Choice remains a central concept in rehabilitation counseling. The individual in rehabilitation must accept personal choice as the means of change. The definition of individual choice defined by Brigham (1979) in Boland Patterson, Patrick, and Parker (2000) is as follows:
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 individualÆs 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. It assumes the natural power of the individual to heal himself or herself. It views psychotherapy as a process of removing the constraints and restrictions that prevent this process from operating. These constraints are viewed as growing out of unreasonable demands that people place on themselves, resulting in lowered integration, impaired personal relationships, and various other forms of maladjustment.
The primary characteristics of the person-centered approach are to resolve the incongruence of maladjustment and to h...