Counselling skills III: helping with feelings

Abstract

A considerable part of the process of helping people in counselling is concerned with the emotional or ‘feelings’ side of the person. In the UK and North American cultures, a great premium is placed on the individual’s being able to control feelings and thus overt expression of emotion is often frowned upon. As a result, we learn to bottle up feelings, sometimes from a very early age. In this chapter, we will consider the effects of such suppression of feelings and identify some practical ways of helping people to identify and explore their feelings. The skills involved in managing feelings can be seen to augment the skills discussed in the previous chapter — the basic client-centred counselling skills.