Counseling and Helping Relationships
What this domain tests
Theory-specific techniques, the working alliance, and microskills, with items that ask you to identify the intervention or the counselor's response from a transcript.
Core approaches
- Person-centered (Rogers): congruence, unconditional positive regard, empathic understanding, plus psychological contact and client incongruence.
- Psychodynamic: transference, countertransference, resistance, defense mechanisms.
- Adlerian: social interest, inferiority and striving, lifestyle, encouragement.
- CBT (Beck): cognitive triad, automatic thoughts, distortions, Socratic questioning, behavioral experiments. REBT (Ellis): ABCDEF and "must" beliefs.
- Behavioral: Wolpe's systematic desensitization, exposure and flooding, reinforcement schedules, shaping, modeling.
- Gestalt (Perls): here-and-now, empty chair, awareness experiments. Reality therapy (Glasser): basic needs and WDEP. Solution-focused (de Shazer, Berg): miracle question, exceptions, scaling. Narrative (White): externalization, reauthoring.
- Motivational interviewing (Miller & Rollnick): OARS (open questions, affirmations, reflections, summaries) and four processes: engaging, focusing, evoking, planning. Stages of change (Prochaska & DiClemente): precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance. DBT (Linehan): mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, interpersonal effectiveness.
Worked example
Client: "I bombed one presentation, so I'm a total failure." Reasoning: label the distortion (overgeneralization and labeling), respond with a reflection first to hold the alliance, then use Socratic questioning ("What evidence supports and contradicts that?") and a behavioral experiment, rather than disputing or reassuring.
Traps that cost marks
- Confusing reflection with interpretation.
- Giving advice before building alliance.
- Treating MI as persuasion or psychoeducation.
- Assuming change stages are strictly linear and never recycled.