THE FOUNDATIONS OF

COUNSELING AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

 THE MICROSKILLS
TRADITION AND BASIC
COMPETENCIES
What students can do to become competent and prepared for the
next stages of their education and professional work.

• Engage in the basic skills of the counseling or

psychotherapy session: listening, influencing, and
structuring an effective session with individual and
multicultural sensitivity.
• Conduct a full session using only listening skills.
• Master a basic structure of the session that can be
applied to many different theories:
BASIC STRUCTURE

1. Develop an empathic relationship with the

client.
2. Draw out the client’s story, giving special
attention to strengths and resources.
3. Set clear goals with the client.
4. Enable the client to restory and think differently
about concerns, issues, and challenges.
5. Help the client move to action outside the
session.
 THE MICROSKILLS
TRADITION AND BASIC
COMPETENCIES
• Integrate ethics, multicultural issues,
and positive psychology/wellness
into counseling practice.
• Analyze with considerable precision
their own natural style of helping
and, equally or perhaps more
important, how their counseling
style is received by clients.
 EMPATHIC LISTENING AND
DEVELOPING RELATIONSHIPS
• Empathic listening and developing relationships with our clients are the
most basic aspects of counseling and psychotherapy.
• Our next goal is to enable clients to tell their stories. Through this
narrative exploration, we can help them rewrite their stories in more
effective ways and then encourage them to act on their concerns in the
real world.
• Our task is to expand client possibilities for intentional response and
action, which in turn lead to a self-actualization of potential, more
effective decision making, and wellness.
• As counselors and therapists, we can make change happen whether we
work in schools and colleges, community agencies, behavioral health
organizations, or private practice.
 TOWARD INTENTIONAL INTERVIEWING,
COUNSELING, AND PSYCHOTHERAPY
• Awareness, knowledge, skills, and actions developed through this chapter
will enable you to:
• Explore the session as both science and art. In this process, we
ask you to reflect on yourself as a potential helper. While science
undergirds what is said here, you as an independent artist will find your
own integration of ideas, skills, and competencies.
• Define and discuss similarities and differences among
interviewing, counseling, and psychotherapy, and review who actually
conducts most of the helping sessions. This may be surprising and
rewarding.
• Gain knowledge of the microskills step-by-step approach that
provides an adaptable base on which to define your personal style and,
later, your view of theories of counseling.
 TOWARD INTENTIONAL INTERVIEWING,
COUNSELING, AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

• Examine key goals of counseling and psychotherapy: self-actualization,

resilience, and resolution of client issues.
• Develop increased awareness of what “multiculturalism” really is and the
importance of being able to work with clients from widely varying
backgrounds.
• Consider the place of cutting-edge neuroscience in your own work and for
the future of the counseling and psychotherapy field.
Homework:
Journal Entry 1:As your first practical exercise, observe your natural style of
communicating and helping. This will provide a baseline so that later you can examine
how your counseling style may have changed at the end of the semester. Write it in your
Counseling Journal.
 WHAT IS THE “CORRECT”
RESPONSE TO OFFER A CLIENT?

• Love Is Listening
• Paul Tillich says “Love is listening.”
• Listening, love, caring, and relationship are all
closely related. These four words could be said to
be the center of the helping process.
*Paul Tillich was a German-American Christian existentialist philosopher and Lutheran Protestant theologian
 INTERVIEWING,
COUNSELING, AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

Counseling

Interviewing Psychotherapy

The interrelationship of interviewing, counseling, and psychotherapy

• Interviewing is the basic process used
for gathering data, providing INTERVIEWING
information and advice to clients, and
suggesting workable alternatives for
resolving concerns.
• Interviewers can be found in many
settings, including employment offices,
schools, and hospitals.
• Professionals in many areas also use
these skills—for example, in medicine,
business, law, community
development, library work, and many
government offices
• Counseling is a more intensive and COUNSELING
personal process. Although
interviewing to gain client information
is critical, counseling is more about
listening to and understanding a
client’s life challenges and, along with
the client, developing strategies for
change and growth.
• Counseling is most often associated
with the professional fields of
counseling, human relations, clinical
and counseling psychology, pastoral
counseling, and social work and is also
part of the role of medical personnel
and psychiatrists.
• Psychotherapy focuses on more deep-
PSYCHOTHERAPY
seated difficulties, which often require more
time for resolution. However,
psychotherapists interview clients to obtain
basic facts and information as they begin
working with them, and often use counseling
as well. The skills and concepts of intentional
interviewing and counseling are equally
effective for the successful conduct of longer-
term psychotherapy.
• Historically, psychotherapy was the province
of psychiatrists, but they are limited in
number, and today they mostly offer short
sessions and treat with medications.
• This means that most talking therapy will be
conducted by professionals other than
psychiatrists.
 THE SCIENCE AND ART OF
COUNSELING AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

• Counseling and psychotherapy now have a solid research and scientific

base that enables us to identify many qualities and skills that lead to
effectiveness but applying that science is, in truth, an art form.
• Theories, skills, and strategies of professional work remain essential, but
Counselors are the one who puts them together and can uniquely
facilitate the development and growth of others.
• Counselor are similar to an artist whose skills and knowledge produce
beautiful paintings out of color, canvas, and personal experience.
• As a Counselor, you are the listener who will provide color and meaning
to the interpersonal relationship we call helping.
 THE FLEXIBLE COUNSELOR AND
CLIENT: INTENTIONALITY AND
CULTURAL INTENTIONALITY

“If you don’t like that idea, I’ve got another.”

—Marshall McLuhan
• There are many ways to facilitate client development.
• As you become increasingly competent, learn to blend what is natural for
you with new skills and theory.
• Be yourself, but also to realize that to reach a wide variety of clients,
you need to be flexible and constantly change behavior and learn new
ways of being with the uniqueness of each client.
 THE FLEXIBLE COUNSELOR AND
CLIENT: INTENTIONALITY AND
CULTURAL INTENTIONALITY

• Be intentional.
• Intentionality, along with cultural intentionality, is acting with a
sense of capability and deciding from among a range of
alternative actions.
• The intentional individual has more than one action, thought,
or behavior to choose from in responding to changing life
situations.
• The culturally intentional individual can generate
alternatives in a given situation and approach a problem from
multiple vantage points, using a variety of skills and personal
qualities, adapting styles to suit different individuals and
cultures.
 THE FLEXIBLE COUNSELOR AND
CLIENT: INTENTIONALITY AND
CULTURAL INTENTIONALITY
• The culturally intentional counselor or therapist remembers a basic rule of helping: If a
helping lead or skill doesn’t work—try another approach!
• Be careful with the danger of stereotyping.
• For example, your own personal issues or cultural factors such as ethnicity, race, gender,
lifestyle, or religious orientation may have biased your response and session plan.

Homework:
Journal Entry 2: Reflection. Developing Your Own Culturally Intentional Style
What multiple paths has your life taken?
How has each new experience or setting changed the way you think?
Has this led to increasing flexibility and awareness of the many possibilities that are yours?
Can you listen and learn from those who may sharply differ from you?
What is your family and cultural background, and how does that affect the person you are?
 INTENTIONALITY, RESILIENCE, AND SELF-
ACTUALIZATION

People who feel good about themselves produce good results.

—Kenneth Blanchard

Intentionality

• As a Counselor you cannot expect to solve all your clients’ issues and challenges
in a few sessions, but in the short time you have with them, you can make a
difference.
• Clients will benefit and become stronger as they feel heard and respected and
become intentionally flexible with new ways to resolve their concerns.
• Resolving specific immediate issues, such as choice of a college major, a career
change, whether to break up a long-term relationship, or handling mild depression
after a significant loss, will help them feel empowered and facilitate further
action.