THE INFLUENCE OF THEORETICAL MODELS ON COUNSELING
The varying ideas and beliefs of counseling modalities greatly influence the manner and approach in which therapists help clients. Therapists need to use the theoretical approach most suited to each individual client’s issues to be most effective.
Cognitive Model
The cognitive model is one of the more popular theoretical models used by therapists. Cognitive therapy is brief, focused, time limited, and only deals with the presenting problem.
The major focus of cognitive therapy is on thinking patterns and their modifications. It also focuses on taking new ideas and acting them out. By examining the dysfunctional thinking and self-defeating thought patterns that keep clients from improving, therapists help clients create more satisfying relationships and functional lives.
Behavioral Model
The behavioral model helps clients through demonstrating accurate listening, concern, caring, acceptance, and understanding of the client as a unique person. For therapists to maximize their helping potential, they must first develop positive relationships with their clients, thereby ensuring greater understanding of clients’ issues and which intervention strategies to develop.
By involving clients in goal setting, therapists also provide them with enough motivation to succeed in acquiring adaptive and functional behaviors. Modern day therapists involve clients in the analysis, planning, process, and evaluation of their behavior management program.
Psychodynamic Model
Psychodynamics attempts to help clients by discovering how their past influences the present. Therapists using this approach often use free association as a tool as an aid to understanding past influences. Orthodox psychoanalysis gives special attention to sexual development during the Oedipal period. However, Jungians search for cultural archetypes in history that determine how we live our lives today, and family therapy explores how intergenerational family issues affect our present condition.
Existential Model
The existential model focuses on the meaning of human existence. Existentialism purports that people are responsible for their own lives. Using the existentialist approach, therapists help clients learn to drop their masks and become more open and self-trusting.
To help accomplish the aim of existential therapy, therapists demonstrate unconditional positive regard and empathetic understanding of clients’ internal frame of reference. Clients can become more mature and self-integrated through therapists’ reflecting clients’ feelings.
Family Systems Model
Family therapy has been compared by therapists as simultaneously running a circus with different acts. In the family systems model, therapists follow sequential stages in their attempt to help clients.
The first stage involves the first contact therapists have with their clients. During the first contact with family members, therapists connect with each person in a way that is intimate and meaningful. The second stage requires the therapist to become part of the family through trust and confidence-building with all family members. In this stage therapists use warmth, authority, and interpersonal skills to create connections with each family member.
Conclusion
While each theoretical approach and modality has its advantages and disadvantages, it is imperative that therapists choose the approach most suited to clients’ issues. For example, while there are some similarities, there are important differences between behavioral theory and existential theory.
Behavioral approaches work best with clients who are more rigid in their thought patterns, are more comfortable with structure, and are very goal-oriented. Existential approaches work best with clients who are above average in intelligence, are comfortable with the more gray areas of life, and who are have good communication skills.
Behaviorism and existentialism are alike in that both theories encourage establishing a more humanistically-oriented, warm, genuine, and generally positive relationship with clients, influenced by respect and unconditional regard for clients. Rapport with clients is an essential requirement for building a solid therapeutic foundation in both approaches. However, while behaviorism strives to be structured, concrete, immediate, and focus on goal-setting, existentialism is very flexible in focusing on abstract, philosophical constructs that influence meaning in clients’ lives.
A behavioral approach is therapist-directed, whereas existentialism lets clients decide the flow of their sessions. Behaviorism’s focus on goals contrasts with existentialism’s focus on clients’ beliefs about life and relationships and letting clients’ discover themselves through dialog and introspection. Finally, behaviorism focuses on the extrinsic or outside world and behavior, while existentialism concerns itself mainly with the intrinsic or internal world of clients, their thoughts, feelings, and attitudes.
While both approaches have the goal of alleviating clients’ suffering, their methods are very different. Yet, each is a valid approach, depending on the type of client, their issues, time allowed for therapy. Therefore, all theoretical approaches can be useful if applied appropriately. It is therapists’ responsibility to be knowledgeable about the commonly used modalities so that they know how, when and with whom to apply a particular therapeutic approach, thereby maximizing their therapeutic potential.
SEE POSTS: COMPARISONS OF THEORETICAL COUNSELING MODELS PARTS 1, 2 AND 3
The cognitive model is one of the more popular theoretical models used by therapists. Cognitive therapy is brief, focused, time limited, and only deals with the presenting problem.
The existential model focuses on the meaning of human existence. Existentialism purports that people are responsible for their own lives. Using the existentialist approach, therapists help clients learn to drop their masks and become more open and self-trusting. 
Age, gender and ethnicity play important characterological roles in the therapist/client relationship. The success or failure of therapeutic relationships is dependent on the interaction between the two cohorts in considering and accommodating gender, age and ethnicity factors. In establishing counseling relationships therapists must begin by building a positive foundation with their clients by skillfully eliciting information, establishing a rapport, trust, psychological comfort, and mutual purpose.
The key element required in working with adolescents is trust-building. Adolescents sense if the counselors are genuine, have empathy, and if rapport is established. Adults are more concerned with therapists’ competence and open-mindedness. Adults also consider other factors such as the sensitivity, objectivity, and inter-personal attractiveness of counselors.
Having a strong foundation in clients’ culture and ethnicity supports counselors in laying groundwork for future sessions. Therapists have two ways to view clients in a cultural and ethnic framework. One is the “…etic or focused culture-specific approach…” which “…holds that all cultures are unique and must be understood for their uniqueness” (2005, p.70). By contrast, Hackney and Cormier (2005) cite Atkinson and Hackett (1998) who state that the universal approach is more subjective and includes “…how culture affects the counseling process by broadening the definition of minority to include all oppressed groups…” (p. 70).
1. Understanding and exploring client resistance such as: quitting therapy prematurely, canceling appointments, and resisting self-exploration.
Cognitive therapy is used to treat common presenting issues such as substance abuse, anxiety, and depression. One of the cognitive strategies currently used is A-B-C-D analysis that is closely associated with rational-emotive therapy. In A-B-C-D strategy, A represents the activating event, B represents the clients’ belief system, C presents the consequence produced by the interaction between A and B, and D represents the disputation of such irrational beliefs and thoughts. The goals of the A-B-C-D modality, as in many of the strategies used in cognitive therapy, are designed to help “the client modify existing thought patterns, or remind the client to avoid undesirable thought, or even help the client assess events more constructively”. The main goal, therefore, is to change thoughts so that a positive change in feelings and behaviors of clients can follow, thereby alleviating clients’ distress.
Psychodynamic therapy places emphasis on clients’ unconscious processes. Therapists using a psychodynamic approach attempt “to deal with underlying characterological changes”. Therapists usually play an authoritative role and encourage clients’ transference to identify and resolve clients’ issues. In contrast, however, the free association psychodynamic modality often used requires therapists to become more like teachers/consultants rather than parental figures. Free association allows clients to freely report whatever enters their mind without bias or criticism from therapists thereby aiding unhampered reporting of clients’ unconscious mind.
Existential therapy allows clients to explore the meaning of life and their human existence. The existential approach is useful in helping clients examine issues of personal meaning in their lives and realize their ability for empowerment. Techniques of existentialism are extremely flexible. 
NAME OF THEORY: Gestalt Theory
