Counselling and Psychotherapy Research

Running head: COUNSELLING SKILLS
COUNSELLING SKILLS
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

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Active Listening.
In counselling, active listening refers to the act of listening attentively to the client
besides internalising and interpreting everything they say (Robertson, 2005). People in
counselling sessions attend these sessions because they are suffering from certain issues in
their lives that they need some professional guidance solving. In that aspect, the role of a
counsellor becomes that of paramount importance and the first thing that they pay attention to
is what the clients have to say (Nelson-Jones, 2015). Active listening thus becomes the most
primary approach to a counselling session. Even though active listening is not exclusive to
therapy and finds use in a multitude of professions like business and medicine, its use in
therapy has been given a prime status because of the following reasons:
1. Active listening helps the therapist slowly and steadily progress into the cognitive
depths of the client thereby revealing potentially important information (Brownell,
1986).
2. Active listening reassures the client that the therapist has his full attention to the case
as well as the client and is willing to engage fully in the client’s problems in order to
solve those (Stickley & Freshwater, 2006).
3. Active listening builds trust, confidence and rapport between the therapist and the
client which makes the process of counselling extremely feasible for both parties
concerned (Brownell, 1986).
Theoretically, active listening has three primary aspects.
The first aspect is that of comprehending where the listened actively listens to what
the speaker is saying and analyses the statements without getting distracted by external
thoughts and diversions (Brownell, 1986).
The second aspect is that of retaining. It entails that the listener remembers everything
that the speaker has said and informed the listener about (Robertson, 2005). Retention is

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important as it enables proper interpretation and conveyance of the message. While some
people actively use their memory skills to enhance the process of retention, some also resort
to note taking.
The final aspect is that if responding. It refers to the act of providing verbal and nonverbal
feedback to the client indicating that the listener is not only hearing unemotionally, but also
understanding what the client is saying.
In addition to the aforementioned aspects, there are certain cues in between that aids
the process of active listening (Robertson, 2005). These cues can be both verbal and
nonverbal. Some verbal cues include filler statements like “Mm hmm”, “how strange”, “I
see” etc. some nonverbal cues include nodding, smiling, maintaining appropriate eye contact
and a lean forward posture.
Developing active listening skills is a very personal behavioural approach that we as
counsellors should put active effort into developing those skills (Nelson-Jones, 2015). An
appropriate body posture including proper gestures throughout the session indicates that we
have full attention towards the client. We cannot learn active listening but we can reinforce it
in ourselves. A good communication skill is backed by a high level of self-awareness. It is
advised that understanding our own personal style of communication, merging that with the
requirements of the counselling session and making minor modifications and adjustments
based on the specific client requirements helps build good and lasting impression with the
client (Brownell, 1986).
Reflecting/Paraphrasing
While listening forms the crux of therapeutic communication, an effective way to
emphasize the outcomes of active listening is through reflection and paraphrasing. It shows
that as therapist, one has not only identified what the client is saying but also what feelings
and emotions are associated with everything that the client speaks (Nelson-Jones, 2015).

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Reflecting/paraphrasing occurs when the counsellor restates what the client has just
said, but using fewer words and keeping the meaning unchanged (Carroll, 2010). Reflection
has been highly emphasised by Carl Rogers and in a contemporary psychotherapy context,
almost all counsellors and therapists place high value of reflecting. As stated “Reporting back
to the client what she has said is one way of indicating that we are listening carefully to her”
(Hough, 2006, p. 44).
One of the crucial backgrounding of reflection or paraphrasing is that the client
focuses on understanding more than on providing advice. The process requires that the
therapist can effectively segregate the aspects of feeling from the client’s speech through the
way he/she uses emotions in their description (Boud, Keogh & Walker, 2013). For instance –
Client: I don’t understand what came upon me. I was so good at everything in school
but here I am just average. Sometimes I feel ashamed to even go to the classes because I can’t
even respond to a single question.
Therapist: So you feel that your efforts in college are not as effective as they were in
school and therefore you are embarrassed to meet people and socialise while you are in
college, is that right?
Client: yeah.
We can see in the example that the entirety of the client’s feelings have been
summarised into the feeling of embarrassment by the therapist. Selectively focusing on words
like ‘ashamed’, gives a clear direction in which the interpretation should move in order to
effectively It is also important to remember that as a therapist, one should not assume that the
reflective interpretation is correct, therefore should always follow the reflection with a
question asking if the interpretation was correct or not (Nelson-Jones, 2015).
While engaging in reflection, there are a few behaviours that can be attempted to be followed.
They are as follows (Van Deurzen & Adams, 2016):

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1. Identify emotions – It is important to listen to the client not only for the content but
also for the feeling, As a therapist it important to remember that the speech is only
part of the whole message and almost in all of the cases the speech should be critically
analysed to identify instances of emotional connection with the content that the
speaker is saying.
2. Identify idiosyncratic words – clients in therapeutic communication often use certain
sets of keywords in order to describe their feelings. These words may not be overt but
it becomes the job of the therapist to identify those overt words and analyse the
feelings from them. These words also indicate towards a general repertoire of ‘feeling
words’ that the client resorts to in order to describe their feelings.
3. Timing responses – It is also crucial to time the responses well. It is not required that
every comment of the speaker is responded to, nor is it advised to take very long
pauses without responding. Response is an effective indicator of communication.
Therefore, in cases where reflective responding is not possible, the therapist should fil
those gaps with the verbal cues like ‘I see’, ‘I understand’ etc.
4. Restating feelings – As the communication progresses, the client indicates a variety of
feelings or emotions that they identify the events or situations with. Those feelings
may be covert in nature, which is why it is important to provide a general restatement
of the feeling. Restating the client’s experiences in one’s own words also indicate that
the client’s concerns are getting due importance from the therapist, thereby helping
building rapport.
Developing good reflection skills can help build a deeper bond with the client
(Nelson-Jones, 2015). That entails that there are certain requirements of good reflection that
we must follow to enhance our skills. The first step would be to identify the difference
between a reflective issue and a non-reflective issue. Not all that the client is stating requires

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a restatement, thus it becomes important to know what to reflect and when (Rouse,
Armstrong & McLeod, 2015). Prolonged pauses should be discouraged and repeated
restatements makes the session very mechanical. Waiting for the client’s approval of the
reflection before proceeding, should be the final step (Boud, Keogh & Walker, 2013).
Questioning
Questioning in counselling refers to asking questions and clarifications from the client
regarding an issue or a topic that has come up and interested the counsellor (Hough, 2006). It
is not always possible to gather all forms of information from the client alone, simply be
relying on their speech. The skill of questioning becomes an important toolkit in those
aspects to develop clarification of the understood issues (Page & Wosket, 2013). Questioning
can not only gain clarification regarding any ambiguity in client speech, but can also help
opening up new areas for discussion. However, just like any other skill, questioning too
should not be overused or underused. Underusing questioning can lead to the client getting
conscious of their speech and might get confused regarding whether the counsellor is
understanding anything they are saying. Similarly, overuse of questioning can lead to the
clients feeling threatened and identifying the session as a potential interrogation (Lang,
1999)). In all respects, there should be a balance between the counsellor and the client, and
over/under use of questioning can distort that balance and turn the situation uncomfortable or
hostile for the client (Lindon & Lindon, 2007).
There are two different types of questioning that we as therapists should be aware of,
namely closed and open questioning (Nelson-Jones, 2015).
Closed questioning is concerned with asking questions that can be answered with
minimal responses like a yes/no question (Hough, 2006). These questions can help the
counsellor obtain very specific information. Such questions include “is that your hat?”, “Do
you enjoy your job?”, or “Are you sad with the behaviour?” etc.

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In contrast, open questioning does not follow any strict regulation and is mostly used
to ask questions that cannot be answered in one word, but rather require elaboration
(Rautalinko, 2013). Most open questions begin with what, why or how. These questions are
asked to obtain detailed information on a topic or a subject, especially something that the
counsellor feels is important but was not given due spotlight by the client. Some examples of
open questions include “Why do you think so?”, “Could you tell me what made you change
your mind?” etc.
In therapy, a well-developed questioning skill is a very important instrument. There
are several steps that can help us develop our questioning skills. First of all, we must listen to
the client well and try to figure out what the main problem is that the client is facing.
Afterwards, we must ask questions pertaining to the issue, like if there are any specific
feelings or emotions attached with this issue, if yes why and what are those. Moreover, the
questions should not be of a generic type but should be more divergent in nature. We should
also take care of not asking too many closed questions. Hough (2006, pp. 49-52) highlights
that apart from simply open and closed ended questions, there are certain sub-variations that
can be considered important while questioning. Asking leading questions and self-reflective
rhetorical questions help the client engage more cognitively with his/her own problems.
Besides, there are probing questions that can be asked to gather further information on a same
topic from the client, as well as focussed questions that can redirect the client to look at one
particular aspect of the problem critically (Hough, 2006, p. 51). Incorporating these aspects
into one’s style of counselling can significantly improve the counsellor’s skill set.

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References
Boud, D., Keogh, R., & Walker, D. (2013). Reflection: Turning experience into learning.
Routledge.
Brownell, J. (1986). Building active listening skills. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Carroll, M. (2010). Levels of reflection: On learning reflection. Psychotherapy in
Australia, 16(2), 24.
Culley, S., & Bond, T. (2011). Integrative counselling skills in action.
Hough, M. (2006). Counselling skills and theory. Hodder Arnold.
Lang, P. (1999). Counselling, counselling skills and encouraging pupils to talk: Clarifying
and addressing confusion. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 27(1), 23-33.
Lindon, J., & Lindon, L. (2007). Mastering counselling skills. Macmillan International
Higher Education.
Nelson-Jones, R. (2015). Basic counselling skills: a helper's manual. Sage.
Page, S., & Wosket, V. (2013). Supervising the counsellor: A cyclical model. Routledge.
Rautalinko, E. (2013). Reflective listening and open-ended questions in counselling:
Preferences moderated by social skills and cognitive ability. Counselling and
Psychotherapy Research, 13(1), 24-31.
Robertson, K. (2005). Active listening: more than just paying attention. Australian family
physician, 34(12), 1053.
Rouse, A., Armstrong, J., & McLeod, J. (2015). Enabling connections: Counsellor creativity
and therapeutic practice. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 15(3), 171-179.
Stickley, T., & Freshwater, D. (2006). The art of listening in the therapeutic
relationship. Mental health practice, 9(5).
Van Deurzen, E., & Adams, M. (2016). Skills in existential counselling & psychotherapy.
Sage.

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