Personal Counseling Theory

The opportunity to make an uncoerced selection from two or more alternative events, consequences, or responses. By uncoerced, we mean that there are no programmed or implicit or explicit consequences for selecting one alternative over the others except for the characteristics of the alternatives themselves.

This definition of choice plays a role in my personal counseling theory. My personal theory is a blend of person-centered therapy and gestalt therapy. Choice applies to person-centered therapy in its core perception that on the subject of an individualĘs life, he or she is the expert. With respect to gestalt therapy, choice applies to one of its core concepts, that people determine their own responses in the world. That is, they are proactive as opposed to reactive. With respect to rehabilitative counseling, I believe individuals must accept that their own choices are crucial in the rehabilitation process. For this reason, my own personal theory of counseling is a combination of person-centered therapy and gestalt therapy.

Person-centered therapy is a humanistic therapy that emphasizes individual existence and variability. I

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he inherent worth and value of the client and his or her feelings and interacts in a positive manner with the client. The major techniques and methods of the person-centered approach include the use of restatements of what the client has said, helping in this manner to focus the client on the ideas and feelings that he or she has said in order to reveal the inappropriate or incongruent aspects of the clientĘs views. The focus is also on revealing the conceptual structure of the self through non-directive restatements. Gestalt Therapy Because person-centered therapy may be inadequate in dealing with some types of patients and some kinds of disorders, particularly neurotics, I believe gestalt therapy is an excellent approach for rehabilitative clients used in tandem with person-centered therapy. Gestalt psychology conceptualizes psychological events as organized, unified, and coherent phenomena. The assumption is that a person interacts with the environment via a perceptual field. Such fields ū and people ūa re organized, which leads to meaning. Other principles of organization include closure, proximity and similarity. Gestalt psychology is mentalistic and antireductionist. It attempts to define the physiological basis of
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Approximate Word count = 1534
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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