Advanced counseling skills

The threads woven

 The Skills
• Confrontation
• Influencing
• Skill Integration
• Advanced empathy
• Self disclosure
 Confrontation
• Gently bringing in awareness in the client of
something that the client might have overlooked.
• It helps the client to gain self awareness
• It is used when counselor observes incongruities
between clients words, behavior, feelings or
thoughts
• Eg: I don’t know what to do with my boy. He is so
disobedient, he never listens to me when I ask
him to study. He will do everything else but no
study. I want him to top the class.
 Steps
• Identify discrepancies
– Polar opposite feelings
• Bring in the awareness
– Supportively and gently
– Reduce defensiveness
• Evaluating the result of awareness by
observing client’s growth
 Influencing skills
• Using counselors’ life stories, choices and
reasons for choices, opinions etc. to
encourage client
• People expect counselors to influence them,
they just don’t like the terminology
• Eg: mentioning your hobby as a stress buster
• Telling life choices when client is looking for
alternatives
• Interpreting and reframing, information giving
 Skill integration
• Self awareness before other’s awareness (oneself
before themselves)
• Confronting by reflection
• Active Listening for summarising
• Influencing by confrontation
• Summarising for confrontation
• Observing for influence
• Empathising for confrontation, reflection,
influencing
• Analysing case competency
• Integrating approaches
 Advanced Empathy
• Advanced empathy is a process of helping clients explore themes,
issues, and emotions new to their awareness (Welfel & Patterson,
2005). It examines too much material too quickly. Clients must be
developmentally ready for counseling to be beneficial. Therefore,
advanced empathy is used in the working stage of counseling.
• Empathy in general may be fostered by attentiveness (the amount
of verbal and nonverbal behavior shown to the client). Verbal
behaviors include probing, requesting clarification, restating, and
summarizing feelings indicating that the counselor is focusing on
the person of the client (Cormier, Nurius, & Osborn, 2017).
Nonverbal behaviors according to Mehrabian (1970), are physically
attending behaviors such as smiling, leaning forward, making eye
contact, gesturing, and nodding one’s head, effectively conveying
to clients that the counselor is interested in and open to them.
• Two factors that make empathy possible are (a) realizing that “an
infinite number of feelings” does not exist and (b) having a feeling
of personal security so that “you can let yourself go into the world
of this other person and still know that you can return to your own
world. Everything you are feeling is ‘as if’” (Rogers, 1987, pp.
45–46).
• Empathy involves three elements: perceptiveness, know-how,
and assertiveness (Egan, 2014). Several levels of responses
reflect different aspects of counselor empathy.
• A scale formulated by Carkhuff (1969), called Empathic
Understanding in Interpersonal Process, is a measure of these
levels. Each of the five levels either adds to or subtracts from
the meaning and feeling tone of a client’s statement.
– 1. The verbal and behavioral expressions of the counselor either do
not attend to or detract significantly from the verbal and behavioral
expressions of the client. (minus 2)
– 2. Although the counselor responds to the expressed feelings of the
client, he or she does so in a way that subtracts noticeable affect
from the communications of the client. (minus 1)
– 3. The expressions of the counselor in response to the expressions of
the client are essentially interchangeable. (neutral 0)
– 4. The responses of the counselor add noticeably to the expressions
of the client in a way that expresses feelings a level deeper than the
client was able to express. (plus 1)
– 5. The counselor’s responses add significantly to the feeling and
meaning of the expressions of the client in a way that accurately
expresses feeling levels below what the client is able to express. (plus
2)
• Be it Primary empathy or advanced, it has to be accurate.
• Accurate empathy is achieved when counselors see clients’
worlds from the clients’ point of view and are able to
communicate this understanding back (Egan, 2014).
– Primary empathy, when it is accurate, involves communicating a
basic understanding of what the client is feeling and the experiences
and behaviors underlying these feelings. It helps establish the
counseling relationship, gather data, and clarify problems. For
example, a client might say, “I’m really feeling like I can’t do
anything for myself.” The counselor replies, “You’re feeling
helpless.”
– Advanced empathy, when it is accurate, reflects not only what
clients state overtly but also what they imply or state incompletely.
For example, a counselor notes that a client says, “And I hope
everything will work out” while looking off into space. The counselor
responds, “For if it doesn’t, I’m not sure what I will do next.”
 Self disclosure
• Defined as “a conscious, intentional technique in which
clinicians share information about their lives outside the
counseling relationship” (Simone, McCarthy, & Skay, 1998, p.
174).
• Sidney Jourard (1958, 1964, 1968) did the original work in
this area. For him, self-disclosure referred to making oneself
known to another person by revealing personal information.
• Jourard discovered that self-disclosure helped establish trust
and facilitated the counseling relationship. He labeled
reciprocal self-disclosure the dyadic effect.
• It is not always necessary for counselors to be self-disclosing.
The process is not linear, and more self-disclosure is not
necessarily better.
• “Each counselor-client relationship must be evaluated
individually in regard to disclosure,” and when it occurs, care
must be taken to match disclosure “to the client’s needs”
(Hendrick, 1988, p. 423).
• Clients are more likely to trust counselors who disclose
personal information (up to a point) and are prone to
make reciprocal disclosures (Curtis, 1981; Kottler et
al., 1994). Adolescents especially seem to be more
comfortable with counselors who are “fairly
unguarded and personally available” (Simone et al.,
1998, p. 174).
• Counselors employ self-disclosure on a formal basis at
the initial interview by giving clients written
statements about the counselor and the counseling
process (a professional disclosure statement).
• They also use self-disclosure spontaneously in
counseling sessions to reveal pertinent personal facts
to their clients. Spontaneous self-disclosure is
important in facilitating client movement (Watkins,
1990a).
• According to Egan (2014), counselor self-disclosure
serves two principal functions:
– modeling and developing a new perspective.
– Clients learn to be more open by observing counselors
who are open.
– Counselor self-disclosure can help clients see that
counselors are not free of problems or devoid of feelings
(Hackney & Cormier, 2013).
– Thus, while hearing about select aspects of counselors’
personal lives, clients may examine aspects of their own
lives, such as stubbornness or fear, and realize that some
difficulties or experiences are universal and manageable.
• Egan (2014) stresses that counselor self-disclosure:
– should be brief and focused,
– should not add to the clients’ problems, and
– should not be used frequently.
• Before self-disclosing, counselors should ask
themselves such questions as “Have I thought through
why I am disclosing?” “Are there other more effective
and less risky ways to reach the same goal?” and “Is
my timing right?” (Simone et al., 1998, pp. 181–182).
• Counselors can help clients overcome hesitancy and
refusal to self disclosure by not only modeling and
inviting self-disclosure but also exploring negative
feelings that clients have about the counseling
process, contracting with clients to talk about a certain
subject area, and confronting clients with the
avoidance of a specific issue.
 To be avoided

Welfel and Patterson (2005) list four

major actions that usually block
counselor–client communication and
should be generally avoided: advice
giving, lecturing, excessive
questioning, and storytelling by the
counselor.