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A Preferred Model for Counselling
As indicated earlier in this report even a cursory examination of the literature reveals almost limitless theories of counselling with individual proponents able to apply their particular model to most situations encountered in the human struggle for emotional balance and meaning. The academic and clinical literature explores and explains a profusion of applications of any number of counselling approaches to a vista of clinical situations, almost all indicating elements of positive impact on a problem under examination.
The more traditional models of counselling/therapy have been added to or complimented by a vast range of New Age developments over recent years. Some of these theories or models of counselling are supported by acceptable evaluation research methodology and some are yet to be shown to be effective. It is not the purpose of this limited report to individually assess every known theory of counselling/therapy since the development of psychoanalytic theory to E.M.D.R. and “Thought Field Therapy”. It is rather to highlight some of the core components of a suitable approach to the counselling of families and friends of missing persons considered helpful in addressing their particular needs.
Counselling, driven by rigid commitment to an inflexible model that may have more to do with the counsellor’s needs for closure projected onto the client, is obviously unacceptable and not part of a competent counsellor’s behaviour. Thus for example, many of the older ‘grief and loss’ models describing artificially contrived ‘stages’ moving toward ‘resolution’ as a goal, are rejected by the families and friends of missing persons as unhelpful. Indeed, Barbato & Irwin (1992) caution against pressing people for premature closure of any stage of grief. On the other hand, models providing, as a core component of process, empathic encounters that focus on a re-negotiation of changed life circumstances find greater acceptance. Howarth (2000) suggests that assisting people to re-conceputalise the “self” as a dynamic rather than concept is a useful framework, as is introducing to them the idea that communities and individuals are constantly changing, and so it is the norm that with this change comes new ways of experiencing the world. Models such as Narrative therapy, Personal Construct theory, and Cognitive Behaviour therapy are examples of useful approaches in this context.
Core principles underlying best practice in counselling the families and friends of missing persons are not dissimilar to those underlying any form of competent counselling of special needs groups. These consist of the well-documented basic skills and principles of empathy, genuineness, warmth, concreteness, immediacy, non-directiveness etc secure in the hands of a developed and experienced communicator (McLaren, 1998; Ballhausen Footman, 1998). With these skills as necessary givens, their application to the special needs of the family and friends of missing persons will be honed by the informed awareness of the counsellor by way of attendance to prescribed reading and participation in training workshops liberally sprinkled with the input of those with ‘lived experience’
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