Social and psychological counseling 
Automatic translate
Methods of psychological counseling and psychotherapy become important in psychological work with clients. People turn to them to help mentally normal people cope with the problems they have. They help a person look at himself from a different angle, realize his problems and change behavior.
During consultation, the specialist communicates with healthy, not sick people; these people are simply stressed and experiencing discomfort at the moment. Psychological counseling helps psychological rehabilitation, helps to get rid of negative experiences, helps restore a person’s mental health, and helps him to adequately assess the environment.
When using psychoconsulting, attention in this case is focused on the problem that needs to be resolved, and not at all on the disease; to solve the problem, previously unused hidden capabilities of the client are attracted, they try to encourage him to make decisions on his own.
It is impossible to draw a clear dividing line between counseling and psychotherapy, but there are still some differences. Therapists are contacted in case of much more severe disorders than in psychocounseling, which require more time to eliminate them. In addition, psychotherapy is more closely related to medicine than counseling.
Consulting consists of the following phases:
- establishing close contacts between the psychoconsultant and the client;
- the client talks about his problems and experiences; the consultant listens to him carefully and tries to understand what worries him;
- dialogue between interlocutors, when the consultant, skillfully questioning the client, helps to clarify the difficulties facing him;
- The final stage is a change in the client’s behavior, when he is able to find ways to overcome the obstacles that have arisen in front of him.
The most important goals of counseling are: the client’s understanding of his problems, changing his emotional state, the emergence of the ability to make independent decisions, the use of psychological support, reconciliation with the situation if it cannot be influenced, acquiring the ability to adequately respond to a changing situation. For a successful counseling process, a specialist must treat clients carefully and sensitively, be tolerant, show empathy for people, respect their clients, be emotionally stable and objective, and have the necessary professional skills.
In practice, psychological and psychosocial counseling is found. In psychological counseling, one person or a group of people are directly influenced (family members in family counseling). When psychosocial counseling takes place, it affects not only a specific person, but also his environment, and not only personal, but also other necessary resources are involved.
When psychoconsulting, one should take into account the phenomenon of “transfer”, discovered by S. Freud. Transference is the repetition during a consultative contact of those attitudes and feelings that were characteristic of the client in the past when communicating with people significant to him, but are unacceptable in the present. This happens in cases where there are unresolved conflicts with significant persons in childhood. Transference helps to look into the client’s past and understand how past experiences provoke his reactions in the present time and how to get rid of them.
So, psychological counseling helps clients get rid of problems that interfere with their lives, adjust their behavior and establish communication with other people.