What is meant by the need ‘freedom’? Imagine a toddler who, full of anticipation, conquers a new playground, tries everything, with curiosity, full of joy and with a richness of ideas…! Here is an alternative list for adults: realising one’s own ideas, choosing one’s individual path, thinking outside the box, grasping opportunities, jumping into cold …
What inner psychological competences are required to pursue one’s need for distance? One must be able to feel one’s own rhythm and enjoy one’s own thoughts and feelings, one must be able to focus, one must be able to experience saying goodbye and enjoy saying hello, one must be able to feel connected with solitude …
What is meant by the need ‘distance’? Imagine a toddler in the sand pit, which plays with complete attention in the sand and sees and hears nothing else. Here is a small list for adults: exploring inner worlds, experiencing one’s own rhythm, following one’s own thoughts and feelings without distraction, losing oneself in day dreams, …
What sort of inner psychological competences are required to pursue one’s need for closeness? One must be able to cope with the pain of saying goodbye, because it always hurts when one must separate for a short or long time, one must be able to yearn, because this feeling can arise in the separation, one …
What is meant by the need ‘closeness’? Imagine a toddler, which rests happily in the lap of its mother, allows itself to be teased and chuckles quietly. Here is a small list for adults: leaning against someone, giving and accepting caresses, feeling warmth, surrendering and doing (having to do) nothing, understanding each other without words, …
Trust eases the counselling session, because mistrust is associated with control and testing of the relationship and this activity uses up a lot of time. Therefore, in counselling contexts, in which the time budget is limited, a quick build-up of trust is necessary. The most important thing for this is the easy ‘readability’ of the …
One cannot make empathy, one can only live it and emanate it. Counsellors must like people and must have developed the talent of mentally and emotionally tapping into the internal world of people who are, in part, very different from themselves. To equate the world of other people (unconsciously) with one’s own (“In your place …
Denigrations are the most prominent form of negation. The attention to indications which show that the client devalues himself (“I was really daft there.” or, more subtly, “I would very much like to become more assured, so that this stuttering in meetings finally stops.”) is, in any case, an ongoing activity of the counsellor. In …
“Well, I can tell you one thing, I have never had such an incompetent boss!”. Those who devalue others (and not their intentions or behaviours) always expose themselves to the suspicion that this fulfils an avoidance function in themselves. “You seem very outraged, because your boss is not coming up with the performance which you …
Acceptance, on the part of the counsellor, means that he has an orientation about when he reacts with affirmation and when with negation. With negation (the second side of acceptance) he reacts to everything which runs contrary to the aim of the counselling. He does this to secure the basis for the counselling. For this …