HUMANISTIC & BEHAVIOURAL

APPROCHES TO COUNSELING

Lekshmi Priya.K.B
2nd MSc Applied Psychology
WHAT IS COUNSELING?
 Counseling
The process of assisting and guiding
clients, especially by a trained person on
a professional basis, to resolve
especially personal, social, or
psychological problems and difficulties.
 Counseling is:

The process that occurs when a client and counselor set

aside time in order to explore difficulties which may
include the stressful or emotional feelings of the client.

The act of helping the client to see things more clearly,

possibly from a different view-point. This can enable the
client to focus on feelings, experiences or behaviour, with
a goal to facilitating positive change.

A relationship of trust.
 Counseling is Not:
Giving advice.
Judgemental.

Attempting to sort out the problems of the client.

Expecting or encouraging a client to behave in a way

in which the counselor may have behaved when
confronted with a similar problem in their own life.

 Getting emotionally involved with the client.

Looking at a client's problems from your own

perspective, based on your own value
system.
 They are divided into three
main categories:
1. Psychodynamic approach

2. Humanistic approaches

3. Cognitive and Behavioural approaches

 Psychodynamic approach

This approach has evolved from early work

based on Freudian psychology. It explores
how we are influenced by sub-conscious
thought processes and often involves
exploring how childhood experiences have
affected our thinking and behaviour.
 Humanistic approaches

This is a wide term covering a number of

different approaches to therapy including
Person-Centred, Gestalt, Transactional
analysis, and Existential approaches.
 Cognitive and Behavioural
approaches

These therapies are based on the way we

think (cognitive) and the way we behave.
 Humanistic
Approach/Counseling
 Psychology in the 1950s dominated by:
Behaviourism.
Psychoanalysis.
Many considered these approaches either limited
or negative.
Humanistic Psychology was a cultural
reaction to these circumstances, and called
a Third Force to contrast with these other
two approaches.
 One of the central disciplines or approaches of
psychology.

For over fifty years a humanistic approach has

been used in the field of therapeutic counseling.

Although behavioural and psychoanalytic forms

of counseling are also available, the humanistic
approach is an extremely successful option.
 Humanistic Psychology is unique in psychological
approaches in its emphasis on subjective
experience

Humanistic psychology is an approach which

speaks to the positive and optimistic within us the
potential for it to be a healing perspective.
 Counselors who work with clients in a
humanistic way are able to provide support
so that the client can freely explore their
whole life experience, rather than singular
blocks. Particular attention is paid to
combining the past, present and future,
instead of concentrating on one specific
area, problem or issue.
 A humanistic approach
provides them with an
opportunity:
To explore creativity, personal growth and
self-development

The foundations of the humanistic approach

provide the client with a deeper
understanding of who they are, what they feel
and the opportunity to explore the possibility
of creating personal choices.
 It encourages self-awareness and self-
realisation.

It focuses predominately on an individuals

unique, personal potential to explore
creativity, growth, love and psychological
understanding.
 Carl Rogers
Client-Centred Therapy
Person-centred Therapy
 Carl Rogers

Born 1902.
Initial focus was agriculture, then religion.
PhD at Columbia University in 1931.
Clinical psychology.
Early work with children.
Wrote his first book on psychotherapy in 1942.
Set up a counselling centre at University of Chicago in
1945.
Published Client Centred Therapy in 1951.
 Person centred
therapy/Client-centred
counseling

It focuses on an individual's self worth and

values. Being valued as a person, without
being judged, can help an individual to
accept who they are, and reconnect with
themselves.
 Goal:

releasing of an already
existing capacity in a potentially
competent individual
 Aims

Aim was not to cure sick people but to help people

live more satisfying

Aim to bring about psychological growth and

maturity in the client

To make the individual a fully functioning person

 Theoretical Propositions

Basic human tendency is toward maintaining

and enhancing the experiencing selfor self
actualization

Assumed the cause of disorder/Problem :

blocked self actualization

Goal: gap between perceived self and ideal

self; increase self-acceptance, inner
direction, and support personal growth
 Inner conflict and
Anxiety-Need for
Counseling
Discrepancy between to gain positive
ones own and others regard
expectation

individuals behaves or thinks in

accept the ways inconsistent with
values of others those introjected values

those values are person loses

internalized and self-esteem
become part of the and suffers
personality anxiety
 The client . . .

Not immediately capable for therapeutic process

Threatened by counseling setting, self conscious,

hurt ashamed of disclosing and disturbed self
concept

Labeled abnormal

Hurt looked upon treated with little respect

 The Counselor . . .

Facilitate the client

Enter the subjective, personal world of the client

open communication

important qualities: genuineness, empathy and

unconditional positive regard
Core conditions
 The stages of Counseling

In successful counseling, the client moves from fixity to

changeableness, from rigid structure to flow, from stasis to process
(Rogers, 1958).

Stage I: blocked internal communication

Stage II: Self-acceptance by client
Stage III: Beginning to recognize contradictions in
experience.
Stage IV: Disclosure of personal experiences with
caution/restrictively
Stage V: Feelings are expressed freely
 The stages of Counseling
(Cont.)

Stage VI: physiological loosening such as moistness in

the eyes, tears, sighs or muscular relaxation,
accompanies the open expression of feelings

Stage VII: Personal growth and trust on counselor with

readiness to change and actualize.
 Rogers (1959) described specifically
some of the changes he expected
successful counseling to produce:

The person comes to see himself differently.

He accepts and his feelings more fully.

He becomes more self-confident and self-

directing.

He becomes more the person he would like to be.

He becomes more flexible and less rigid in his

perceptions.

He adopts more realistic goals for himself.

 He behaves in a more mature fashion.

He changes his maladaptive behavior,

even such a long established one as
chronic alcoholism.

He became more acceptant of others.

He becomes more open to the

evidence, both to what is going on
outside of himself, and to what is
going on inside himself.

He changes his basic personality

characteristics in constructive ways.
BEHAVIOURAL COUNSELLING
 BACKGROUND OF
BEHAVIOUR APPROACH
History

had its beginnings in the early 1900s

Became established as a psychological approach in
the 1950s and 1960s.
a number of people that that have contributed to the
development of behaviour therapy:
Ivan Pavlov (1849 1936)
John B. Watson (1878 1958)
B.F. Skinner (1904 1958)
John Dollard (1900 1980) & Neal Miller (1909 2002)
Joseph Wolpe (1915 1977)
 MAIN CONCEPTS

The main concepts of the behavioural approach take the

form of different types of learning;

classical conditioning,
operant conditioning and
social learning.
 CLASSICAL
CONDITIONING

A type of learning when an unconditioned stimulus

(UCS) such as food produces an unconditioned
response (UCR) such as salivation. If a neutral
stimulus such as a bell is then paired with the UCS
to get the UCR and this is repeated, the neutral
stimulus will create the response of salivation. The
neutral stimulus is now the conditioned stimulus
(CS) and the response is a conditioned response
(CR) .
 OPERANT CONDITIONING

Also known as instrumental learning

the process whereby learned responses are controlled
by the consequences (Weiten, 2007)

There are two main processes involved in operant

conditioning
1. Reinforcement(occurs when a response is
strengthened by an outcome)
2. Punishment (when a response to behaviour decreases
the likelihood of the behaviour reoccurring )
 SOCIAL LEARNING

Or modelling occurs when an individual (or animal)

responds a certain way due to having observed the
behaviour previously. Social learning is an extension
of classical and operant conditioning in that an
individual is conditioned indirectly by observing
anothers conditioning. For example, a child observes
his or her older sibling setting the table for their
parents. The older child receives praise for setting
the table. The younger childs own tendency to set
the table for the parents is reinforced as a result of
the praise the older child receives
 Behavioural counseling is
Working with someone to help change his or her
maladaptive behaviour.
 Behavioural Approach

The Behavioural Approach to Counseling focuses on the

assumption that the environment determines an individual's
behaviour. How an individual responds to a given situation
is due to behaviour that has been reinforced as a child.

For example, someone who suffers from arachnophobia will

probably run away screaming (response) at the sight of a
spider (stimulus)
 Behavioural Approach(Cont..)

Behaviourists believe that that behaviour is 'learned'

and, therefore, it can be unlearned.

Behaviour counseling focuses on the behaviour of

the individual and aims to help him/her to modify
unwanted behaviours

counsellor would identify the unwanted behaviour

with a client and together they would work to change
or adapt the behaviour.
 Theoretical Proposition
All behaviours, adjustive or maladaptive is primarily
learnt in the same manner. Hence it should be modified
by employing learning principles.
 Four basic principles
involved in all types of
learning(DCRR)

1. DRIVE
2. CUE
3. RESPONSE
4. REINFORCEMENT
 Process of counseling
Once the unwanted behaviour is identified, the client
and counsellor might continue the process by drawing
up an action plan of realistic, attainable goals.

The aim would be that the unwanted behaviour stops

altogether or is changed in such a way that it is no
longer a problem.

Clients might be taught skills to help them manage

their lives more effectively.
 Process of counseling(cont..)

For example, they may be taught how to relax in

situations that produce an anxiety response and
rewarded or positively reinforced when desirable
behaviour occurs.

Another method used involves learning desirable

behaviour by watching and copying others who already
behave in the desired way.
Techniques in behavioural
counseling
Reciprocal inhibition technique
Behavioural modification
 Reciprocal inhibition technique
Developed by Joseph Wolpe in 1950s

a method of behavior therapy based on the inhibition of

one response by the occurrence of another response
that is mutually incompatible with it; a relaxation
response might be conditioned to a stimulus that previously
evoked anxiety
The technique is used especially for treating phobias,
where a state incompatible with anxiety
1. Counter conditioning
2. Positive reconditioning
Reciprocal inhibition
3. Experimental extinction technique
 How do I become who I am
(in theory)
Humanistic Psychology
Behaviourism
I have choice. I am motivated I learn by association.
by an actualising tendency,
to become who I am and the
best of who I am. Repetitive experiences
shape or even create
My capacity to grow and be my response.
the best of who I am is
fundamentally influenced by
the regard and empathy I Intervention in this
receive from others and the cycle is possible to
extent to which they support change my /our
my being and becoming who I
am.
experience.
Thank You