The Aims Of Counselling:

Counselling aims to build a rapport with the client based on trust, empathy, active listening, professional knowledge, conduct, and boundaries. It is the practice of absorbing information while being quietly present and analysing the interaction for issues that might lie under the surface of what's said. Then, with a thorough assessment, build a program to target the relevant issues, and perhaps bring in other professionals for a complete service.

As a counsellor, you are expected to be open and upfront regarding your intentions for the work you do, what you intend to achieve, and the professional ethics and standards you follow. This includes the practice of confidentiality between client and practitioner and its limits, e.g., risk of self-harm or harm to another.

Counselling is an intervention in a client’s life to explore possibilities of self-improvement and encourage and improve their circumstances. It is balancing a partnership with a client, that’s not them and us, but rather working together to help them through their issues using agreed-upon techniques to find solutions and build new cognitive processes.

We do not fix! As professionals, we guide and support the client’s progression of resolving issues, overcoming personal obstacles and confidence building, so that they can heal and have a life-long toolkit to use without a counsellor present. Counselling equips a client to be in a situation without losing control when faced with triggers that cause an unsettling mindset.

Three Basic Narrative Practices can be applied in trauma support

1. Telling the Story: In this way, the client can learn about themselves through the story. By getting a client to write a life story, they themselves will see how their thoughts and behavioural patterns developed from the events and how their social background and culture may have caused negative patterns that lead them into situations where they put themselves further at risk.

However, the concept is to teach them, not to blame them. To help them learn to use their own skills, empower them to be the experts on their lives, and guide them to live without being a victim of circumstance.

‘Narrative helps clients begin to explain and maintain what is reality, circumstance, and experience. But, of course, it’s all subjective, depending on their backgrounds and experiences. To some, it might be just a blip to another it is a trauma, as we all experience events through different perspectives’.

Some will construct a reality to deal with traumatic events; this helps them cope and move forward. Narrative therapy enables them to see the trauma as sequences of events and begin to separate the person so that a counsellor can work with them to construct a new reality that is defined by everyday norms that are external and not internal.

The counsellor is only party to the narrative told by the client; from there, he, as a professional, can highlight certain inconsistencies, which when opened up, might lead to deeper issues. These might highlight patterns of behaviour for the client to see themselves. Using simple techniques like listening, being present, and helping the client create a timeline, are ways of working the story, bringing out the client's skills and abilities for them to find answers and techniques to separate the trauma from the individual effectively.

2. Externalisation: a counselling process could start with storytelling, but then move onwards to Externalisation. Using this technique allows the client to see themselves from another perspective using their own skills to create a narrative.

It’s all about changing the individual's mindset to see themselves differently, very much like employing certain cbt methods to alter the initial thought or behaviour towards an incident. If you can remove the event, they might start to realise they are not a victim, but have been subject to external issues that arose from acting in a certain way. Due to the way society acts, we create labels. Thus the person becomes the label if it’s said enough times. Remove that stigma, make them see it's the reaction to a trigger, then change the process, and the person and event are separate. They can be further worked through to allow the client to develop and create ways to handle triggers and build new value and belief systems, creating meaning and purpose for the client.

By the client developing by understanding how they formed poor behaviours through external influences and events, they become empowered, which with any Narrative technique is the end goal.

3. Outcomes Technique can be adopted to allow a client to seek the viewpoint from another perspective. It's not about finding the truth, for what is the right truth? It's all a point of view. But rather give the client the opportunity through narrative to review their story from a different point of view and then assess how different the issues really are when telling the story.

For a counsellor working with someone who has been affected by a traumatic incident, taking this point of view to separate them from the event can work well, rather than keeping them as the first person. It acts as a method in which you can effect externalisation of the event. This allows trauma to be discussed in the third person thus reducing the power it has on the client and helps them create narratives that promote a better reality.

As a counsellor, we need to know what other professional services are available to us so that when we are met with a client that goes beyond our learning and abilities, we have the sense and professionalism to refer the client to the right professional. For example, it might be, as in the case of a Rehab, that the counsellor and psychologist/specialist work in conjunction, and have the permission of the client to share information.

Other scenarios might include a counsellor's presence at a police station or accident site to assist where survivors are seen to by professionals to attend and assess the extent of trauma. Again, the counsellor plays a more empathic role, though they will look to consider signs of further psychological trauma that might lead to self-harm.

Often in certain situations where a person has been traumatised, the need for referral comes if they are unable to self-care, and signs show they lack the cognitive ability to handle their lives, or perhaps due to the trauma, are too vulnerable.

Especially here in South Africa, where women living with violent partners ‘might' have been raped, a counsellor might deem it necessary that they should not return to the location. Or, for them to have the right therapy to help all concerned with the effects of the trauma and make informed decisions.

As a counsellor, I always look to listen and understand the individual's concerns and seek to read between the lines for further unresolved matters that might be nearer the root of the patient's problems. That might include mental health matters and whether there is a need for other Specialists and Social workers.

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