WEEk 4 - Common factors and counselling poitions Flashcards
What is useful in being a successful counsellor
- Nearly two-thirds of the good effects are due to the
worker/client relationship or alliance - About a quarter of the benefits are due to the workers
commitment to their approach
What are Client/Extra-therapeutic Factors
- Readiness for change
- Strengths
- Resources
- Pre-morbid functioning
- Social supports
- Socio-economic status
- General statistical error –
unexplained, uncontrolled and
unrecognized influences
What are treatment effects (13-20%)
Therapist effects (4-9%):
* Who provides the therapy
* Some therapists are more effective than others
* Ability to form therapeutic relationships key
What is it about the person?
What difference might age or gender make?
What about level of experience?
Type of degree?
Model and Technique (1%):
* Good fit for client’s preference
* Provide structure
Expectancy, Placebo and Allegiance effects (4%):
* Client and therapist expectations about outcomes and efficacy of models
Alliance effects (5-8%)”
Largest contribution to outcomes
* Quality of the relationship between client and therapist
* Alliance impacts on engagement and engagement is a strong predictor of change
* Client view of alliance is particularly important (more important than therapists view of the alliance
What doesn’t predict outcomes in therapy
- Client age, gender, diagnosis and previous treatment history
- Therapist age, gender, profession, degree, training, theoretical orientation, amount of supervision, personal therapy, registration, use of evidence based practice
- Model/Technique of Therapy
- Matching therapy to diagnosis
- Capacity/adherence to particular treatment approach
Differences in outcome have little or nothing to do with the worker’s…?
- Age
- Gender
- Professional discipline
- Theoretical orientation
- Training undertaken
- Personal therapy
- Professional registration or certification
How do good counsellors normally go about achieving good outcomes
- They encourage clients to use their own skills, knowledge, ideas and preferences
- They work to develop an understanding relationship with clients.
- They work to achieve change in the shorter term.
- They are constantly extending their skills by deliberate practice (Rather than by more academic qualifications, supervision, teaching, writing papers etc)
- Their primary focus is on preferred stories of “clarity, coping, endurance and desire”
“unsuccessful staff focused on problems whilst neglecting strengths . Successful staff focused on clients resources from the start - They track progress
How can theory help us be successful in counselling
- Helps us to attend to and organise vast amounts of information
- Map – ideas on how to proceed
- Increases consistency – helps identify what is helpful for that person
- Grounds us and allows us to improvise – like musicians
- Hope to be guided by theory – not blinded by it
What are assumptions
something that is accepted as true without proof
*Become so ingrained in our daily lives - no longer question their validity
*Sometimes valuable – sometimes not
*Brookfield (1995) – critical reflection a process of ‘hunting assumptions
What are the three levels of assumptions?
- Paradigmatic assumptions – inform our view of reality (deep assumption about world view. For example, Western View that we can generalise knowledge to everyone)
- Prescriptive assumptions – what we think ought to happen (assumptions on the way we think things should be. For example manners are beliefs on how you should act and if you don’t follow the manners we hold assumptions that that person is rude or uneducated)
- Causal assumptions – inform what we expect to happen (assume cause and effect –> for example in psychodynamic ideas something that happened in your childhood has caused this in your adulthood)
What is the value of reflective practice?
- Our beliefs and attitudes are learned and become so
smoothly incorporated – they become part of us. - Not being aware of our beliefs/attitudes to ‘other’
groups puts us at risk of repeating discriminatory
practices within the counselling setting - We have a responsibility to become aware of how our experiences influence our practice – shape what we see, what we look for, what we pay attention to
- Prevents practice from going stale
- Invites creativity
What is Post Colonial Thought
The body of thinking and writing that seeks to move beyond
colonial oppression, to find a voice for those who have been
silenced by that oppression, and to challenge the perpetuation of structures and discourses of colonisation…
Postcolonial thought seeks to recognise the pervasiveness of
colonisation, to validate the voices of the colonised and to
recognise and reverse the patterns of colonialist domination. It identifies how powerful the voices of the colonisers have been, and, to the exclusion of others, and how this has stripped the colonised of their identity and devalued their culture
**Noting that colonisation has continued for a lot longer than you know. People often will say that was 200 years ago, or things like that, right? This idea that the systems that have been established continue to be quite oppressive for people and what has also happened as a result of of colonisation It’s also meant that particular knowledge have been privileged over other knowledge, and I think, certainly this is the case for psychology and for counselling. and what we’ll see is, instead of people looking for more traditional ways of healing, we’ll be looking for these more scientific ways of of working with people.
What might be the impact of imposing mainstream methods and theories to provide meaning for Indigenous peoples?
It is important to reveal the paradigms that underlie
psychology in order to understand how and where to
decolonise the science.
Rose (1999) describes psychology as one of the clearest
disciplinary expressions of individualism.
Psychology has shared and legitimised the Western
capitalist conception of individuality which holds the
individual responsible for their behaviour, successes and
failures (Rose, 1999)
‘Hearing voices’
Many cultures experience voices as completely ‘normal’ but in other cultures could be considered a biological flaw or something like ‘schizophrenia’
-In many Asian and African cultures it is sometimes understood as a spiritual awakening, or as part of a supernatural process
-In Maori culture its an ordinary part of life like saying hello to your family
What is Counsellor Positioning
As Counsellors whether we are offering advice or allowing the client to come up with their own answers we are positioning ourselves and the client in particular ways.
- In doing so, either the client or the counsellor’s knowledge is privileged in the conversation
whos knowledge are we going to privlage
Counsellor as the expert
Position ourselves as the expert by:
- Offering advice
- Sharing evidence-based knowledge
- Assessing, diagnosing and treating the client
- They are privileging either their personal knowledge or theoretical knowledge that may be deemed to be common/normal over the clients own local knowledge.
- When positioning their knowledge at the centre of the conversation counsellors may or may not be influential in enabling change and run the risk of feeling exhausted or burdened by having to come up with all of the strategies/solutions
