Major Elements of Counseling are given below:
Elements
1. Counselling involves two individuals—one seeking help and the other, a professionally trained person who can help the first.
2. There should be a relationship of mutual respect between the two individuals. The counsellor should be friendly and cooperative and the counsellee should have trust and confidence in the counsellor.
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3. The aim of counselling is to help a student to form a decision, make a choice or find a direction at some important fork in the road such as that of planning a life career, a programme in college or university, or a campaign to obtain employment.
4. It helps the counselee acquire independence and develop a sense of responsibility. It helps him explore and fully utilise his potentialities and actualise himself.
5. It is more than advice-giving. Progress comes through the thinking that a person with a problem does for himself rather than through solutions suggested by the counsellors.
6. It involves something more than the solution to an immediate problem. Its function is to produce changes in the individual that will enable him to extricate himself from his immediate difficulties.
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7. It concerns itself with attitudes as well as action.
8. Emotional rather than purely intellectual attitudes are the raw material of the counselling process. Information and intellectual understanding have their place in the counselling process. But it is the emotionalised feelings which are most important.
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Counselling has proved to be very useful wherever the development of an individual student is cared for. It helps an individual to know himself better, gives him confidence, encourages his self-defectiveness and provides him a vision.
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The main objective of counselling is to bring about a voluntary change in the client. For this purpose, the counsellor provides facilities to help achieve the desired change or make the suitable choice.
The client alone is responsible for the decisions or the choices he make, though the counsellor may assist in this process by his warmth and understanding relationship.
Counselling and Psychotherapy:
Counselling and psychotherapy are different. Although the psychotherapist uses counselling as one of the techniques of treatment, psychotherapy is concerned mostly with individuals whose behaviours are neurotic.
It deals with repressed individuals but counselling is concerned mostly with normal anxieties. Psychotherapy operates in a medical setting whereas counselling operates in an educational setting.
Psychotherapist uses play therapy, psychodrama, socio-drama, etc. as techniques; in counselling, such techniques are used as can be employed in educational institutions, industrial establishments etc.
Psychotherapy is deeper in scope whereas counselling is broader in scope. A counsellor cannot be a psychotherapist; a psychotherapist can be a counsellor, being better and specially qualified.
