Different Types of Counseling Techniques and How to Use Them

If you are into counseling and helping people get through their problems, then you should know that there are various counseling techniques used depending on a certain situation. Of course, you will first have to know the basics such as how to establish rapport with your client, how to conduct yourself during a counseling session and how to ask questions so that you will get the information that you want. Aside from mastering these techniques to help make your client comfortable with you, you should also know how to guide them into finding a solution for their problem. The basics of counseling will only teach an overview of these techniques and you will have to take another class that specifically teaches these techniques if you want to know more about these and how to use them in counseling sessions.

One of the more common approaches that are being used is psychoanalytic psychotherapy. This type of therapy focuses on increasing self-understanding and deepening one’s insight on the emotions and conflicts that they are experiencing. This is done by exploring the unconscious thoughts and feelings of a person and relates this to underlying emotional conflicts, interpret defensive mechanisms and how these are also related to one’s self esteem.

Another type of therapy that is being used by counselors is the Gestalt Therapy which involves determining what happened during a client’s childhood and how these events have interrupted the normal developmental process. Uncovering these events may go a long way towards helping the person understand and prevent it from holding him back from what he wants to do with his life. Person centered counseling is another way of providing counsel to clients and it relies on the belief that everyone has the capability to overcome their problems given the right set of conditions. With this belief, the counselor only facilitates the healing process and it is ultimately the person himself who does the curing.

Cognitive behavior therapy is another popular method that is commonly used to treat people with mental health problems like depression, post traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. This approach aims to solve dysfunctional behavior and emotion by using a goal-oriented and systematic approach. It basically says that the person’s interpretation of events, rather than the event itself, causes the negative emotional and behavioral consequences; and the goal of this technique is to change the way how a person interprets a certain event.

Knowing how to do these counseling techniques is not enough. You should first know the theory behind them so that you may know when to use them and how to use them more efficiently. In order to do this, you may need to take special classes that teach these techniques of counseling. Online classes like http://www.lifestylelearningdirect.com offers such a class which will explain all the different techniques, the reason behind them and which one is best to use in a certain situation. Being a distance education, this class is not hard to take and you can fix your schedule in such a way that you will only be studying during your free time.