Counseling and My Understanding

Since young i have been involving myself in various activities related to helping youths and students such as church camps or school activities. My involvement in this activities especially from the school part mostly because of my father. My father is a counselor at my school, SMK Bau and sometimes he directly or indirectly made me involved in school talks on drugs, moral declination among teenagers, school camp and many more. There are many thing that I learnt about counseling indirectly from my father and from the way the school function.

From what I understand, a person who is given the trust to listen to others’ problems and find a way of making the problems much easier for the clients to handle is a person of great responsibilities. It is normal for human being protective towards their problems and dilemmas and thus making it not easy to share them with other people. Therefore, when a client meets a counselor and asks for advices or opinions, that mean the client has trust and high expectation for the counselor. That trust and expectation received from the clients are what make the task somewhat difficult and burdening. A counselor needs to be prepared mentally and physically to face varieties of clients who have different needs and necessities.

Although I have never been to a counseling session or even conduct one, I believe that only during that session the client is able not just to express their problems or dilemma but also the time to comfort themselves. By seeking the help from a professional, the clients somewhat feel secure of spilling the problems out. Even though the counselor’s range of duties does not include giving the absolute solution of a problem, their discussions or dialogues during the session might help the client to come across other solutions. A counselor gives their opinions or samples of solutions or examples of ways to reduce the client’s crisis but does not force or influence the client to accept his/her idea.

One specialty in counseling that caught my intention is marriage and family counseling. For me, this field of counseling is important as it deals with the most common problems among the society. Most families face the common problems of parenting, communication, infidelity, loss of family members or substance abuse. Counselor in this field of specialty does not only assist by giving several ideas on how to manage the situation, but also may give tips on dos and don’ts to generate a healthy family. Marriage counseling is very important for every couple who wants to start a new life together. Counselor would give advices, preparatory for new challenges that would surely come in the future, importance of being understanding and tolerance towards each partner and so on. These tasks are what make the profession as a marriage and family counselor interesting because every happy and healthy family produces successful children and the children today are the leaders tomorrow.

To conclude, the subject of counseling itself is interesting but when it comes to practicality, it is not an easy thing to do. This is because every counselee or client has different needs of advice and different ways to be approached. The variety of behavior of human being is one of the big challenges that strike every counselor besides concerning the age of certain group of clients and also clients background. But nevertheless, counseling as complicated and as challenging it is, the main purpose is to help people and that is what matters.