Counselling is neither giving advice nor offering solutions to personal problems. It is a human technology to stimulate people to exploit their God-given human and spiritual resources, in order to change themselves for the better and grow in maturity.
We change ourselves through a learning process, which consists of three stages : exploration-understanding-action. We explore psychologically where we are in our world, understand where we want to be, and devise steps that will take us from where we are to where we want to be.
The counsellor introduces this learning process in the counsellee by going through these five stages :
Attending, Responding, Personalizing, Initiating, Evaluating.
By attending, the counsellor involves the counsellee in the process of couselling; by responding, the counsellor introduces in the counsellee the first stage of the learning process, i.e., exploration; by personalizing, the second stage, understanding; by initiating, the third stage, action; and by evaluating, the counsellor motivates the counsellee to take all the steps required to reach the goal she has set for herself.
All these skills are the outward expression of the counsellor's attitudes of respect, genuineness, empathy, self-disclosure, concreteness, confrontation and immediacy.
Objectives
The aim of this Institute is not to train counsellors; rather, it is to meet the need for continuing formation of Professionals in the Helping Professions.
Means
The means used to meet the objectives are training courses in Personal Counselling of 50 hours duration. These courses offer an integration of the two models of counselling of Robert R. Carkhuff, which appeared in his books, Helping and Human Relations, 1969 and The Art of Helping, 1977.
The integration has modified substantially these models and has added the spiritual dimension of the human being. It is found in the textbook, Personal Counselling,
Thirteenth Revised Edition, 2006, written by J.M. Fuster.
Practicals
The laboratory method and sensitivity training are used. There is no role-playing in the practicals; instead, there is real counselling practice, as trainees are counsellees to one another under supervison. Thus they are in touch with a real person and a real problem. This offers them the scope to adopt the attitudes and practise the skills taught in these courses.
Staff
Founder and Director
J.M. Fuster, S.J.
M.A. (Psy.USA) Ph.D. (Psy), Trained at Carkhuff, Institute of Human Technology, USA.
Achievements upto April 30, 2007
1. Training Courses
140 counselling courses have been conducted in India and abroad: in Bombay, Madras, Delhi, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Nagpur; and in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Australia, Italy, Spain, England, Scotland and Guyana. The participants were 2,000 professionals in the helping professions as follows :
