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Chapter 5: Common Concerns of Beginning Helpers

Chapter 5: Common Concerns of Beginning Helpers

Chapter 5 Lecture Notes

Common Concerns of Beginning Helpers

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Aim of the Chapter

Exploring Self-Doubts and Fears

Transference and Countertransference

Various Forms of Transference

Understanding and Working With Transference Therapeutically

Working With Transference in Group Counseling

Understanding and Dealing With Countertransference

Working With Clients Who Manifest Problematic Behavior

Attitude Questionnaire on Understanding and Working With Problematic Behavior Displayed by Clients

Handling Resistance With Understanding and Respect

Types of Clients Who May Pose a Challenge to You

Guidelines in Dealing Effectively With Ambivalence and Reluctance

Striving for Competence

Knowing When and How to Make Referrals

Keeping Current

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

• Effective helpers must become aware of clients’ transference and of their own countertransference. Neither of these factors is to be eliminated but is to be understood and attended to therapeutically.

• Countertransference refers to the unrealistic reactions therapists have toward clients that are likely to interfere with their objectivity. One way of becoming more aware of your potential for countertransference is by being willing to seek your own therapy. Another way is by focusing in your supervisory sessions on yourself and your reactions to clients.

• Defensive behavior and reluctance take many forms, and it is necessary to understand the ways in which they protect clients. Not all cautiousness or reluctance stems from stubbornness on the part of the client. Some can be caused, or at least contributed to, by the attitudes and behaviors of helpers.

• The goal in a helping relationship is not to eliminate defensive behavior but to understand what functions it serves and to use it as a focus for exploration.

• A useful way of looking at the concept of resistance is to view it through the lens of those who practice motivational interviewing (MI) where it is viewed as a normal part of the therapeutic process.

• Clients display many types of difficult behaviors, and some of them will evoke your own countertransference reactions. When this happens, you are now part of the problem. Instead of allowing your countertransference to interfere with the quality of the therapeutic work with your clients, take the opportunity to engage in personal work to effectively process your own unfinished business.

• Competence is both an ethical and a legal concept, and striving for competence is a lifelong journey.

• Ethics codes explicitly state that it is unethical to practice outside the boundaries of your competence. It is essential that you be able to make an accurate assessment of your knowledge and skills to determine your ability to effectively work with a particular client. You need to learn what clients you can best work with and to know when a referral is appropriate.

• Either as an intern or on your job, you may be asked to take on clients or to provide therapeutic strategies that are beyond the scope of your training and experience. Learn to be assertive in staying within your limits.

• Graduation from a training program does not signal the end of learning but merely the beginning of a process of professional growth and development. To maintain your effectiveness, continuing education is a necessity.

• One of the best ways of keeping on the cutting edge of one’s profession is to become involved in a peer-consultation group that affords professionals opportunities to share their concerns and learn from one another. Through peer groups, helpers can actively contribute to their own personal and professional development and that of their colleagues.

KEY CONCEPTS AND TERMS

Competence, the personal and professional abilities, knowledge, and skills needed to work with clients, is a process rather than something we achieve once and for all. It involves ethical and legal dimensions.

Countertransference involves the unrealistic reactions helpers have toward their clients that can interfere with their objectivity.

Empathy fatigue, a form of countertransference, can result from helpers being exposed to the pain that clients express, especially if counselors are not aware of their own unresolved personal issues.

Motivational interviewing (MI) is a humanistic, client-centered, directive counseling approach in which the therapeutic relationship is central to understanding the change process. Within the MI framework, reluctance to change is regarded as a normal and expected part of the therapeutic process.

Parallel process is a phenomenon that can occur in counseling, resulting in the need for helpers to temporarily put their reactions to clients aside and later process them in their own therapy, which can benefit both client and helper.

Passive-aggressive behavior involves behavioral patterns that clients have learned to use in defending themselves from hurt by dealing with people indirectly, often with sarcasm.

Political countertransference can be evoked by the helper’s reactions to highly charged political issues.

Political transference occurs when clients project onto helpers reactions to the political context that has shaped their experience.

Resistance pertains to behavior that keeps us from exploring personal conflicts or painful feelings. It is a process by which we attempt to protect ourselves from anxiety and defend ourselves from pain.

Transference is a process that often operates on the unconscious level and involves clients projecting onto a helper past feelings or attitudes they had toward significant people in their lives.

Copyright © 2019 Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2019 Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

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