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Counselling Session Essay

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Counselling session can facilitate the process of overcoming or working through personal issues from everyday hardship as well as potentially life threatening situations. This reflective essay will analyse a counselling session that I have attended with a professional counsellor. Her name was Hend. The session was to be recorded so I can refer to particular examples during the session. In this reflective essay I will give an overview of the counselling session as well as a discussion of my feelings before, during and after the session. Key skills used by the counsellor such as active listening, reflective skills and empathy will be explained, supported with verbatim examples from the session. Furthermore, the overall experiences and …show more content…

(p. 48) Attending skills means giving a physical attention to the speaker or, as Bolton (1987) refers to it, “listening with the whole body” (p.33) Furthermore, Hand demonstrated following skills by using minimal responses such as ‘Mm-hmm’, ‘Ok’ and ‘Yes’ which gave me reaffirmation that she was listening while I was talking continuously. Another following skill that the counsellor applied was the appropriate use of open and closed questions. Closed question are used when a specific answer or specific information is required (Geldard & Geldard, 2012). For example the counsellor asked me closed questions such as “How old were you when you noticed this problem” which made me try to remember the very early stages of my problem. On the other hand she used open question such as “When did your worries about your health increase again?”. The answer to this question revealed some new information. I stated that my worries about my health rose very soon after I moved to Australia. Geldard & Geldard (2012) suggest that in counselling, open questions encourage the person to be creative and share new information. Secondly, Hand demonstrated some reflecting skills which complemented the active listening skills and I had an impression that she was listening carefully and understood what I was saying. I said: “I remember I have had this problem since I was very young. I

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