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Irena Klympush

Psychological correction of family relationships : Psychological Counselling and Psychotherapy






Characteristics of psychological counseling and psychotherapy.

Principles of family psychological counseling.


Psychological assistance to the family is most often provided through psychological counseling or psychotherapy. This is aimed at solving the emotional problems of the family through a structured dialogue between the counselor and the client. At the same time, psychological counseling is understood primarily as an influence aimed at correcting the client's interpersonal relationships in the family. Psychotherapy is focused primarily on solving deep personal problems that are rooted in most of the client's difficulties arising from interpersonal relationships with other family members. Depending on the orientation of psychological assistance, the following types of family psychological counseling are distinguished:

- marital

Counseling of children and parents;

- parents on children's problems;

- families, one of whose members is seriously ill (symptomically or mentally);

- those who are getting married;

- those who are getting divorced.

Counseling is also classified according to the duration (one-time, short-term, long-term) and the nature of assistance (educational and recommendation, diagnostic, psychological counseling).

The main goal of the counselor is to help the client find ways and means to solve problems related to difficulties in interpersonal relationships with family members.


In order to achieve this goal, the counselor has to solve the following tasks:

- understand the essence of the problem, help the client relieve emotional stress, better understand the current situation, using reflective listening to the client;

- to expand the client's understanding of himself/herself, the problematic family situation, and the surrounding reality in general, as a result of which he/she begins to see and evaluate the situation in a new way, and tries to find alternative options for behavior in it;

- help the client to take responsibility for his/her own "contribution" to the family situation;

- support the client's belief in themselves and readiness to implement the identified ways to overcome family problems, primarily by changing their own attitude and behavior.


These tasks can be solved by adhering to certain principles:

- voluntariness, which means the client's own desire to see a psychologist and, therefore, his or her orientation towards the perception of psychological help;

- confidentiality, i.e., the prohibition to transfer information to other persons without the client's consent (except in cases of threat to the life and health of either the client or other people, which the client is warned about immediately);

- goodwill, empathetic attitude towards the client, ability to listen attentively and actively to another person, showing respect for him/her, interest in his/her fate;

- non-judgmental attitude to the client, the ability to accept him/her as he/she is, evaluating but not condemning his/her norms and values, life rules since it is possible to expand a person's understanding of the environment based only on his/her own ideas;

- refusal to give advice, to take responsibility for everything that happens in the client's family, otherwise the client may develop a passive attitude toward the problem instead of actively trying to solve it; at the same time, any failures may be attributed to the counselor, which undermines his or her authority;

- Avoiding friendly relations with the client in order to maintain an objective and detached position necessary for effective problem-solving;

- the client's rightness, the inability to attribute unsuccessful counseling to the client's misbehavior, stubbornness, inaccurate interpretation of problems, etc.

As a result, the counseling psychologist creates an atmosphere of friendly trust and, as a person who is more competent at the problem (due to professional training), helps the client find ways to solve it and overcome the difficulties of family life.

There are several groups of methods and techniques of psychological counseling for families:

  • General skills of psychological influence;

  • Nonspecific methods of counselor's work;

  • Special methods and techniques of psychological counseling.

General skills of psychological influence are primarily related to compliance with the rules of counseling based on ethical and professional norms and principles. At the same time, the verbal and non-verbal behavior of the psychologist helps to create a favorable psychological climate for the conversation, constructively analyze the situation, find out the true causes of the problem, and form the client's confidence in the effectiveness of counseling recommendations and the desire to use them.

Insufficient mastery of the relevant skills of a counseling conversation by a psychologist can lead to typical mistakes:

- failure to establish the necessary psychological contact, which prevents the creation of an atmosphere of goodwill and trust;

- proceeding to solve a problem without sufficiently studying its essence, making recommendations that ignore the client's motives and interests;

- authoritarianism towards the interlocutor, imposing one's opinion on the interlocutor, inability to listen, creating obstacles to explaining and justifying one's view to the client;

- asking the client direct questions in order to obtain information to verify their point of view, when the interlocutor does not understand the motives for the questioning;

-a strong commitment to a pre-formulated hypothesis and an emphasis on "pushing" the interlocutor toward it through relevant questions.


Nonspecific methods of work by a counseling psychologist involve the use of various techniques and tasks aimed at solving the problems of psychological counseling regardless of its goals.

For example, homework assignments for clients (keeping a self-observation diary; tasks involving conversations on given topics that family members must conduct over a certain period of time; tasks to record positive and negative reactions to the actions of other family members according to a given plan; tasks to use forms of communication for a certain period of time, the absence of which led to a difficult family situation) help them to consolidate the positions and skills learned during counseling.

Questions that are formulated in such a way that the answer implies a change in the client's position on the problem (for example, talking about family relationships from the perspective of another family member) stimulate the development of a broader understanding of the situation.

A similar effect is achieved by using the "paraphrase technique," which involves rephrasing the client's complaint to reduce its negative sound and add a positive connotation to it (for example, a complaint about a child's disobedience can be interpreted as a manifestation of the child's independence, which is very important for his or her future life).



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