英文摘要 |
To understand whether counseling is effective or ineffective from clients' perspectives is crucial for helping profession. Therefore, by doing so, counselors can get a clearer picture of clients' needs, how effective the helping process is, and further improvement. This study recruited 48 college students and five graduate students at a public university in southern Taiwan who sought counseling services in the hope of investigating their perspectives on the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of counseling, help-seeking purposes, and the reasons behind for further service-seeking. The data is collected from written material and semi-interview respectively. Based on the findings, most of the participants are self-referred, and their seeking for help is due mainly to making a breakthrough in interpersonal relations, self-understanding, career advice, and stress-related issues. The contributing factors in effective counseling mostly depend on the part that counselors play-the empathy and understanding of the clients' emotions and situations, the proper guidance based on their needs, such as redirecting them to look at things from different angles or helping them further understand themselves and thus making a change via self-reflection and insight-getting, as well as developing the capability of facing and dealing with the concerned issues deemed to be challenging via feeling supported and empowered. Being a decent listener is vital to a counselor, which helps the clients to feel respected and further accepted, also feel relieved after being understood and then accept things as they are. By contrast, the following factors in the ineffective counseling might deter the counselors from comprehending the whole picture of the issues and thus the goal of effective counseling could not be attained: not telling the truth, expecting too much, and not having a goal in mind to reach on the clients' part, which might also time unavailability, and not understanding the counselors' proposals to cope with the problem. On the other hand, The factors in the failure of effective counseling lie much in being too anxious and rushed to get the problem addressed, only showing interest in certain topics, misinterpreting clients' intentions or thoughts, being unable to get deeper into the issues concerned, unstructured or unready for closure, immature self-disclosure. |