Ideas and Tools for Brief Counseling

Brief counseling is as much attitude as it is technique. The counselor who attempts to use time wisely and well must have a good sense of where to go with the material a client offers. The suggestions offered in this book spring mostly from solution-focused and narrative approaches to counseling, but they are only useful if you pay close attention to your relationship with a client. As most research shows, it is the way you collaborate with your client that does the work. Although the ideas and tools in this book are drawn from what might be considered a postmodern view, you do not have to abandon the rich discoveries counselors and therapists have made during the profession's first century. Brief counseling is not indicated for all people in all situations, but you will find that many of the brief counseling concepts and strategies can enhance your current practice. This book offers a balance between theory and technique, and it is written so that you can take what you find useful and leave the rest on these pages. Chapter 1, "History of Brief Counseling: The Fly Bottle," offers the rationale for using a brief approach to counseling. Many practitioners in the helping professions are beginning to question the old notions of the mechanistic and medical models that treat clients as defective machines or as pathological protoplasm. These counselors are now attempting to understand the process of change itself and are trying to find ways to tap the natural resources that clients possess. The older humanistic notions of human potential and growth are being vindicated by these new approaches to helping. Today's interveners are reinventing intervention. Instead of engaging in the traditionally intensive process of long-term psychotherapy, counselors are increasingly involved in the minimalist and "just-in-time" process of brief therapy. Their efforts are aimed at building up the client's strengths and resources rather than at remediating the client's problems and dysfunctions. Although most books on brief counseling and therapy emphasize their differences from traditional approaches, we offer a bridge between the past and the future. The postmodern era challenges us to reconsider our beliefs and to do something different than we have done before. Chapter 2, "Facilitating Change: The One Constant," addresses how you can help clients change unproductive ways of viewing the world so that they can find new, successful strategies. Instead of only assisting clients in finding solutions, you can also help clients in achieving a sense of resolution by deconstructing their representations. You can consider clients' "problems" as their "stuck" or rigidified representations of experience that are in need of change. Through counseling, your client becomes a newly resolute person. Some important clinical issues discussed in this chapter are the death of resistance, the concept of utilization, and clients' lives as metaphors or stories. Chapter 3, "The Centrality of the Counseling Relationship: No Magic Tricks," points out that any technique will fail unless you have established a relationship with your client. In this chapter, we discuss the various common factors found by many researchers to be indispensable to the counseling process. Such research inevitably leads back to Carl Rogers, who articulated the core conditions for a successful counseling relationship. We discuss the concepts of empathy and acknowledgment and the LUV triangle--listening, understanding, and validating the client's perspective. We also describe Bill O'Hanlon's technique, "Carl Rogers with a Twist," which is a way of adding possibility statements to our reflections of client concerns. Chapter 4, "Helping Clients Frame Goals: The Pull of the Future," suggests that it is teleology--not etiology--that is the main concern of brief counselors. You start your counseling work with a view to the future rather than to the past. OnPresbury, Jack H. is the author of 'Ideas and Tools for Brief Counseling', published 2001 under ISBN 9780130799852 and ISBN 0130799858.