INSIGHT ORIENTED COUNSELLING APPROACHES

INTRODUCTION:

          Insight-oriented psychotherapy is an approach with a focus on helping clients to understand their own emotions and motivation.

          Insight is the ability to acquire a new accurate awareness about a thing or person. Insight therapy is a type of therapy that helps clients to understand how past events negatively influencing their current inner workings, thoughts, and behavior.

TYPES OF INSIGHT APPROACHES:

1. PSYCHOANALYTIC:

          Psychoanalytic therapy is based upon the idea that much of our behavior thoughts and attitudes are regulated by the unconscious portion of the mind and not within conscious control. There are different levels associated with the clients motivating factors such as:

• Id; source of all energy and instinctual drives, unconscious
• Ego; capacity for rationality and logic
• Superego; nature off right and wrong

          Freud introduced the concept of different levels of awareness that motivate behavior.

SEVERAL REGIONS OF MIND

• The Conscious Mind; which contents those thoughts and feelings that are always accessible.
• The Pre-Conscious Mind; which holds elements on the edge of awareness that, with manual effort, can be made immediately accessible.
• The Unconscious Mind; which harbors the secret of the soul.

          The human mind has many aspects that can be investigated and analyzed. With that in mind, each layer of awareness that is peeled away gives therapies access into the human psyche by allowing the unconscious thought of the client to surface (Kottler and Shepard, 2015)

          Clients should be encouraged to say what comes to mind even it seems silly, irrelevant. One such way of accomplishing this is through the technique of free association which involves exploring a person’s unconscious mind through spontaneous word association. Talk therapy is designed to help uncover unconscious occurrences. Then the originating cause can be identified.

ATTACHMENT THEORY

          According to attachment theory, “children are born with a biologically determined behavior system aimed at eliciting caregiver care and support during distress” (Bonmans, 2016 p: 311)

          The psychoanalytic approach can benefit a child who looks at are healthy attachment style. Psychoanalytic therapy can show a child what a healthy relationship looks like. It is where adults and children develop healthy relationships. Furthermore, during therapy adults can moron the lost childhood while learning how to develop a healthy attachment.

          The psychoanalytical approach and the attachment theory are useful to uncovering suppressed memories that may be buried deep in the unconscious mind.

Limitations:

1. Extremely complex and dense (required your specialized training).
2. Over-emphasis on the role of insight and insufficient emphasis on making life changes.
3. Tend to ignore the effect of socio-cultural factors in the causes of the client’s concern.
4. Note useful for the person who requires immediate relief of symptoms.

2. CLIENT CENTERED THERAPY:

          Client-centered therapy like all other insight therapies requires a great rapport between the client and therapist. The therapist established this relationship by being genuine, actively listening to the client, not using judgment, and providing empathy.

 Active Listening;

a. Helps the client feel reassured that he or she is deeply understood or accepted.

b. Clarify a client’s feelings so the situation may be viewed more objectively.

c. Encourage the client to move from superficial concern to deeper problems.

LIMITATIONS:

1. Does not respond to the difficulties encountered in the process of translating feelings into action.
2. May give too much responsibility to the client and reduce the role of the counselor as an expert.
3. Tends to be more useful for highly verbal clients.
4. Narrow in its focus on feelings and tend to ignore thought and behavior.
5. Main over-focus on issues of freedom autonomy and independence.

3. PSYCHODYNAMICS THERAPY:

          Psychodynamics therapy is like psychoanalysis in that its goal is to discover the root of emotional suffering, but it is much shorter and more modernized than psychoanalysis therapy. Psychodynamic therapy delves into how dynamics in one’s life affect one’s current emotional state or psyche.

4. GESTALT THERAPY:

          Gestalt therapy is more focused on the present moment. The goal of Gestalt s is to help the client gain insights that their dread and guilt about the past and worry about the future are what cause their suffering. Gestalt therapy also focuses on helping clients be themselves instead of someone else.

• Stuck; the inability to resolve issues and thereby avoid dealing with now.
• Polarization is another key gestalt concept; refers to the various parts of the self that are in conflict.

GESTALT INTERVENTIONS

     Double Chairing:

               a. Help people experience opposite pole off self.

               b. Councilor explores a problem with the client and identified opposing feelings.

               c. Two chairs are set up and the client is instructed to take one and talk to the empty chair from one pole of the issue.

LIMITATIONS:

1. The tendency of counselors to be overly manipulated and controlling.
2. Cognitive thinking factors are greatly de-emphasized.
3. Very little emphasis on acquiring behaviorally useful life skills.
4. Often overemphasized feelings to the exclusion of cognitive aspects of existence.

5. NARRATIVE THERAPY:

          Night if therapy is a highly interactive, egalitarian, and collaborative process.

TECHNIQUES:

1. Externalizing Conversation: counseling process often begins with externalizing the problem.
2. Naming the problem: Counselors help clients come up with a one-word name or short phrase for their complaints.
3. Identifying Unique Outcome: the importance of listening for times in clients’ recounting of their stories when their problems did not exist or when they had found a way to solve them.
4. Use Therapeutic Documents: create new documents for the client that serves as ‘counter documents’ and facilitate clients’ developing alternative stories.

LIMITATIONS:

1. Can be argued that encouraging people to externalize their problems help them avoid personal responsibility for them.
2. Tends to use its unique vocabulary or a common word in unusual ways.
3. Has yet to demonstrate how it can be culturally sensitive with clients who feel safer with counselors they perceive as experts.

HOW DOES INSIGHT ORIENTED PSYCHOTHERAPY WORKS:

          Insight-oriented psychotherapy works out of the assumptions that the better you know yourself the better you will function. Better Functioning includes symptoms along with improvement in your work, academics, social, romantic, and even athletic life. It teaches you how and why you function in the way you do and to clarify your motivations. It shows you that you have an internal world, and it interprets how that internal world operates. It gives you self-knowledge.

         Unconscious mental life is a core assumption in insight-oriented therapy. This means that there is a belief that your problems, symptoms, and general discomforts are rooted in, or caused by, something that occurring inside you but about which you do not yet know. The primary method of therapy becomes making the unconscious conscious.

         Counselors are asked to identify what theory of practice they have chosen. However, that decision may not be as easy as it sounds. Also, counselors can be guided by a theoretical framework as they apply to specific theories and practices (Cotton, 2013).

         So, counselors must decide to follow an insight-oriented approach. Furthermore, counselors should understand their values, morals, standards as this will guide them towards existing theories they can identify with.

         A harmonious client-counselor rapport must be established for insight therapy to work. As with most cases in therapy, clients must develop enough trust in their therapist to reveal their deepest and most troubling experiences, thought, and emotions. Clients must divulge details of the troubled relationship in the past, difficulties, or parents growing up, any kind of abuse, or severed ties with family members.

CONCLUSION:

         The differing theories are useful for understanding people and behaviors, and promoting change, however, each theorist seems to contradict one another (Kottler & Shepard, 2015).

         Insight-oriented approaches promote understanding and focus on issues from the past, current family interactions, dysfunctional thinking, behavioral inconsistency, or functional aspects of continuing to act self-destructively (Kottler & Shepard, 2015, p201).

         Likewise, psychoanalytic approaches center beliefs on how early occurrences in life, may have affected and influenced a client’s behaviors (Cory, et al., 2014).

         The main goal of insight-oriented therapy is to bring to light and then change these entrenched feelings because they are seen as the main causal agents in our psychological lives.