are made during brief (less than 20

are made during brief (less than 20 sessions) psychotherapy, the worse
the therapeutic alliance and the treatment outcome. Similarly, the
high drop-out rate from counselling may be a result of inappropriate
associated factor search. The search for possible associated factors
presumes a causal connection that may well not be necessary; there is
ample evidence that solutions do not necessarily link to problems (de
Shazer et al., 1986). The questions arising at this stage of assessment
include:
• How to describe briefly the counsellor’s understanding of the
nature of people and explain the purpose of the questions asked?
• Before embarking on eliciting a long history, how to decide with
the client how much you need to know?
• How to check with the client that questions, or encouragement to
say more about a particular topic, has some meaning for the client?
• How appropriate it is to ask questions about internal states when
attending too much to the irrational dimension of the relationship
is demonstrably counterproductive?
• What strengths and abilities does the client possess that counter
concerns and problems, or enable them to be endured?
3 ‘To determine client expectations and desired outcomes’
This is not as straightforward as it seems because, although counselling
has ‘emerged from a long historical journey in the direction of selfcontained
individualism’ (McLeod, our emphasis), the client may well
have expectations that others, too, will be influenced by the counselling.
These ‘others’ are not easily visible to the counsellor, as
McLeod warns us:
The client experiences counselling as one facet of a life that may encompass
many other relationships; the counsellor has no first-hand involvement into
these other relationships and is limited to his or her experience of the actual
sessions.The two types of experience therefore have quite different horizons.
(1998, pp. 27–8)
What we do know is that client expectations about counselling before
they enter it have very little influence on eventual outcomes, but the
expectations they build during initial sessions have significant influence
on outcomes (Sexton and Whiston, 1997).The initial session is
therefore critical to the effectiveness of overall counselling as this is
Introduction 9