A Counselling Skill in Action
What you are about to watch is a short demonstration taken directly from the diploma course. In it, a counsellor is working with a client who is talking about her daughter growing up and beginning to build her own independent life. The client is sad. She is sitting with a feeling that many parents will recognise.
Watch the demonstration first. Then read the reflection below.
Before you watch
As you watch, pay attention to what the counsellor does and does not do. Notice your own instinct as a viewer. What do you want the counsellor to say? What do you want to happen for the client? Hold those thoughts. We will come back to them.
After watching – what just happened?
The client was in an emotion. She was not in crisis. She was not asking to be fixed. She was simply sitting with something real and difficult, and she was doing it out loud, with another person present.
The natural human instinct, when someone we care about is in pain, is to help them feel better. To find the positive angle. To remind them of all the good things. To rescue them from the discomfort. It comes from a genuinely kind place. But in counselling, that instinct can actually get in the way.
When a counsellor moves too quickly to reassure or reframe, what they are really doing, however unintentionally, is communicating that the emotion the client is feeling is something to be moved away from. Something uncomfortable. Something that needs to be fixed. And that is rarely what the client needs.
The skill is in staying
A skilled counsellor does not rescue. They stay. They allow the client to be fully present in their experience, without rushing them through it or pulling them away from it. They welcome the emotion into the room rather than trying to close the door on it. The silence, the stillness, the simple act of being genuinely with someone in their pain without trying to change it, that is one of the most powerful things a counsellor can offer.
This is not passive. It takes real skill and real self-awareness to sit with someone else’s discomfort without acting on your own urge to make it better. It requires you to trust that the client does not need protecting from their own experience. That they are capable of being with it. And that your presence, not your words, is often enough.
That skill does not come naturally to most people. It is something you learn, practise, and develop over time. And it starts with understanding yourself well enough to recognise when your own instincts are driving your responses rather than the needs of the person in front of you.
When you are ready, mark this lesson as complete and move on.