Counselling Skills: A Reflective Analysis

This essay is a reflective evaluation of the skills to counselling applied to the low self-confidence and anxiety a pregnant woman goes through and the impact it’s having on her marriage. This essay will contain reflections of verbatim examples from during the counselling session in which Humarah is the patient and I am the counsellor. The purpose of this essay is to reflect upon the use of counselling skills, which I have applied to a scenario as part of the roleplay with the goal of establishing a therapeutic relationship. It will give an analysis of the skills used, as well as a critical evaluation of their effectiveness. A discussion of how I applied these skills as well as the areas of possible improvement supported by relevant literature.

There are different types of reflective listening, for this case I have used paraphrasing. Paraphrasing is summarising what the patient has said. Throughout the role play, I demonstrated few examples of paraphrasing. The reason for this was to check the accuracy of my understanding, but more importantly to help the client emphasise what she felt was important in the session overall. An example that shows this is ‘From what you tell me I can see that you feel very self- conscious and this is becoming a problem in your relationship. (7)’.Also in response to the information Humarah gave about her past relationship with her husband ‘So you say you had a good relationship before you got pregnant and did a lot of things together (15).’ I found paraphrasing very useful as it helped me identify the issues and making sure I was picking up on the important points as well as re-assuring the client I was listening and I was in the right track and not missing any important information. Paraphrasing also helps the client develop their answers further, again gaining more insight of the problem. Geldard and Geldard (2009), suggest that these reflections also help to deepen the therapeutic relationship between both the councillor and the