LESSON 2

THE DISCIPLINE OF COUNSELLING

THE DISCIPLINE OF COUNSELLING

• Is a relationship characterized by the

application of one or more psychological
theories and a recognized set of
communication skills problems, or
aspirations.
 DEFINITION OF COUSELING

• Counselors are professionally trained and

certified to perform counseling.
• Their job is to provide advice or guidance in
decision-making in emotionally.
• To resolving an emotional or interpersonal
problems.
• Traditionally in many societies, counseling is
provided by family, friends, and wise elderly.
• Counselors – exist in a wide range of areas
of expertise:
• Marriage
• Family
• Youth
• Student and other life transition dealing
with managing of issues of loss and death,
retirement, divorce, parenting, and
bankruptcy.
• COUNSELING – is widely considered the
heart of the guidance services in schools.

• Methods adapted to the needs of the

client, the trained counselor helps in
defining a problems and acquires
initiative, determination, courage, and
efficiency to solve the problems.
 • COUNSELING - gathering information about
clients through the use of psychological test and
non-psychometric devices.
• What is psychometric?

• PSYCHOMETRIC – is a branch of psychology that

deals with the design, administration, and
interpretation of quantitative tests for the
measurement of psychological variables.
• Such as intelligence, aptitude, interest, and
personality traits.
 CONTEXT AND THE BASIC CONCEPTS OF
COUNSELIN
• Counseling is affected by the context and
the surrounding factors.

• First of all, context defined includes the

peers, the culture, the nieghborhoods, the
counseling, client, the counseling, and the
contextual and the process factors.
 PEERS AS CONTEXT

• Friend’s attitudes, norms, and behaviors

have a strong influence on adolescents.
• Many personal issues are often
introduced to individual by their peers.
• Critical family issues involve family roles,
both positively and negatively.
 NEIGHBORHOOD AS CONTEXT

• The interactions between the family and

neighborhood as immediate context are also
important to consider.
• The behavioral problems in this particular
neighborhood require that families work
against crime and social isolation that may
impact them.
• For this reason, neighborhood context is an
important consideration in counseling.
 CULTURE AS CONTEXT
• WHAT IS CULTURE?
• Culture provided as community
organization.
• The various sectors of community
families, peers, and neighborhood are all
bound together by cultural context.
• Therefore, the cultural context is a major
consideration in counseling.
 • CULTURE – is the source of:
• Norms
• Values
• Symbols and
• Language which provide the basis for the
normal functioning of an individual.
• From the counseling context, other
success factors such as:

• 1. CLIENT FACTORS
• 2. COUNSELOR FACTORS
• 3. CONTEXTUAL FACTORS
• 4. PROCESS FACTORS
 1. CLIENT FACTORS

• The client factors are everything that a

client brings to the counseling context.

• He or she is not a passive object

receiving treatment in the manner of a
traditional doctor-patient situation.
 COUNSELOR FACTORS
• The personality, skills, and personal
qualities of a counselor can significant
impact the outcomes of the counseling
relationship.

• The counselor’s personal style and

qualities can make the interventions
successful.
 CONTEXTUAL FACTORS

• The context in which counseling takes

place can define the outcomes.

• Counselors are therefore concerned with

the environment and atmosphere where
to conduct the sessions.
 PROCESS FACTORS

• The process factors constitute the actual

counseling undertaking.

• Vellemean (2001) presents the following six

stages, which for him apply to all problem
areas in the process of counseling.
 • A. DEVELOPING TRUST
• This involves warmth, genuineness, and
empathy.
• B. EXPLORING PROBLEM AREAS
• This involves providing a clear and deep
analysis of what the problem is, where it
comes from, its triggers, and why it may
have develop.
• C. HELPING TO SET GOALS
• This involves setting and managing goal,
directed interventions.
 • D. EMPOWERING INTO ACTION
• This means fostering action to achieve set goals.
• E. HELPING TO MAINTAIN CHANGE
• This means providing support and other
techniques to enable the client to maintain
changes.
• F. AGREEING WHEN TO END THE HELPING
RELATIONSHIP
• Being directed by the client and towards
independence.
 GOALS AND SCOPE OF COUNSELING

• Counseling is aimed at empowering a client.

• The general goal is to lead an individual client or
group to self-emancipation in relation to a felt
problem.
• At some stage in the process.
• 1. the client should attain insight and understanding
of oneself.
• 2. achieve better self-awareness and look at oneself
with increased self-acceptance and appreciation.
• 3. and be able to manage oneself positively.
• The scope of counseling is wide. Essentially,
it involves application of some psychological
theories and recognized communication
skills.
• It does not deal with clinical cases such as
mental illness.
• It is a professional that requires an eventual
closure and termination of the counselee-
counselor relationship.
 PRINCIPLES OF COUNSELING
• The principles of counseling can be found in
the basic process of counseling since they
govern each and every step:

• Developing trust
• Exploring problem areas
• Helping to set goals
• Empowering into action
• Helping to maintain change
• Agreeing when to end.
• Since the objective of counseling is to provide
support in dealing with issues of concern,
counseling is effective when it is performed with
clear objectives that include providing some
degree of:
• Advice
• Reassurance
• Release
• Emotional tension
• Clarified thinking and
• reorientation
 1. ADVICE

• Counseling may involve advice-giving as

one of the several functions that
counselors perform.
• The counselor making judgement about a
counselee’s problems and lays out
options for a course of action.
 2. REASSURANCE

• Counseling involves providing clients

with reassurance, which is a way of giving
them courage to face a problem or
confidence that they are pursuing a
suitable course of action.
3. RELEASE OF EMOTIONAL TENSION

• Counseling provides clients the

opportunity to get emotional other
personal issues.
• Counseling experience shows that as
person begin to explain their concerns to
a sympathetic listener.
 4. CLARIFIED THINKING

• Clarified thinking encourages a client to

accept responsibility for problems and to
be more realistic in solving them.