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Trauma Talk Counselling Service
Robin Poll Counsellor RTS. UKRC. MBACP (Accred) MCS (Acc)
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WHAT IS COUNSELLING? Counselling is a partnership, entered in to by the client and the counsellor, to look at and explore difficulties in a person’s life. These difficulties can take many forms, and can sometimes feel insurmountable and overpowering. Emotions, feelings, beliefs, and behaviour, can soon become disproportionate, or inappropriate, to the difficulties. When this starts to affect the way you lead your life, then this is where counselling support, by an independent and non-judgemental person, can be very useful. Clients can explore their traumatic experiences, their anxieties, intimate thoughts, fears, sorrows, anger, frustration, or bewilderment etc, in a safe, non-judgmental, and respectful environment, with an experienced counsellor, who is bound by the rules of client confidentiality. The Integrative or Eclectic
counselling approach – is
when several distinct models of counselling and psychotherapy are used
together, in a converging way, rather than separately.
Many counsellors use one core theoretical model of counselling, but
draw on techniques and styles from other approaches when appropriate. (Sussex Counselling,
2007, p. 92). Central to the idea
of Solution-Focussed therapy is
that the client has been having ‘difficulties’ because they are stuck
in an unsuccessful pattern of trying to resolve their situation.
The role of the therapist is to have the client try other things,
often the opposite to what they had previously been trying. i.e. to stop
the client trying what clearly does not work and to try something else
which might. (Workitthrough.com (2001).
Whilst Psychodynamic
and Behavioural counselling
models focus on the ‘problem’ and the investigation of internal and
external factors which perpetuates that problematic behaviour or thinking,
Solution-Focussed therapy requires no such knowledge.
The theory behind this is that concentrating on the ‘problem’
only makes it bigger. Solution-Focussed
therapists believe, as do other Humanistic
counsellors, that most clients already possess enough skills to resolve
their own problems, they just need to ‘focus’. Motivational Interviewing
is focussed on exploring the client’s own concerns and perceptions in
relation to a problem. Identifying their strengths, and working with their
weaknesses, (which may involve a lack of information or awareness), we
then strengthen their commitment, building up their motivation to effect a
change. The central
hypothesis of the Person-Centred
approach is that every person has within himself or herself ‘vast
resources for self-understanding, for altering his or her self-concept,
attitudes, and self-directed behaviour – and that these resources can be
tapped only if a definable climate of facilitative psychological attitudes
can be provided’ (Rogers, 1986, p. 197).
Empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard are the three
counsellor-offered facilitative conditions that Rogers regarded as
necessary and sufficient for therapeutic change (Rogers, 1957; Raskin
& Rogers, 1989).
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