What is Counselling?
Counselling involves the helping skills of caring, listening and prompting.
It’s based on talking and the respectful, trusting relationship that
builds up between the client and the counsellor but it’s not the same
as the advice-giving service of, say, the Citizens Advice Bureau. A counsellor
will be supportive but give little or no direct advice, since the aim is
to help you develop insight into your problems. They do this by helping
you to draw on your own resources (resources you often aren’t aware
you had) and so enable you to approach your life in a fresh way.
Counselling is also rather different from a self-help group where a group
of people with the same problem talk together. Self-help groups are very
supportive and often go well with counselling – but one-to-one sessions
can offer a more concentrated kind of help.
During the course of the counselling sessions you may well, with the counsellors
guidance, reassess your “coping skills” – how you deal
with problems, challenges, relationships, work and learn ways that are more
effective for you. For instance, if you feel harassed at work but react
by getting depressed, a counsellor may help you find a way you can stand
up for yourself. Learning to be assertive (which doesn’t mean being
aggressive), and in effect saying to yourself and to others: “I matter
too”, can be an important step away from depression.
Counselling looks at the way we communicate with each other, helping us
to become more clear and direct with what we want to say – for instance
learning to be angry without making the other person “wrong”,
or learning to ask for what we need rather than going into a sulk because
the other person hasn’t “guessed” our needs. This process
is beneficial for most relationships, particularly where each blames the
other for what’s gone wrong, resulting in a stalemate.
Counselling uses very human skills – like knowing how and when to
ask the right questions – which the counsellor has developed through
training and experience. But counselling is also relationships, and, especially
in long term counselling, you may get in touch with difficult emotions –
suspicion, hostility, fear – which perhaps you brush aside in real
life, but which, in the sake space of the session, the counsellor will help
you focus on and work through.
Most of all, the counselling process can help you to feel more in control
of your life and able to do something yourself about what isn’t right
for you, about the feelings distressing you or about a difficult relationship,
rather than feeling helpless, angry or frustrated. You don’t have
to a victim of your life.
Counselling sessions typically last 1 hour, and takes place once a week
over a period of weeks or months, depending on how things go and the arrangement
you make with the counsellor. Setting some sort of goal with the counsellor
(e.g. Not feeling panicked by work or by yelling at the kids) is often a
part of the process.
In the case of refugees and asylum seekers you are dealing with abnormal
circumstances of serious experience of loss or violence that can often include
family, friends and homeland. You might have experienced serious war condition
and experiences that left you traumatised and unable to cope. Counselling
can provide methods of treatment that will help you overcome the loss, trauma,
flashbacks and nightmares. This is hard and slow work but it can be done.
Confidentiality
All that takes place between counsellor and client is treated with respect
and discretion. An agreement is usually made at the outset on confidentiality.
However, exceptional circumstances may arise when a clients’ consent
will be sought for a change in this agreement.
