Common Counseling Mistakes (Part 3)

Information in this post comes from Dr. John Cheydleur's book Called to Counsel, in which he describes 12 Common Counseling Mistakes that lay counselors and nonprofessional Christian Counselors tend to make. (Used with permission)

5. Poor Challenging Skills
The counseling process needs to reach the action-planning stage in order to make significant impact on the counselee’s life.  It is very comfortable for counselees to stay in the exploration or insight stages where they talk about the people or situations that are bothering them, but not yet looking at their personal contribution to the problem. The counselor needs to look deeply into the motives behind the behaviors of the counselees and examine the factors that can sabotage them from following through with their plans for change.  Then the counselor can appropriately challenge the counselee to take bigger risks, set narrower boundaries and establish specific goals to address the issues that are troubling him.

How to avoid this mistake:

• Avoid yes or no questions, irrelevant comments, and inappropriate emphasis on secondary issues.
• Ask appropriate, precise, accurate, timely questions.
• Slowly direct the counselee to decide for himself and take responsibility for his problem.           (Be careful not to fall into the trap of premature plans.)

6.  Superficial Decisions

This happens when the counselor asks the counselee to make decisions toward the beginning of the counseling session before the problem has been thoroughly explored. The decision may be the "right thing" to do, but the counselee has not processed their emotions and weighed their options, so they will still have many adverse emotions when trying to implement the decision, and likely will not persevere in the decision. 

Example:   

A counselee is a very good worker, but his boss is quite abusive.  During counseling he decides to confront his boss.  However, he has not taken time to process his emotions.  When he confronts his boss, he is overwhelmed with emotion (for different people, it may be different emotions: fear, anger, breaking down or appeasing) and does not state his problem clearly.  The boss does not get the point and continues to look down on him and not treat him well.

How to avoid this mistake:

Do not ask the counselee to make decisions early in the counseling process.  Instead explore the problem and look at other factors that caused this problem to arise:  Who are the people involved?  When did this specific problem begin?  How did this problem affect the counselee’s functioning level?  Look at how the person perceives the problem, his subjective distress, and his coping skills. 

7. Artificial Action Plans

Sometimes the counselee may simply choose the accepted course of behavior as an action plan without getting to the root cause.  He is just trying to appease.  The counselor may tend to push the client to make a decision or create an action plan too soon in the counseling process, before emotions and values are sufficiently explored and clarified.  Sometimes a counselor stays on the superficial level of the problem without looking at the core issues.  When the counselor focuses only on the presenting problem, he may be treating only the symptoms instead of treating the real cause of the problem or dysfunctional behavior. 

Example: 
A client says that his boss is abusive.  After talking with his counselor.  He decides to set a meeting with his boss and bring up the matter.  He has decided he will take the risk of confronting his boss and has plans to accept a lower paying job if his boss fires him.  However, the counseling never got to the root of the issue that the counselee is quite irresponsible at work.  He has a pattern of poor performance and his personal life has been interfering with his work performance.  But there is nothing in the action plan to address that.

How to avoid this mistake:

• Explore the counselee’s emotions and values, not just the content of the current problem 
• Compare and contrast the counselee’s values with Scripture.
• Brainstorm with the counselee in order to create a wide number of options and possibilities.
• Prune and organize all of these ideas to end up with a functional set of behavioral goals and programs to accomplish these goals. 
• Work as a coach, helping the counselee to create a realistic action plan based on values you can support and to which the counselee is committed.

8.  Overlooking Accountability

Sometimes there is an assumption that after the counseling that everything will be all right.  The counselee went away feeling relieved and having good advice to follow.  However, the chances of the counselee resolving the problem without some kind of followup and accounability are slim.

Explanation:  In short-term pastoral counseling, the selection and commitment to an accountability partner is very important.  This step supports, reinforces, and maintains the new decision and the actions that go with it.  Accountability to you as the pastoral counselor is not enough.  

How to avoid this mistake:

Each counselee’s decision and plans should be: 

• Clearly endorsed by the client
• Submitted by the client to God in prayer
• Communicated to at least one other significant individual who can serve as an accountability partner