Page 338 - DEDU502_GUIDANCE_AND_COUNSELING_ENGLISH

Guidance and Counseling

Notes Listening
Sympathetic listening is the heart of the counseling process. It is often fallaciously considered a
passive activity. Owing to inappropriate socialization, many socially disadvantaged individuals are
poor in listening skills. Their homes are often filled with din and confusion with everybody talking
simultaneously. The young ones soon learn not to listen but to emotions. A blank stare or an empty
facial expression often means that the client has not followed what has been said.

Modesty
Modesty, usually considered a desirable quality, is not quite useful in counseling, especially when
the counsellee is too modest. A false sense of modesty blocks expression of overt negative feelings.
Such blockages are not helpful in counseling.

Diagnosing
In order to achieve the goals of counseling, the counselor must be able to relate to and to communicate
with his client. The counselor must be able to determine the client’s state of existence. To be able to
assess what needs to be done, good diagnosis is necessary. However, with socially weaker clients,
accurate diagnosis is not only difficult but also often not possible. In employing standardized
diagnostic instruments, the counselor may not always be able to diagnose correctly. There are several
problems inherent in the use of standardized instruments with clients from weaker sections. There
are, at the outset, several situational problems. In addition, the client’s anxiety may affect test
performance. Clients are almost always unfamiliar with test situations and this may prove to be a
barrier. It may be more helpful to use non-standardized procedures such as observation, anecdotal
records, interviews and the like.
Intervention
Determining preventive and corrective measures is quite difficult and applying them to socially
disadvantaged clients is not easy.
The most important of all is the counselor’s attitude. The counselor should exhibit an attitude of
unconditional self-regard towards his clients.

32.8 Counseling Drug Addicts

Many psychological aspects of drug addiction represent non-adjustive behaviour that some
individuals resort to. Broadly speaking, the reactions of drug addicts fall under the category of
character disorders.
In the last three decades, the phenomenon of drug abuse has assumed enormous proportions and
has become a very serious threat to order and society’s survival. Hence it demands urgent
consideration. In the early decades of the twentieth century, alcoholism posed a serious social problem
and usually involved adults and older persons. Now drug addiction has taken roots among
adolescents and youth. It does not of course mean that it ceases to be an adult problem. Those who
pick up this habit become wrecked personalities.
Over the last three decades, there has been a sea change in the socio-economic conditions of the
youth. They are becoming highly politicized. Owing to defective economic planning and educational
policies, more and more youth are being turned out of colleges and schools with degrees and diplomas
that are not worth the paper on which they are printed. More youth are becoming unemployable
and are disillusioned because the education they have received was not designed to equip them
with skills or competencies for the employment market. Naturally, there is growing frustration.
Those in colleges and schools, seeing and knowing the plight of their seniors, are becoming anxious,
losing faith in the vlue of their education. They are also exposed to other tensions and stresses
present in the society, owing to socio-economic and political factors. Youth are becoming alienated.
They have strong feelings of ‘anomie’. Some experience identity crises and develop feelings of

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