Problems with Techniques

One of the points that really stuck out to me in the article about multicultural counseling was that over time theories of counseling have been redefined to fit into techniques and approaches to clients.

This is something that has always brought up questions for me and I do not thing this only applies to counseling. It applies to many things in education and the world. When we go through school, we are taught textbook ways of doing things and we do not live in a textbook world. Things are not always as black and white as textbooks seem to put them sometimes.

I think techniques are good but I also think that they can sometimes cause problems for students once they get into the “real world”.  I think Ginter is right when he says that counselors want to focus more on “doing” counseling than “being” a counselor. When you are taught techniques, it is easy to want to place people in to categories and then apply certain approaches or techniques to them based on what category they are in. In doing this we lose sigh of being a counselor and actually counseling. We place too much emphasis on applying textbook techniques to real world people.

With all that being said it is very, very important for students going in to counseling to practice. Along with practice, it would be beneficial to watch counseling sessions take place. Being able to see how other counselors handle certain problem would be good because you are able to see different ways of handling situations that may not go along with textbook approaches.