Page 342 - DEDU502_GUIDANCE_AND_COUNSELING_ENGLISH

Guidance and Counseling

Notes • Delinquency is a symptom of emotional immaturity leading to socially unacceptable or
reprehensible behaviour of the youth. Delinquency is one of the most common problems
reported among the post-puberty or early adolescent children. One of the common symptoms
of delinquency is truancy. Delinquents commit petty offences like thieving, shoplifting, and so
on.
• Counseling, we have observed earlier, is help voluntarily sought by the client. But this is not
always the case. Occasionally counselors have to work with clients who are reluctant to discuss
matters with the counselor. Such clients can be identified in different situations like the school,
home and work situations. Reluctant clients are usually those who are the referral cases.
• Counselors also sometimes become highly anxious and feel inadequate when dealing with
non-communicative clients.
• Marriage counseling is indeed a very wide field and has three important areas, namely, pre-
marital counseling, counseling for better marital harmony and counseling to eliminate or
forestall a marriage from breaking up.
• A crisis in marriage relationships could arise from the intrusion of a third party. If this third
party has affective relationships, it could cause an emotional turmoil leading to a crisis. Another
factor that could pose a threat to a marriage is the change in the family structure. A third
source of crisis could be illness in the family. Another source of tension could result from
strong likes and dislikes and a difference in beliefs and life styles of the couple which have
recently emerged owing to some extraneous factor(s).
• In recent times, studies have revealed that marital counseling has come to be a continuous
process with its beginnings in the day of courtship, its course progressing through marriage to
times of stress prior to the parting of ways.
• The second aspect of matrimony concerns compatibility. Can incompatibilities sustain a marriage
for long? The parties to the marriage should have similar attitudes, interests, cultures, likes,
value systems and so on. A fundamental aspect of compatibility is age. People of different ages
will not have similar interests. Age is also important from the viewpoint of sex gratification.
• Premarital counseling concerns the very important stage of choosing a mate. This basically
involves the coming together of two individuals who may be known to each other from their
childhood or who may be related in one way or another to each other or who may be
acquaintances or who may be in close contact in day-to-day life as coworkers, class fellows,
etc.
• Marital problems result in stresses and strains owing to lack of communication or faulty
communication. Misinformation breeds misunderstandings and tends to create an information
vacuum.
• The socio-economic factors that make or mar a happy marriage concern finances, social life,
religious and othe values.
• Finances—Finance
• Social life
• Relatives and dependants
• Occupational demands
• In structuring the situation the counselor is concerned with the mechanics of the situation.
Structuring is usually concerned with the timing of the counseling sessions, their duration, a
definition or at least an indication of the client’ responsibility, etc.
• Marital counseling, like any other counseling, is strictly voluntary. Clients seek assistance on
their own and the counselor offers assistance only when it is sought for by the clients.

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