What Makes Counseling Effective?:

Is it the wand or way the magician waves it that creates the magic?

As a counselor educator, I found the linked review below appropriate as we begin another academic year. With a new cadre for “future counselors” populating our classes, it is easy to

become myopic in our approach to counselor education and disproportionately attend to “the theory of counseling,” with all its associated erudite foci,  and inadvertently relegate the “practice of counseling” to an “also ran” category in our pedagogy. The review is of an article that indirectly revisits an old topic, one familiar to most counselor educators, namely, the importance of the relationship to an efficacious outcome in counseling.

Although the “Four Common Factors” of counseling are not the focus of the article, I could not help but flash back to the significance of these determinants of counseling outcome as I read the review, in particular the significance of the therapeutic alliance or what we so often refer to as the “relationship” between the practitioner and the individual being treated—Hans Beihl wrote an interesting essay on this in his review of the findings of Task Force on Evidence-Based Therapy Relationships commissioned by the American Psychological Association – see http://bit.ly/1eaPSLW.

In any event, this is not intended to be an essay, but an invitation to “review the review” linked below as it gave me pause to consider what the issue of primacy “should be” when training the entering “next generation of professional counselors”…and provides me with further pause to consider just how I can best teach this…can I teach empathy? As I consider my role as a counselor educator, I find myself realizing that much of what I learned about “effective counseling” came at my grandfather’s knee rather than in a graduate school classroom. Like Fulghum wrote in Everything I needed to know I learned in kindergarten, it is the basic principles of the “Golden Rule” that serve as the glue that binds practitioner and client in an effective therapeutic relationship…or as Pancho Sanza sings when asked why he stays with Don Quixote as his “squire” in The Man of La Mancha, “I like him; I simply like him…”

Enjoy…and ponder

Dr. Robert

For more on the significance of the practitioner is affecting treatment outcome consider:

Treatment: staff do matter (click to visit article)

For most research, the impact of the therapist is noise in the system – a nuisance to be adjusted out of the analysis in order to focus on the therapy. This risks sacrificing what matters for what so often does not, so we stretched our hot topics to an issue which arguably ought to be sizzling in the research, offering a reminder of lessons from the past and from general psychotherapy.