ABSTRACT
When someone decides to seek out counselling this is presumably because they anticipate that it will be helpful in some way. Often a new client is not particularly clear about what they want from counselling or indeed how it will assist. Nevertheless they expect that it will result in some gain, some improvement in their quality of life. It is my belief that in the majority of instances this is the case, that counselling is indeed a productive expert ence for the client. I imagine that most of the time all in the profession will share this belief. If counselling were not, on balance, living up to this aspiration then it would not attract and hold the many committed people who work in the field. All practitioners will inevitably have those occasional days when all the evidence seems to refute this belief, the client whose carefully nurtured progress crumbles and falls away, those who never arrive for the sessions booked or seem to give up on the therapeutic work, others who decide against committing themselves to the tasks that seem so necessary and urgent to the counsellor. But the times when there are more than one or two such disappointments are thankfully rare and easily forgotten in the face of more positive results with others.
