What are the skills requirements of psychological counselors?
Psychological counseling is a job that requires long-term communication with others. It helps others, improves themselves, and allows visitors to slowly open their hearts and observe their own thinking and interpersonal communication patterns. And by consulting their own professional ability and methods, guide visitors to make certain adjustments, improve their social adaptability, and respond to various external stimuli with more mature cognition, thus maintaining mental health and good mood. Therefore, as a psychological counselor, you must have the following basic qualities:
1, good personality, these are the most basic and important requirements of psychological counseling, because some privacy secrets of visitors are often involved in the counseling process, and psychological counselors should strictly abide by the principle of confidentiality from both legal and moral aspects.
2, good listening ability, visitors need to open their hearts during the consultation process, so as to make the consultation more smooth. However, in actual consultation, many visitors will still hide something for various reasons, or their words are not satisfactory, so consultants need to capture the core issues of visitors by capturing useful information.
3. Good language expression and generalization ability, able to accurately grasp the key points of the problem, at the same time express their understanding of the visitor's narrative and make a concise summary of the effective response of the visitor.
4. Have a certain sense of identity, feel his current situation and difficulties from the visitor's point of view, respect the visitor's previous choices without any prejudice, become a problem-solving partner, and help me out of the current predicament.
5. Kindness and sincerity. Most people who engage in psychological counseling are either based on psychological hobbies or have encountered difficulties themselves. After solving them, I began to want to help others embark on the road of employment. The essence of this profession is to help others and help yourself. If you don't have a compassionate heart and a helping heart, it's hard for you to go far.
6, perfect professional ability, from theoretical knowledge to practice, there is a perfect system of learning accumulation, and after the assessment of the state and the association, holding the relevant association certification.
Quality requirements of psychological counselors
1, knowledge condition
Psychological counseling is a major with its own theories, methods and skills. People who engage in psychological counseling do not rely on good wishes, enthusiasm and common sense to comfort and persuade those who have difficulties, or to encourage psychological patients to fight against diseases. You must go through special training and get a certificate before you can take up your post. Counselors must devote themselves to the theory of psychological counseling, master the methods and skills of psychological counseling, actively participate in the practical activities of psychological counseling, and constantly improve their professional level in order to become a qualified counselor.
Psychological counselors must develop various knowledge structures, such as general psychology, children's psychology, personality psychology, social psychology, mental health, abnormal psychology, psychometrics, clinical psychology and other basic theoretical knowledge, and master counseling methods and skills such as psychological help skills, family therapy, behavior correction methods, music therapy and cognitive therapy.
There will be many problems in the process of psychological counseling. For example, youth's outlook on life, world outlook and values, interpersonal relationship, personality development and social adaptation, young students' professional thinking and learning methods, adolescent physical and mental problems, love and marriage, and so on. This requires consultants to have a comprehensive knowledge structure. Psychological counselors should not only have professional knowledge of psychology, but also take the world outlook and methodology of dialectical materialism and historical materialism as their ideological guidance, and resolutely resist the invasion of all superstitious ideas that violate science. In addition, there must be knowledge of pedagogy, sociology and basic medicine. Only by developing one's own knowledge structure in many ways can we give the explorers correct inspiration, education and guidance.
In psychological counseling, you may meet visitors with different mentality and encounter unexpected problems in advance. Psychological counselors must have rich experience in psychological counseling and improve their professional ability. Besides learning from books, they should also learn from practice. Summarize experience in consulting practice, learn and develop predecessors' theories, improve the ability of analyzing and solving problems, and form their own unique style.
Only by combining theoretical knowledge with practical ability can we understand how the difficulties of visitors are formed? Where are the roots of contradictions and conflicts? What is the real meaning of their psychological symptoms? What defensive measures are used to deal with inner conflicts? Only in this way can we help inquirers analyze problems, guide them out of difficulties and promote their personality growth.
2. Professional ethics
Psychological counseling is a helpful work, which requires time and energy, understanding, sympathy, care and patience for the clients. Only those who are helpful can give visitors warmth, create a safe and free atmosphere, accept all kinds of positive and negative emotional experiences of visitors and enter their inner world.
Psychological counselors must have a strong sense of responsibility, be honest and frank with visitors, and make them willing to expose their inner privacy and secrets, which is worthy of their trust.
Counselors must protect the vital interests of visitors, respect the personality and wishes of visitors, respect privacy and keep secrets, which are all important contents to protect the interests of visitors. Never put the privacy and consultation mentioned by the caller.
People outside the relationship are free to chat and play, which is the minimum moral standard as a consultant.
When helping visitors overcome psychological barriers, they should be guided by good ethical concepts. This is of great significance to help the healthy development of the caller's morality and personality.
Psychological counseling should help visitors to ease their psychological confusion and guide them to face life with a positive attitude. Guide them to correctly handle all kinds of problems encountered in life, and solve the contradictions encountered in the relationship between ideals and reality, interests and specialties, individuals and collectives, and individuals and others. At the same time, tourists' mental state and moral quality have been sublimated.
The basic mode of psychological counseling is education and medical treatment, so psychological counselors should have both morality and medical ethics [2].
3. Psychological quality
Counselors themselves should be mentally healthy people. The better the counselor's mental health level, the greater the help he can provide to visitors in the counseling relationship. On the contrary, if the counselor is psychologically unhealthy, it will produce distorted values and eccentric mentality, which will lead to confusion and conflict in counseling, and may even induce some diseases of the counselor.
A competent consultant is active, optimistic and energetic in his work and life, besides the relationship between consultation and interview. They can integrate their optimistic attitude of loving life into the consulting work and bring enthusiasm and vitality to the consulting work. Psychological counselors should not only heal people's wounds with superb skills, but also give visitors positive infection and influence with their noble and sound personality strength.
Mentally healthy people can understand others from the objective reality, associate with people with different temperament and personality, understand people's situations and difficulties and give them appropriate sympathy, support and help. If the counselor's mental health is deficient and interpersonal relationship is tense, how to guide the visitors correctly?
Counselors also have their own joys and sorrows. But they are good at scheduling and have a high tolerance for setbacks. Their own needs of love, hate and anger are met outside the relationship between consultation and visiting. They can't have obvious mental illness themselves. They sympathize with the questioner, but don't let this sympathy get too deep. In the whole consultation process, they always keep a cool head and psychological independence.
In the process of consultation, consultants gain insight into their inner world through their own words and expressions. Some visitors don't know much about the essence and principle of psychological counseling, so it's easy to beat around the bush at the beginning, talk about some side issues and hide their real problems. A keen caller can find problems in time and guide the conversation in depth.
A good consultant must have deep and sincere feelings. The conversation between the consultant and the inquirer should be frank, earnest and sincere. Only sincerity can shorten the distance between people, make people feel trusted and open their hearts without reservation. The counselor's mood should be relaxed, cheerful, confident and full of humor, so as to ease the inquirer's nervousness and express his problems in a relaxed environment.
The good psychological quality of counselors is also manifested in high concentration, good memory, fluent language expression and strong adaptability to various accidents. Besides, you need patience, flexibility and vigilance.
In a word, a competent consultant has many good qualities. He is a man with high moral character, rich professional knowledge and healthy psychological quality.