Five steps in counselling session

In the counselling room, there are two people, sometimes it can be more than two people, which we call group counselling session. The clients bring in their stories to speak to the psychotherapists.  The psychotherapists guide the clients through five steps to talk over their issues and while psychotherapists use various micro counselling skills to stimulate the clients to open up their darkness.

• Open the session.

Open the session is to facilitate the session. To open the door, you need a key to do that, so to open the darkness of someone’s life, it needs someone trained to ignite the session to set the pace.

The highly effective session is achieved through the establishment of building rapport. The psychotherapists welcome the clients and help the clients become custom to the new environment. In this way, it helps the clients feel welcomed, thus settles in that space.  By doing so the psychotherapists create a safe, comfortable and secure environment so that the clients freely express themselves.

The psychotherapists must assure the client's confidentiality of the information the clients are about to share as it’s privileged information.

• Hearing the story.

The clients are asked to speak the reason for being there while the counsellors are attentively hearing their stories.  The counsellors attend, question and reflect on their stories thus gathers all the information presented to draw out their stories, worries, troubles which will help them set their platform for change.  

The counsellors apply various counselling micro-skills to help clients profoundly express themselves to empty themselves.  When all has been released to open space, the clients feel relief about it as someone has heard their stories.

• Prioritizing primary concerns.

After the information is gathered, the psychotherapists and the clients collaboratively assess and agree on the main issues from the client’s stories.

When the main issues are identified and established, now the psychotherapists and the clients categorize them into the order of importance so that both are focused and work towards the changes.

• Working on change.

The psychotherapists and clients collaboratively work on ways to bring about changes to the main issues that have emerged from the stories.

Here, psychotherapists and clients develop action plans which the clients can work on to bring about change in his or her life. The small steps they take contributes to a bigger scale of change.

The clients must work on the plans that have been drawn out so that they can experience the changes in their life.

• Close the session.

Before allowing the clients to re-enter the outside world, the clients may feel vulnerable after sharing their dark side, so to help them feel secure, the psychotherapist ties together the overall session and provide support information for the next step.