Building Effective Client Responses

As the therapy progress and trust (often called rapport) builds, the client should be helped to move into positive ways of responding; either to depression, anxiety, fear, anger, phobias or the full gamut of emotional distress which is so often part of the human condition.

In this way the therapist should seek to work in therapeutic alliance with the client to help them achieve a number of key things:

  • Re-enforcement - helping the client to focus on their gifts strengthens and talents. This is akin to the positive psychology (focused on building on the best in people). It s from this place that clients can stand to see and value their capacity for positive change. The Human Givens has been described as the ‘heart of positive psychology’.
  • Reframe – that positive approach can be applied to the negative thoughts, behaviours, feelings and patterns that often feel as if they blight they client’s life. Based on the principle that all human behaviour is in some way goal directed, reframing helps the client to understand their behaviours more clearly, identify the lacking need and get it met more healthily. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) is often used.
  • Resolve – very often such needs are not being met because there come sort of internal conflict within the client. The Human Givens approach enables those conflicts to be given space for exploration, allowing them to be brought out into the open, to be resolved and new healthier, positive ways to be established.
  • Regression – without endlessly exploring the past, regressing back and understanding how key events, persons or memories have influenced our current behaviour can help bring the client up to date with the greater understanding of the re-enforced abilities, reframed patterns and resolved conflicts – this is especially around traumatic events, where the rewind technique is a powerful and careful combination of regression to the memory and resolution of its effects.
  • Roles – all of us often play various roles in different situations. Maybe we learnt these roles ourselves, maybe they were assigned to us, often called social conditioning. The key interest for the therapist will be around how effective these roles are in the clients life and indeed, if the right role s being played in the right place, at the right time!
  • Rehearse – the human Givens therapist will also ensure that regardless of the issue, the client is advised, supported at has the opportunity to build, mentally rehearse and physically practice the effective response that they wish to give in their lives.

In this (and with these) positive set of ways, the client builds a set of effective responses, quickly.

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The views expressed in this article are those of the author. All articles published on Counselling Directory are reviewed by our editorial team.

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Stevenage SG1 & London W1G
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Written by Keith Abrahams
MBA, MHGDip
location_on Stevenage SG1 & London W1G
Keith Abrahams is widely experienced and trained in various psychological models. He has practiced as a therapist both privately and as a volunteer, with a specialism in working with trauma. He lectures in business and leadership for professional dev...
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