What Counselling Really Is (and Isn't)

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For many people, hearing the words counselling sets off all sorts of thoughts and questions. Some imagine it is simply being lectured at; some think it is just an expensive listening service; some picture it as nothing more than a serving of chicken soup for the soul.

What is counselling? Counselling is a science of listening

"The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them " – Ralph Nichols

The heart of counselling work is using Active Listening to help the client feel and re-experience, within the counselling process, those experiences that have been denied (Denied Experience). Many clients accumulate a great deal of stress in their working environment, and a good deal of emotion surfaces in their relationships. To a degree, those emotions and that stress are signals — signals carried through bodily reactions, feelings, thoughts and behaviour to deliver a message to the client, reminding them that they may need rest, reminding them to pay some attention to their own inner needs. Yet those emotions and that stress are sometimes denied — perhaps because expressing emotion is seen as a petulant performance; perhaps because, as an adult, one feels one ought to face things with strength. And so, when those experiences are denied again and again, the body and mind stay out of alignment for the long term, far too much energy is spent, and over time this affects emotions, relationships, the quality of one's work, and even physical health. A professionally trained counselling practitioner is able to use empathy (Empathy) to understand the client's emotions, and even those repressed feelings (Repressed emotions), and so truly listen. We believe psychological services can provide a non-judgemental atmosphere, helping you to express and accept those feelings that even you find hard to accept. We believe this allows you to put your inner world in order, to readjust your goals and your life, to develop your potential, and to reach self-actualisation (Self-Actualization).

Counselling work is the art of relationship

A counsellor's expertise rests not only on the ability to counsel, but even more on how the counsellor builds the counselling relationship with the client. To build that relationship, a counsellor must draw on an attitude of congruence (Congruence) to establish a relationship of mutual trust (Rapport). Being genuinely congruent is by no means just deploying the techniques of empathy. Ordinary empathy techniques can indeed make a client feel the counsellor's care within a short time, but as time goes on, without a genuine attitude of stepping into the other person's world, the client will sense it; every counsellor must hold a genuine attitude of care towards the client.

Stepping into the client's world and building a relationship from there sometimes brushes against the counsellor's own personal issues (Personal Issue); if the counsellor pays no heed to those personal issues, there is a chance they will subconsciously misjudge the problem the client is facing, failing to separate the counsellor's own personal issue from the problem the client is actually facing. Take a common example: a counselling practitioner grows up in an environment where they are frequently criticised by their parents, and without ever attending to this experience they carry many complicated feelings towards "parents," so that, over time, criticism leaves them at a loss as to how to respond. In the counselling process, when they hear the client being criticised by others, having paid no heed to their own inner history they overreact, even showing more anxiety and grief than the client; and when they hear the client mention their parents, they subconsciously express an attitude of anger, when in fact the client actually feels something quite different towards their parents. A professional counsellor may also undergo personal counselling or supervision and, besides separating their own issues from the client's, must keep examining themselves. Most importantly, the counsellor too learns self-care within the counselling process, so that, facing a client with the same issue as their own, they can still offer care with genuine congruence.

"Development is not about learning how to counsel but about becoming the kind of person who can counsel."

Counselling is more than a chat

Do you know the difference between counselling and a chat? A chat is two or more people working together to deal with the problems of two people; counselling is two people working together to deal with the problem of one person. From this it is clear that professional training matters greatly in counselling work. One important principle in counselling is "regard for society and for the rights of the case," and as a professional counselling practitioner, one needs to ensure that every case receives a professional service. So we need to keep equipping ourselves, learning diverse methods and techniques, such as mindful contemplation (Mindfulness) and Psychological Assessment, while also continually learning the counselling domains that belong to different groups, such as Gerontological Counselling, School Counselling and so on.

Different counselling psychologists develop and broaden their own service scope (Service Scope) to ensure clients can receive a professional service. We hope to apply techniques and theories from many angles, such as Psychodrama and Art, to help you feel your own experience more fully, rather than using only simple, ordinary counselling techniques.

Counselling work cannot be technique alone

There are many service programmes that train counselling volunteers, such as suicide-prevention hotlines, crisis hotlines and emotional-support hotlines. Most course content covers counselling techniques and basic theory; in my own past work coordinating online support services and prevention hotlines, I would also arrange for tutors to teach some counselling theory and therapies, for example Client-centered Therapy and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. While arranging the curriculum and lesson plans, some students asked me why I taught not only counselling techniques but also counselling theory.

To me, as a professional counselling practitioner, counselling work cannot be the application of technique alone. Learning counselling theory helps us understand the client's situation and assess the process (Process) and stage (Stage) of the client's counselling; if a counsellor has only the knowledge of counselling techniques but lacks an understanding of counselling theory, the counselling process will stay on the surface, because the counsellor has no ability to observe the client's real needs and the underlying issue (Underlying Issue). The counselling work of a counselling psychologist is, in fact, professionally grounded in an understanding of psychology that allows them to grasp the client's situation on a theoretical level, to see clearly what help the client needs and what inner resources they need to draw on to face the problem. Take, for instance, a client facing unemployment in midlife: a counsellor lacking counselling theory might use counselling techniques such as questioning and active listening to understand the client's emotions and story, but how to take those elements and turn them into conceptualisation (Conceptualization), and how to apply therapeutic methods to help, comes down to one's understanding and practical command of psychology and counselling theory. Facing a client like this, a counselling psychologist can use the theory of psychosocial development (Psychosocial Development) to understand that people entering midlife may face a midlife crisis; in the theory, those entering midlife may face a "can't reach high, won't settle low" situation, lacking the ability to learn new skills for society and having reached a plateau in their personal career. The counsellor will understand how to transform such a situation, helping the client uncover inner resources — saying, for example, that with their social experience the client can, through their own seasoned history, re-enter work that suits them, even educate the next generation and contribute to social progress, drawing out the client's generativity (Generativity). We hope to bring psychological knowledge into counselling work, to discern the problem you are facing and the resources for your growth.

Counselling helps you get to know the past you

In the counselling process, I often ask the client about the details of the inner experience they are facing in the moment, including emotion (Affection/Emotion), behaviour (Behavior) and cognition (Cognition), then invite the client to recall the same or similar experiences from the past. In this process of exploring early experience (Early experience/Early recollection), the client is able, through understanding their past self, to see clearly why certain fixed patterns (Pattern) and coping mechanisms (Coping Mechanism) came about, and from there to work on those connections (Connection) that aid the client's change.

Often, the reason a person feels inwardly tangled about certain things, even feels pain for no apparent reason — longing to change yet powerless to do so — lies in the way past experiences have shaped some of our thought patterns and reactions. Some can be trauma (Trauma); some can be repressed memory (Repressed memory). Connecting with past experience can help the client understand their own choices, and the counsellor, through re-education (Re-education/Psychoeducation), can then help them change.

For example, a case feels they find it hard to form intimate relationships and is deeply afraid of losing them; a counsellor with professional counselling training can recognise that the case holds a negative belief and a private logic (Private Logic) about intimate relationships, and by asking about the case's past experiences discovers that the case once witnessed their parents' separation and came to feel incapable of sustaining a relationship — compounded by the fact that, at the time, the parents handling the divorce gave the case no appropriate care — which left them without a sense of security in intimate relationships. We hope the case can, through psychological services, gain insight into the cause of the problem and choose a new direction in which to address it.

Counselling is not only about pouring out pain — happy things can be drawn out too

Someone once asked me: "Does going for counselling mean I have a mental illness? Do I need to see a doctor?" I think this idea is quite mistaken. Counselling work is sometimes not only about dealing with psychological problems; even sharing the everyday parts of life and the things that make you happy can help you understand yourself and cultivate a healthy state of mind.

In the counselling process, I think the details of life that make you happy are all the more worth sharing, because tucked within them sometimes lie latent resources in your inner world, resources that can help you understand yourself and reveal a better you.