Counseling and Helping Relationships
Counseling and Helping Relationships is the largest applied domain: theory, microskills, the working alliance, conceptualization, and ethical management of the relationship. Items often give a client statement and ask for the best counselor response, so technique precision and timing matter more than theory name-dropping.
Know cold
- Person-centered (Rogers): unconditional positive regard, empathy, congruence; reflection over interpretation.
- REBT (Ellis): ABCDE - activating event, belief, consequence, dispute, effective new belief; targets musturbatory shoulds.
- CBT (Beck): collaborative empiricism, cognitive restructuring, behavioral experiments; less directive than REBT.
- Solution-focused (de Shazer/Berg): miracle question, scaling, exception questions.
- Narrative (White/Epston): externalization, reauthoring, unique outcomes.
- Gestalt (Perls): empty chair, here-and-now awareness.
- Reality therapy (Glasser): choice theory; WDEP (wants, doing, evaluation, planning).
- Microskills: open questions, paraphrase, reflection of feeling, summarization, confrontation (pointing out discrepancy, not attacking), immediacy.
Worked example
Client: I am worthless; nobody would miss me. Responding with You are not worthless - you just got a promotion is reassurance and closes exploration. A reflection - You are feeling like you do not matter to anyone right now - stays with the affect and invites elaboration. Given the possible safety issue, the counselor also conducts a suicide risk assessment rather than treating the statement as cognitive distortion alone.
Traps
- Paraphrase (content) mistaken for reflection of feeling.
- Why questions that sound accusatory.
- Premature interpretation or advice before alliance.
- Countertransference acted out as boundary drift; transference misread as resistance.