something helpful and should not th

something helpful and should not therefore be assumed to be resistant
if they have difficulty articulating their concerns?
• Where the agency places restrictions on the number of sessions
available to the client, how can the counsellor establish what is the
least that needs to happen to make a difference for the client?
2 ‘To identify factors that may be associated with the problem
and the client’s experience or behaviour’
Any one problem has a whole range of factors that may be associated
with it but causal relationships between the two are less easy to establish.
Depending largely on a counsellor’s theoretical home (which will
influence what research findings are deemed most relevant), a counsellor
will filter the ‘factors’ through her own understanding of problem
causality.This will influence whether the questions asked to elicit
associated factors are about internal states, interpersonal relationships,
external factors, or a combination of any of these. Even where our
respondents had some sort of assessment structure imposed on them,
they still structured their assessment questions to meet the requirements
of their particular model of working. They knew what they
were looking for: the Freudian,TA and some of the person-centred
counsellors were most interested in exploring the internal worlds of
their clients; the solution-focused, narrative and some person-centred
counsellors were most interested in client strengths; and the CBT
counsellors wanted a clear understanding of the problem: ‘I want to
assess how they think, behave, feel physically, and what sort of
emotions go along with this’.
Without an explanation of the counsellor’s understanding of the
nature of people, this will at best puzzle the client and at worst insult
them. For example, the mother of a child exploited as a prostitute and
murdered at the age of 17 reported that when she sought help in
coping with her daughter at the age of 14, a psychologist suggested
that the situation was a product of rebellion in the context of a liberal
household.The mother thought the questions about the interpersonal
nature of her relationship with her daughter were not relevant to her
concern that her 14-year-old daughter was being sexually abused by
a 32-year-old man (cited in Weir, 2002, p. 9). Similarly, some clients
can perceive solution-focused approaches as ‘solution-forced’
(O’Connell, 2001).
The accurate assessment of associated factors is a major problem.
Piper et al. (1995) point out that the more transference interpretations
8 Assessment in Counselling