Disciplines and

Ideas in the Applied

Social Sciences
The student is expected to gain these
from learning the topic/lesson:

Remember: appreciate the value of goals

and scope of professional counseling
Understand: identify the principles of
counselling.
Apply: described the context involved in
counselling.
What I Know
About
Counseling
What I Want to
Know
About Counseling
What I Learned
About
Counseling
Definition
of
Counseling
Counseling comes from the Latin word
“Consilium” meaning advice, suggestion,
wisdom, plan, purpose, judgment.
Counseling is a profession and a helping
relationship that facilitates the development
of individuals, groups, and families that are
based on the principle of empowerment that
helps achieve personal, social, educational
and career development.
Traditionally, counselling was
reffered to as “guidance and
counselling”; but in the early 80s,
the profession has been reffered to
in books and journals as simple
“counseling” to refer its uses in
community, schools and private
clinical practices. In the Philippines,
we often refer to them as “Guidance
Counselor”
Context and the Basic Concepts
of Counselling
Peers as Context
– friends’ attitudes, norms, and
behaviors have a strong influence
on adolescents. Many personal
issues are often introduced to the
individual by their peers.
Neighborhood as Context
– the interactions between the
family and its neighborhood as
immediate context are also
important to consider. A family
functions within a particular
neighborhood. The behavioral
problems in this particular
neighborhood require that families
work against crime and social
Culture as Context
– culture provided meaning and coherence of life
to any orderly life such as community or
organization. It is the source of norms, values,
symbols, and language which provide the basis for
the normal functioning of an individual.
Understanding the cultural context of a client
makes it easier for a counselor to appreciate the
nature of their struggles as well as their cultural
conditioning that informs certain personal
characteristics.
THE COUNSELLING ENVIRONMENT
SHOULD BE
-comfortable (e.g. have comfortable
seats)
-a place with few distractions (e.g. no
telephone, or interruptions from other
staff or family members)
-somewhere where privacy and
confidentiality can be maintained (e.g.
somewhere away from other people)
-non-threatening (e.g. a place where
people can feel relaxed and comfortable).
Goals of Counseling
Different individuals have various issues and
concerns in life. Their reason for consulting of
Counselor or a Counseling Psychologist differs
based on their problems and concerns. The
following are some goals of counseling:
a.Facilitate change of behavior -
counseling has specific goals, this specific goal
will help both of the client and the counselor
understand what specific change of behavior
is desired.
b. Promote decision making - this
enables individual make critical
decisions but not to decide which
decisions the client should make to
acquire an understanding not only of
their abilities, opportunities, and
interests but also their emotions,
behavior, and attitudes that could
interfere their choices and decisions.
c. Enhance coping skills and
adjustment - there are a lot of
pressures in life that a person will face
in his/her lifetime. It is the goal of
counseling to empower individuals
that can enhance coping skills and
adjustment to be able to adapt and
survive in this complex society we are
living.
d. Improve relationship skills - many
people go to a counselor because of
poor self-esteem or inadequate social
skills, some of them might be bullied by
classmates, and it is the goal of
counseling to help the client improve the
quality of life by becoming more
effective in teaching life skills and
interpersonal skills to improve
relationships.
e. Facilitate counselee or client potential-
one of the counseling goals is to help an
individual maximize his freedom and seek
individual’s effectiveness by giving him or her
control over his environment and/or overcome.
Counselors are working with people with
excessive smoking, depression, and aggression
they help them to take care better of their clients
holistically:physical, psychological and spiritual.
Scope of Counseling
1. Individual Counseling- Identity
problems, relationships, anxiety,
depression, family problems, behavior
management, gender (identity and
sexuality), grief/bereavement,
relationships, sexual abuse recovery,
workplace stress and relationships, drugs,
eating disorders, HIV, spirituality, status
and middle age syndrome.
2. Marital and Pre-Marital
Counseling- Marital and relationship
dynamics, Relationship and fertility issues.
3. Family Counseling- Children and
adult behaviors, divorce/annulment and
separation problems and adjustments,
family problems, life stages, transitions,
parenting and remarriage relationship
counseling.
Principles of Counseling
l Listening skills-This is the number
one skill that a counselor should
always consider in counseling
process. When listening attentively to
the client to show what we are
interested, and we respect him/her
whatever situation he/she have right
now.
l Resistance- Human behavior is very complex,
and people respond to things differently. It is
important for counselors not to take client’s
resistance personally since some resistance to
therapeutic change is natural.
l Respect- Counselor should have respect for
his/her clients no matter how weird, strange,
peculiar, different the client is with you. A
counselor should be neutral and must be
objective no matter what.
l Empathy or Unconditional Positive Regard-
Empathy requires listening and
understanding client’s feeling and their
perspective. This principle should be part
of the counselor’s characteristics since the
success of counselee-counselor
relationship will depend on the quality of
rapport built along the process.
l Clarification, Confrontation, and Interpretation-
Clarification is an attempt by the therapist to
restate what the client is either saying or feeling
so the client may learn something or understand
the issue better. Confrontation is a skill that can
assist clients to increase their self-awareness that
can be used to highlight discrepancies that
clients have been previously unaware of while
interpretation is when the counselor tries to
interpret the client’s situation based on noting
and reflection of their story.
l Reassurance- Counseling involves
providing clients with reassurance, which
is a way of giving them courage to face a
problem or confidence that they are
pursuing a suitable course of action.
Reassurance is a valuable principle
because it can bring about a sense of
relief that may empower a client to
function normally again.
l Advice- counseling may involve advice-giving
as one of the several functions that counselors
perform. When this is done, the requirement is
that a counselor makes judgements about a
counselee’s problems and lays out options for a
course of action. Advice-giving has to avoid
breeding a relationship in which the counselee
feels inferior and emotionally dependent on the
counselor.
l Release of counseling tension- counseling
provides clients the opportunity to get emotional
release from their pent-up frustrations and other
personal issues. Counseling experience shows
that as persons begin to explain their concerns
to a sympathetic listener, their tensions begin to
subside. They become more relaxed and tend to
become more coherent and rational. The release
of tensions helps remove mental blocks by
providing s solution to the problem.
l Clarified thinking- Clarified thinking tends to
take place while the counselor and counselee
are talking and therefore becomes logical
emotional release. As this relationship goes
on, other self-empowering results may take
place later as a results of developments
during the counseling relationship. Clarified
thinking encourages clients to accept
responsibility for problems and to be more
realistic in solving them.
ACTIVIT
Y
Directions: Counseling
challenge!
List possible life situation
that can be addressed in
counseling according to its
different scope.