Elements and Performance Criteria
- Enable clients to identify concerns
- Enable clients to express their concerns freely
- Explore presenting issues of clients in order to establish their nature and depth, and give attention to the possibility of underlying issues
- Identify situations requiring immediate action and deal with promptly
- Enable clients to identify their primary concerns in relation to the presenting issues
- Enable clients to prioritise concerns to work on
- Assist clients to become aware of underlying issues where appropriate
- Identify and respond appropriately to strong emotional reactions
- Identify indicators of client issues requiring referral and report or refer appropriately, in line with organisation requirements
- Enable clients to work through concerns
- Identify and work with uncertainty and ambivalence of clients
- Support clients to experience and process difficulties
- Draw attention to and discuss parallels and links in clients' experience as appropriate
- Ensure that interventions have meaning for the immediate situation of the client
- Reflect on and consider interventions that are most likely to facilitate client understanding and actions
- Enable clients to identify and use known and previously unknown strengths
- Explore perceptions of clients' feelings by reflecting back, clarification and review with clients
- Assist clients to become aware of underlying issues where appropriate and begin to identify ways of dealing with them
- Acknowledge and work with changes in client's life as appropriate
- Monitor the counselling process
- Monitor and review the counselling process with clients to ensure it remains of value
- Work on threats and disruptions to the counselling process with clients
- Review and compare individual perceptions and client's perceptions of the process
- Work on any tension between clients' hopes and expectations and the reality of resource limitations
- Facilitate change at a pace the client can tolerate and assimilate
- Assess the appropriateness of ending the current counselling
- Acknowledge, value and work with individual uncertainty in the counselling relationship
- Apply ethical codes of conduct as required in addressing counselling dilemmas
- Bring the counselling process to an end
- Enable clients to identify when the process is approaching its conclusion
- Enable clients to identify, acknowledge and evaluate what is and is not changing, both in the counselling process and in their situation and understanding
- Utilise the ending process to enable clients to understand the nature and impact of earlier issues
- Utilise boundaries of the counselling relationship to assist the ending process
- Plan, structure and contract endings appropriately with clients
- Support clients' sense of autonomy during the ending process
- Inform clients about any opportunities for further support
- Identify unresolved issues and discuss further work if appropriate
- Complete appropriate documentation in line with organisation requirements