Essential Counseling Techniques and Skills

Some Qualities of a Good Counselor

• Empathetic (the ability to understand the view of another person)
• Respectful
• Warm
• Confidential/discreet
• Honest
• Attentive/listening
• Unbiased
• Understandable/clear
• Unhurried

• Effective Questioning. Use questions to elicit facts or feelings about the client’s health. Use closed-ended questions (yes/no) to quickly gather factual, nonsensitive information (e.g., name, age), while open-ended questions (e.g., “What do you know about the AIDS virus?” and “How do you think you might have gotten this infection?”) are critical for eliciting feelings and detailed information. Use probing questions (e.g., “Can you tell me more about ____?”) to elicit more in-depth information.
• Active Listening. In order to get the information you need to help a client, you must listen actively. This technique involves communicating, without words, your interest in the needs the client expresses. You can open up communication by using silence. You can let the client know that you are listening by maintaining eye contact, leaning forward, occasionally saying words like “yes,” “uh-huh,” and “please continue”—these are signs of respect and generate a feeling of well-being in the person who is being heard.
• Paraphrasing, Summarizing, and Clarifying. This technique involves repeating, synthesizing, or summarizing in other words what the client has told you. This helps the provider clarify what the client is saying, and helps the client to feel that he or she has been heard.
• Reflecting and Validating Feelings. This technique involves clarifying the feelings the client expresses in order to help understand his or her emotions. For example, “It seems to me that you are worried because you suspect that your husband had sex with other women, and you are afraid that you will get AIDS.” It is helpful to clients to let them know that their reactions to a situation are normal, and that those feelings are common to other people in similar situations. You can communicate that the feelings are valid.
• Giving Clear Information. Before you give any information, it is helpful to ask questions to determine how much the client already knows. It is important to provide information using words that the client can understand. Ask clients to repeat the information you have given them to verify that they understood.
• Arriving at Agreement. This technique involves clarifying and summarizing the decisions that a client has made during the counseling session.

 Inappropriate Responses in Counseling

• Judging: For example, “You wouldn’t have these problems if you hadn’t had sex without being married.”
• Attacking: For example, “How could you be that irresponsible? Having sex without using a condom!”
• Denial: For example, “Don’t worry. I’m sure that it’s nothing important. Just a little infection.”
• Pity: For example, “Poor thing! How terrible that happened! I hope you don’t have an STI!”