ABSTRACT
To be effective counselors, students must learn to “develop therapeutic relationships, establish appropriate counseling goals, design intervention strategies, evaluate client outcome, and successfully terminate the counselor-client relationship” (Council for the Accreditation of Counseling and Related Helping Professions, 2001, Section II, K5b). Throughout this primer and in your program of study, you are given opportunities to grow in self-awareness, a skill critical to a therapeutic counselor-client relationship and to maintaining appropriate professional boundaries. In Part Two, you will begin learning the essential interviewing skills of basic and advanced active listening and questioning, and the use of affective, cognitive, and behavioral interventions. These basic skills and the more advanced skills you will learn later are based on theories and practices developed over the last century. Counseling is a profession in which many styles and techniques make up the work of a client session. Today, more than 400 different systems of counseling and psychotherapy are in use around the world (Corsini, 2008).
