us who follow him should confine our own work to a smaller scale.
Building Multicultural and Ethical Competence
As you embark on the process of learning more about yourself and your motivations to be a counselor, as well as about the skills necessary to do this work, you will want
to simultaneously heighten your appreciation of the multicultural, diverse nature of the world in which you work. It is part of your obligation to make sure that you work
in ways that ethically protect the safety of both your clients and yourself. A later chapter is devoted solely to these issues of becoming an ethically adept and
multiculturally aware counselor, but it is appropriate to reiterate the importance of ethical and multicultural awareness here as well. An awareness of issues related to
dealing with people who might be different from you, as well as the ethical principles that guide our profession, is as critical to doing solid counseling work as are selfunderstanding and a repertoire of skills. You want your clients to leave you feeling and doing better than when they started—or at the very least no worse. Your attention
to the ethics of good practice, as well as to the worldview people bring to counseling, helps to ensure that no harm will be done.
Some of the basic assumptions held most sacred by European-American theories about effective counseling fly directly in the face of many non-Western cultural
traditions. Some of these assumptions are firmly entrenched in the Western cultural ways of thinking about people and entrenched as well within the thinking of
counselors who have been raised in that tradition. Such assumptions, if unchallenged by the unaware counselor, may result in an inability to connect with clients who have
different worldviews. One obvious example of this kind of thinking has to do with the emphasis on the inherent value of the individual in most traditional counseling
theories. A counselor who is grounded in such individualistic assumptions about people will have a hard time understanding the collectivist, more community-mindedness
of non-Western clients (Greenfield, 1994; Schneider, Karcher, & Schlapkohl, 1999). Even worse, the counselor grounded in Western cultural values may ignore—or even
help to perpetuate—some of the real abuses of power and oppression that some clients endure due to the political forces at play in the world that those clients inhabit
(Hanna, Talley, & Guindon, 2000).
Adopting a multicultural worldview and learning about ideas related to counseling from such a multicultural perspective are essential for those who want to be effective
counselors. You live in a rapidly changing, incredibly diverse world, and you will encounter clients who have experiences and perspectives that are very different from
yours. Rather than seeing these differences as a block to understanding, you can embrace such differences as a great opportunity to stretch your own thinking. This is yet
another opportunity to learn more about yourself in relation to others, to learn from the clients you serve.
The Effective Counselor
The man who would learn the human mind will gain almost nothing from experimental psychology. Far better for him to put away his academic gown, to say goodbye to the study, and to wander with human heart through the world. There, in the horrors of the prison, the asylum, and the hospital, in the drinking-shops, brothels,
and gambling hells, in the salons of the elegant, in the exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, religious revivals, and sectarian ecstasies, through love and hate,
through the experience of passion in every form of his own body, he would reap richer store of knowledge than textbooks a foot thick could give him. Then he would
know how to doctor the sick with real knowledge of the human soul. (Jung, 1961, p. 71)
Nobody said that learning to become a counselor is easy.
It is a rare profession indeed that requires academic preparation and training and also demands that you expand and examine yourself personally. Not only must you
become an adept practitioner of a trade, but you must also become wise in the ways of the world. You don’t need to take Jung’s advice literally, because academic and
intellectual training are critically important in learning to do counseling work, but his words remind us that we must attend to other responsibilities as well.
Who you are as a person will largely determine how effective you will be in working with others as a counselor. You are, in your individual person, your own single best
tool for helping others. Your values, beliefs, and personal background—simply how you live your daily life—will influence the lives of your clients. All of your history,
your personal conduct, and your attitudes about people and the world around you are at play in the counseling relationship. The degree to which you understand yourself
will have a lot to do with how effective you will be with your clients (Kottler, 1993).
The Importance of Counselor Self-Awareness
Because self-awareness has such a major impact on a counselor’s effectiveness, many programs in counseling, clinical psychology, and even social work require
implicitly or explicitly that students engage in some kind of personal counseling or growth work as part of their training. Counselor self-awareness is also a primary
ethical consideration because it ensures that we will, at the very least, do no harm to our clients by unconsciously working out our own emotional unfinished business
through them. Counselors do not have to be perfect people, but the more we understand and have come to grips with our personal history, the less we will be controlled by
that past or look to others to satisfy its deficits (Sommers-Flanagan & Heck, 2013).
A counselor’s unmet intimacy needs or desire to prove competency may actively interfere with delivering the best services possible. The effective counselor has learned
how to use his particular personal difficulties as a way of relating to the specific emotional needs of his clients (Foster, 1996). Truly sound, effective, and ethical practice
involves learning all you can about people and how they behave, as well as about yourself. Certainly, the degree of self-awareness that you are able to achieve is at least as
important as the formal training you receive (Cavanagh, 1990). Self-awareness is a critical factor in developing the all-important empathy necessary for doing good
counseling work (Brennan, 1987; Dixon, 1980), and learning about yourself is probably the best way to begin to learn about the development of empathy for others
(Duan, Rose, & Kraatz, 2002). While the connection between your personal history and your counseling effectiveness is not directly clear, there is nevertheless a good
case to be made for looking at your own background (Barta, 1999; Clemente-Crain, 1996; Softas-Nall, Baldo, & Williams, 2001). The best counselors are those who learn
how to blend their formal knowledge and understanding of human relationships with a solid understanding of their own personal history (Cormier & Cormier, 1998).
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