Importance of Rapport and Counselling Relationship

Counselling, having many different interpretations, can be taken to mean different things to different people, in different times and in different cultures. In keeping with a somewhat linguistically trusted understanding of the very word, according to the Oxford Dictionary, as a noun, counsel refers to advice; and as a verb, counselling refers to the act of giving advice. Yet, this synonymity between counsel and advice, is far from what people holding the profession of the aforementioned would consider accurate. In fact, and more often than not, professional counsellors would keep their practice and reputation as counsellors, far from the idea of advice giving. Instead, associations with concepts of “help” and “growth” in areas of the self and one’s perspective are much preferred by counsellors time and time again. And, despite the varied phraseology by different practicing counsellors, the concepts of “help” and “growth” stay central, where the matter of difference may simply lie in nothing more than semantics. Hence, the aim of this paper is to explore and, as far as possible, discuss a working definition of what counselling is, and how its nature is made up of counsellor-client dynamics in the form of a therapeutic relationship and empathic communication, amongst other factors.

Counselling

Attempting to define what counselling is can be both difficult and fascinating. Difficult, because there has been, and still is no single agreed upon definition. As mentioned in the introduction to this paper, counselling means a different thing to different people during different times; and adding on, with different expectations to deal with different issues with different approaches. In short, how one views and chooses to define counsellin...

... middle of paper ...

...e Publications.

Rogers, C. R. (1961). On becoming a person: a therapist's view of psychotherapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Seeman, J. Counselor judgments of therapeutic process and outcome. In Rogers, C. R., and R.F. Dymonds, (Eds.) Psychotherapy and personality change. University of Chicago Press, 1954, Chap. 7.

Thorne, B. (1992) Carl Rogers, London: Sage.

Wallis, J. H. (1973). Personal counselling: an introduction to relationship therapy. London: Allen and Unwin.

What is Counseling?. (2014). American Counseling Association Website. Retrieved from http://www.counseling.org/learn-about-counseling/what-is-counseling/overview

Williams, K. (1973). The school counsellor. London: Methuen, [Distributed in the U.S.A. by Harper & Row, Barnes & Noble Import Division.

Yeo, Anthony. (1993). Counselling: a problem-solving approach. Singapore: Armour Publishing Pte Ltd.