Understanding the Main Styles of Counselling

I recently began a formal qualification in Counselling and I’m loving it. I’ve been a trained coach and mindfulness practitioner for years, but often I found the biggest shifts occur in people when they were given space to express repressed emotions and all I had to do was counsel them. In this short blog I’ll write about the main skills and styles in counselling.

Foundation Counselling Skills

First the basics: it’s really important to have these skills honed and practiced.

• Attending / Presence: One needs to be able to be there as fully as possible and aware of what one is feeling and thinking. One begins to ‘feel’ more sensitively only when you bring presence.
• Listening, (use of silence): One needs to be able to provide a non-judgemental listening space. The interruption should be minimal and there should be gaps for silence occasionally, as felt.
• Reflecting feelings: One must pick up on the emotional content and reflect on it, empathically. I believe this also means to feel a little of it and match body language and tone somewhat. This creates connection and trust.
• Acknowledging with paraphrasing and summarising: It can be demonstrative of active listening when the helper reiterates back what is spoken, sometimes in the language of the client, but often with a degree of simplification, to make it more succinct.

Advanced Counselling Skills

As practice creates more sensitivity and theoretical knowledge continues we learn and practice:

• Immediacy: Being able to notice and pick out observations in the moment, to help the client be more present. This could also be sharing a thought that ‘popped’ into my head as I listen.
• Self-Disclosure: Sharing a relevant experience of our own can validate the client’s experience and create more connection and trust. Must be used sparingly, so as not to detract the attention too much away from the client.
• Focusing: Picking out the key components and keeping the client on track, without overly directing the process of exploration.
• Challenging / Questioning: Sparing use of questions to clarify or challenge the client. especially when you detect them avoiding a subject with vagueness or moving on quickly.
• Advanced Empathy: Seeing and feeling into what is beneath the surface emotions and descriptions. What could this really be about? The main tool here is intuition.

Self Reflection and Personal Development
We all have blind spots and as ‘helpers’ we must work on becoming aware of our own so that we are capable of holing the counselling space and not accidentally end up being counselled by the client. Blind spots could be a belief that some character trait is bad, a leaning toward certain relationship styles, or a slight prejudice against a certain type of person. Self-reflection helps us see and understand ourselves.

Integration of blind spots
Our job then is to ‘integrate them’ so that we are less likely to fall into automatic reactions. Integration is the process of maturity, where we discover parts of ourselves that we repress or abandon and bring into our awareness and make them more cooperative towards our values and goals (​This is my definition. There are many others). An example for myself is I know my mind is critical of ‘weakness’ (because of my past conditioning) and I integrate that by priming useful reminders for myself and I use mindfulness to see a person as they are, not how I think they should be. In a session now, if I notice my critical mind I will thank it and take a breath, remind it that it’s OK, and bring my full attention back to the present moment. This could happen within a single second.

Journaling can be a great way to self-reflect

Styles of Counselling

Everyone has their own style, based on their own understanding of how the psyche actually works. Here is some basic history of the main influences. The three videos below are incredibly useful in showing the three main styles used today. We begin though with two big pioneers from the early 1900s:

• Sigmund Freud​ pioneered psychoanalysis using techniques like free association (uncensored expression) and discovered transference (projecting an idea of who someone is onto them without realising it). He had some wild ideas, but his model of the Id (natural drives), Ego (conscious awareness mediating the other two) and super-Ego (social conditioning) is still used today. His idea is to talk to people and make parts of the unconscious more conscious. Others followed this with different interpretations:
• Carl Jung modelled the idea of ‘archetypes’ (a concept “borrowed” from anthropology to denote supposedly universal and recurring mental images or themes). The main of these that are still used today are the Shadow (repressed parts), Persona (mask of personality), the collective unconsciousness (the interconnected ideas and impulses felt globally) and the Wounded Healer (what drives us to care and treat one another). Jung loved dream analysis as a way of accessing the psyche.

The three big modern styles — check out the videos!
These practitioners from 1960 to 1990 are shown in striking contrast in the videos above.

• Carl Rogers founded the humanistic approach (Client Centred), which prioritised a genuine and empathic relationship between client and helper, through which healing and integration occur naturally. VIDEO LINK
• Fritz Perls coined the term ‘Gestalt therapy’ which seeks to raise the awareness of people as a process of sensation, perception, bodily feelings, emotion, and behaviour, in the present moment. He would use quite an extreme noticing of body language and encouragement to develop and express it. He would also use roleplaying to help people switch roles and see how things play out in the mind. VIDEO LINK
• Albert Ellis founded Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) — a precursor to modern CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy). He saw how unconscious beliefs ran the show of our actions and feelings and sought to make people more aware of them through talking and exposing them to observation. VIDEO LINK

I also use ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), Clowning and Fooling, Art Therapy and DBT (Dialectical Behaviour Therapy). I will explore them in other blogs.

My counselling and coaching offer
At the moment I offer client-centred, yet goal-oriented coaching. This blog talks about the difference between counselling and coaching. If you feel drawn to me for help let’s work together. We can all use a little help to discover our repressed patterns of thought and behaviour and integrate them to become more empowered and fulfilled people.