Lecture
At this stage, the client sequentially implements the plan for solving the problem. The counselor helps the client build activity toward achieving the set goals, taking into account circumstances, time, and emotional costs, and also helps the client cope with possible partial setbacks. The counselor can provide adequate psychotechnical support for developing new behavioral models using various selected means (role-playing games, "rehearsal" of actions, autogenic training, attending a psychological support group, etc.).
One of the techniques for providing help at this stage may be the provision of information. The counselor expresses their opinion and answers the client's questions. Providing information in counseling is sometimes very important, since clients often ask the counselor all sorts of questions. Particularly significant are questions behind which lies the client's anxiety about their future.
At this stage, a procedure called “clarifying details” may be used, which helps explain to the client the minor but essential particulars connected with carrying out the practical methods for achieving the set goals that were jointly worked out by the psychologist-counselor and the client. In order to make sure that the client has not only understood correctly but also knows well what to do and how to put the recommendations received into practice, the psychologist-counselor asks the client questions and, based on their answers, determines whether the client's understanding of what is being discussed is correct. If something in the client's understanding of the issues discussed does not entirely satisfy the psychologist-counselor, they offer the client additional clarification of their thoughts, trying to make it as concrete and practically oriented as possible.
When giving the client recommendations for forming a new behavioral model that promotes successful achievement of the set goals, the counselor should adhere to a number of rules.
1. When formulating recommendations for the practical solution of the client's problem, it is desirable to offer them not just one single method but several, if possible different, methods. This is because different ways of solving the same problem require meeting different conditions and performing different actions, and some of them may turn out to be unavailable to the client. For example, some behavioral methods will require the client to have exceptional willpower and a number of other personal qualities, which may be relatively poorly developed in them. Other methods, for instance, presuppose having a fairly large amount of free time, which the client may in fact not have.
The various methods offered to the client for solving their problem must take into account the real conditions of their life, their capabilities, and their individual psychological characteristics.
2. In order to make it easier for the client to choose a method of solution, the psychologist-counselor should offer them well-reasoned personal assessments of the effectiveness of different behavioral methods, revealing to the client their positive and negative sides.
3. The client must be given the opportunity to independently choose the behavioral method that they consider most suitable for themselves. No one except the client themselves can fully know their personal characteristics and living conditions, and therefore no one except the client can make the optimal decision.
4. It is very important to explain to the client effective means of independently monitoring the success of the practical actions being undertaken to solve the problem. The client should form an understanding of how they can practically monitor themselves, and by what signs they will judge that their behavior is correct and that the actions being undertaken are actually producing a positive result.
5. It is important to give the client the opportunity to receive additional information and recommendations from the psychologist-counselor already in the process of practically solving the problem.
Techniques and methods aimed at solving various special tasks related to changing and correcting the client's position play a major role in the counseling process. The counselor may prescribe homework assignments with clear instructions on what and how the client should do.
A counselor's mastery of such techniques and methods is largely determined by the professional's experience and familiarity with various theoretical works on psychotherapy and counseling, as well as by their professional communication with colleagues.
Professional familiarity with a broad range of psychotechniques is a criterion of a counselor's mastery and professional competence. They undoubtedly enrich the possibilities of psychological help.
+At this stage of psychological counseling, psychocorrective intervention may be provided. Different schools of psychotherapy emphasize the importance of different factors in providing psychocorrective intervention. Thus, in psychoanalysis the leading role in this is given to catharsis and the restructuring of personality structures, in Viktor Frankl's logotherapy – to the acquisition of meaning in life, and so on. (You will become acquainted with various theories of counseling and various models of psychocorrection in Section 4.)
Short-term counseling is aimed at providing help in the most economical, expedient way; it seeks to help the client change their situation in some way, but it does not strive for any significant results and relies, above all, on how ready the client themselves is for change.
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