Psychological communication: Theories, roles and skills for counsellors by van der Molen, Lang, Trower, & Look (second edition) – Chapter 6 summary

Listening skills are used to give the client an opportunity and encouragement to tell their story. Non-selective listening skills refer to skills that exert little influence and are intended to encourage and stimulate the client. The are several non-selective listening skills:

• Non-verbal behaviour
  This includes the following skills:
  • Facial expression
    This should be tailored to the individual (e.g. occasional smiling; frowning)
  • Eye contact
    The clinician should look at, or in the direction of the client most of the times but should not stare or avoid eye contact.
  • Body language
    This communicates the tenseness of the situation.
  • Encouraging gestures
    This includes nodding and using supportive hand gestures.
• Verbal following silences
  This includes the following skills:
  
  • Verbal following
    This includes ensuring that one’s comments line up as closely as possible with what the client says and does not introduce new topics (e.g. minimal encouragement). It gives the client the opportunity to explore and elaborate on their own line of thought.
  • Use of silences
    This gives the client the opportunity to consider what they have just said.

Selective skills refer to skills that are used to select a certain aspect of the client’s story which is deemed important. This can be done by going into the content, feeling of giving extra attention to a certain subject. There are several selective listening skills:

• Open questions
  This gives the client a lot of freedom in their answers.
• Closed questions
  This does not give the client a lot of freedom and often stem from the clinician’s frame of reference. It has three disadvantages:
  
  • It restricts the client in their range of possible responses.
  • The questions are often suggestive.
  • It may steer the conversation to a question-answer format.
• Why-questions
  This is a form of open question that can give the idea of the need to justify oneself.
• Paraphrasing
  This refers to briefly reproducing in one’s own words the gist of what the client said and refers to the informational content of the client. It should be done in a tentative voice and reflect genuine interest, acceptance and understanding. It has three goals:
  
  • It shows the clinician whether they understood the client correctly.
  • It shows that the client is being listened to.
  • It can give the client a clearer picture of the problem.
• Reflection of feeling
  This refers to reproduction or mirroring of feeling. The intensity should match the client and the reflection should correspond to the nature of the emotion expressed. It has three functions:
  
  • It shows that the client is understood, accepted and worthy of attention.
  • It gives the client a sense of security.
  • It shows the clinician whether they understood the client correctly.
• Concreteness
  This aims to help the client to be as accurate and precise as possible when discussing their problems. It should be used when the client uses vague terms and it can be used to assess the situational specificity of problems.
• Summarizing
  This refers to reproducing statements of the client over a longer period of time and can be a summary of content or feelings. The goal is to give structure to what the client has said by ordering the main points in their story and can demonstrate contrasting emotions.

Regulating skills are used to ensure that meaningful progress is made. There are several regulating skills:

• Starting the interview
  This includes explaining what the client can expect from counselling and discusses bidirectional expectations.
• Making an initial contract
  This includes emphasizing that it is joint undertaking with joint responsibility and the client should be invited to cooperate and participate.
• Goal-setting and goal evaluation
  This includes formulating realistic process goals.
• Situation clarification
  This includes discussing ambiguities and misunderstandings and requires a meta-view of the conversation. It is necessary when mutual expectations do not align anymore. It is necessary when a client finds a particular topic difficult to talk about (1), when the dialogue goes in circles (2) and when the client jumps from one topic to another (3).
• Thinking aloud
  This includes disclosing thoughts leading up to a conclusion as well as a conclusion as this may reduce anxiety (1), makes sure that the clinician does not get stuck (2), may model thinking aloud (3) and promotes joint cooperation (4).
• Ending the counselling interview
  This can include a meta-conversation about how the client experienced the interview.