Chapter 6-7: Using Counselling Skills Flashcards
What benefits does listening bring to the helping relationship?
Conveys respect and positive regard – to pay full attention to someone communicates a sense of valuing and being interested in who they are and what they have to say
Lays the foundation for a respectful, trusting relationship
Helps the other person listen to themselves, gives them a sense of clarity, brings a greater understanding of a problem or situation
Allows the helpee to talk through, understand and release challenging emotions, thereby reducing tension.
Can encourage more information to surface and support problem-solving
Is important to not only listen, but to communicate to the other person that you are listening. How can a helper communicate that they are listening?
Through their nonverbal communication, including body posture and movements, facial expressions, and small gestures and movements. Movement and touch, body language or posture, physical distance, facial expression, and the nature or degree of eye contact. Tone of voice including pitch, volume, accent, and how you stress certain words more than others
Minimal encouragers such as nodding, smiling, head tilting, saying hmm
Remember the acronym SOLERB
Sit Straight towards the other person
Open body posture – arms unfolded, feet flat on the floor
Lean forward occasionally
Offer Eye contact – appropriately
Be Relaxed, don’t fidget – check shoulders are not tense or hunched
Breathe – check you aren’t holding your breath
What role can silence play in the helping relationship?
Can allow the other person to open up more, talk further, open up the conversation and move it to a deeper level.
The client can be engaged in the process of experiencing and unfolding of feelings or memories, reflecting on the meaning or implications of something that has just been said or felt, help them focus when their thoughts and feelings are scattered
Can slow down the pace- when their minds are full or preoccupied it allows space for reflection and clear thinking. Silence allows us to feel, which in turn broadens our understanding and awareness. Can simply be a space to be with each other
When the helper communicates how they think the helpee is feeling back to them. It recognizes emotions in others
Sensitively and carefully reflecting back to the helpee in a few words the key message of what they are communicating, either verbally or in their body language.
Reflection
For example, the client rushes in, laughing, saying “I’ve had the greatest day“ and sits down smiling. The reflection would be: you seem so excited and happy!
Shows that you have paid attention to their behavior.
Sometimes is about using the exact words the person has just used, also called re-stating
Taking the content of what the helpee has said and feeding it back to them using your own words. And doing so without bringing your own thoughts, feelings or interpretation into it.
Paraphrasing
What role does paraphrasing play in the helping relationship?
Helps the person feel listened to and valued. Feeling understood can strengthen the relationship.
Helps the person to clarify situation or get things straight in their minds. Like hearing yourself speak which helps them understand the situation better
Is a good way to check that you understand their thoughts and feelings, allows the helpee to correct the helper if they had misunderstood or misheard
Collecting all the main points of a conversation and putting them together in a brief summary which also reflects the balance of what’s been said. Often done at the end of a helping session to bring the session to a close.
Summarizing
Explain the role of summarizing in the helping relationship
Can help to bring a helping session to a close. Help clarifies that you understand what has been said.
Can be used to help bring things together, to simplify them and make them manageable
Useful for assisting the helpee decide what’s important for them to talk about in the helping session. A good summary can focus the helpee , Especially if they begin by talking about a number of different things. This is what you’ve mentioned, which of those would you like to talk about today? It is important to let the helpee decide what is important and what they want to talk about
Questions that can be answered with one word or phrase
Closed questions
Useful for fact and information gathering. Some closed questions can be useful in a helping session for clarifying a situation or clarifying understanding.
More about what the person asking the question wants or needs to know.
Use closed questions to finish a conversation or part of a conversation
Questions that cannot be answered by a single word or phrase, and invite the other person to talk and volunteer new information.
More about the helpee and what they want to talk about
Use open questions to get the other person to speak more fully
When the helper gently asks the helpee to prove or justify something. The helper is disputing the truth or validity of something. Should only be used once the helping relationship has been built into a safe, trusting one.
Challenging
What is the role of challenging in the helping relationship?
Can support the helpee to move forward and make changes
Can support the helpee to get in touch with difficult and painful feelings in order to gain clarity and understanding about a situation they have been reluctant to face
Sometimes used to simply gently query a discrepancy in the helpee’s story
Sometimes what the helpee says seems to be at odds with how they look or behave and this can create a space for the helper to make a gently inquiring challenge. The helper identifies that they are being incongruent – the feelings they are expressing do not match how they are behaving.
Can help with self-awareness as it makes them aware of previously unacknowledged information.
If done in a confrontational, harsh or clumsy manner, can create defensive behaviour and harm the helping relationship
Acknowledging what’s happening in the helping session between the helper and the helpee. Noticing what is happening in the present moment and reflecting that back to the helpee.
Immediacy
What is the role of immediacy in the helping relationship?
Can we use to explore any tensions between the helper and the helpee. For example, things ignored or left unsaid. For example, maybe the relationship between the two mirrors or replicates other relationships in the helpee’s experience
It is about intimacy, about honest communication between two people working to understand what’s happening when they are together.
Can simply be acknowledging what’s happening in the here and now. For example, the helper might notice changes in their clients body language.
It is the ability of the helper to use the immediate situation to invite the helpee to look at what is going on between them in the relationship.
Involves revealing how you are feeling, sharing ahunch or sense of what the helpee may be feeling in the here and now, inviting the helpee to explore what is going on between you
In what three situations should you use immediacy?
- To address the helpee’s patterns of relating – that may be being repeated in the helping relationship, in order to help them understand and deal with it.
For example, I am aware that you have said that you never get angry, yet I am sensing that you are very angry with me even though your voice is quiet. - To deal with difficulties that arise – which may be to do with anything going on the session.
For example, a lack of trust or a boundary issue. I’m finding it difficult to concentrate on what you were saying because I have just realized that I know the person you were talking about. - To deal with an issue of difference – that might be affecting the relationship
For example, I am aware that you are a black female and I am a white male, and I wonder how easy you find it to tell me about your experience of racial discrimination at work. Can we talk about this?
