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Unit 16: Interview Process in Counseling

certain, action is appropriate or not, is of great importance in determining the course and success of Notes
the counseling process.
Selection of Feelings
The client may express several feelings of varying importance. The counselor exercises his subjective
judgement in choosing to reflect one feeling rather than another. In this way, the counselor actually
is directing the client along certain channels which he deems important. In this sense the non-
directive approach, on closer examination, is actually a directive approach. Often this subtle but
important point is missed and the Rogerian approach is emphatically declared as a non-directive
approach par excellence.
Content
The material expressed by the client could be of different degrees of significance from the point of
view of the counselor. A wrong approach would be to reflect content, that is, to repeat the words or
the substance of what the client has expressed. The counselor blindly or mechanically states what
has been said by the client. Reflecting content is of little value in counseling. Often it may be
detrimental to the counseling process. The counselor should primarily be concerned with feeling
but not with content. If the counselor were to be so concerned, he would be missing the essence of
the communication.
Depth

This connotes the obvious experience of our day-to-day life. We experience some feelings deeply
while many feelings may be experienced superficially. In other words, some of our feelings could be
shallow and others deep. A counselor could by attending to the shallow feelings, be wasting his
time and energy. At the same time it cannot be gainsaid that the counselor should not reflect too
deeply. Either extreme may prove counter-productive.
Meaning
Perhaps this is one of the common ways of secondary elaboration indulged in by all of us frequently.
When something is said we either read too much meaning into it or do the reverse. This is the
common concern of all our communication techniques. For example, if someone says that he saw a
tiger, the listener may report that the speaker said that he saw a big tiger. Much of this addition or
omission is unintentional and may also be quite harmless. But there are occasions when a slight
addition or omission could change the whole complexion of a communication. A counselor should
guard against committing this common error. A counselor is not supposed to add or detract any
meaning, however trivial, in any circumstance.
Language
The importance of language is easily appreciated. It is through language that the nuances of feelings
are expressed. A counselor is expected to be careful in the choice of his words. He cannot afford to
be careless with the most important tool of communication, namely, language. In the same way, he
is expected to follow the client’s language as carefully as possible.

Thinking
The reflection of feeling or experience could vary in timing. The counselor may employ immediate
reflection or may use the technique of summary reflection. The difference is that in immediate
reflection the counselor deals with one feeling at a time. It also means that he identifies the feeling
as it is expressed and immediately reflects it, in which process he may interrupt the client’s flow of
expression. In summary reflection the counselor may reflect a number of feelings at one time and he
may not interrupt the client until he finds a logical or appropriate pause. But he may miss out a few
feelings in the process owing to memory lapses. The last kind of reflection is called terminal reflection
and it comprises a summarizing process usually conducted at the time to the termination of the
counseling relationship.

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