Person-Centered Counseling



Person-Centered Counseling

Describe the three “core conditions” in person centered counseling and discuss them in regards to their importance in the counseling process and the development of the conditions within your role as counselor.

Part of providing good person centered counseling for people involves getting to know the person. Gibson (1991) recognized that by finding out about a person's life history, it could be used in care-planning and put into practice with reminiscence therapy. May et al (2009) say that life story can often shed light on situations helping others to understand why a person is behaving or reacting to events in the way that they are. Very often, challenging behavior can also be as a result of care staff lacking in education and understanding into the world of dementia, resulting in their own actions provoking certain behaviors. Education specific to care is essential, particularly in relation to attitudes, values and beliefs (Geldard & Geldard, 2009).

The three major core conditions that are considered essential for effective person centered counseling are:

Congruence

Empathy

Unconditional Positive Regard (UPR)

The above mentioned three core elements are essential for ensuring that the patient gets good care. The most important of these elements is congruence. This means that the counselor needs to ensure that he/she gives undivided attention to the clients (Geldard & Geldard, 2009). The counselor has to assure the client that he/she is completely available to listen to the problems and issues. For this purpose, communication skills of the counselor must be good. Communication is essential to balance, self-knowledge, it must be constructive and positive to be fully satisfactory. The Unconditional Positive Regard (UPR) is another significant element which means that the counselor must listen to the problems of the patient in a non judgmental way. The counselor must not be biased in any way nor should pass any judgmental decisions or comments on the patient. This will assure the patient that he/she can trust the counselor and will open up and easily interact without the fear of rejection or judgment against them (Hermansson & Webb, 2009). Empathy means good understanding between the counselor and the patient.

Choose Three Key Person Centered Theoretical Concepts:

Counseling is a process in which the expert or the counselor has face to face conversations with the patient to solve his social, personal or professional problems. Counseling is the process which handles individual personal, social, vocational and professional problems. Counseling is basically a theory based process and counselors work only in those fields in which they have expertise (Mearns &Thorne, 2007). Counseling refers to advising or guiding a counselee to follow proper guidelines that lead to success and happiness of life. The health professionals are increasingly moving away from a model of care focused on tasks and job requirements only to turn to a model of care which takes into account the holistic perspective of patients and their experiences and needs. In the field of dementia, this change was most often described as a movement towards the "person-centered ...