Creative Counselling

The Counselling Relationship

There has been a lot of discussion in counselling circles about what exactly it is that works when therapy works. And research shows that therapy does work, regardless of the orientation of the therapist.

There are a number of factors involved in counselling that stay the same across different theoretical orientations: one person seeking help from another, the boundaries of time and space, the fact of talking to a stranger, confidentiality, the chance to explore one's problems or one's life in general. It would make sense that it is one or more of these that is effective in therapy, since no one theory is shown to be the only effective one.

I think that all the elements of therapy matter but I remain convinced that the most important element over which the counsellor has control is the relationship between the counsellor and the client.

"It is the relationship that heals" - is the single most important lesson the therapist must learn. (Irvin D. Yalom in Existential Psychotherapy)

Belief in the importance of the counselling relationship is not new. Carl Rogers, who was born nearly thirty years before Yalom, was the founder of client-centered therapy. He believed that clients will change when certain key factors are established in the client/counsellor relationship. The main key factors are:

Empathy - that is, understanding the client's world.
Unconditional Positive Regard - valuing the client regardless of how they present or what they say or do.
Congruence - a genuineness on the part of the counsellor, being real in the relationship.

These 'core conditions' remain at the heart of client-centered therapy today.

Not everyone gives the relationship this primacy. Karen Tallman and Arthur C. Bohart believe that since it is the client that is the common element across all orientations:

it is the client, not the therapist or technique, that makes therapy work.

It is true that while counsellors facilitate it is the clients who do the work of change. In this view:

the relationship is yet another resource which clients utilize to mobilize personal agency and change.

Whether the relationship is the primary agent of change in therapy or not, it is the single most powerful therapeutic element over which the therapist has control. This is why it is so important for us as counsellors to have undertaken training and personal development work to enable us to be aware of and comfortable with who we are. In the final analysis, who we are is what we are offering to our clients.