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Establishing, promoting and maintaining counselling relationship
for effective working alliance at a distance
Fidel O Okopi
National Open University of Nigeria, Lagos – Nigeria.
Accepted 17th April, 2012 |
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The
paper focuses on how to establish, promote and maintain
therapeutic relationship, rapport and effective working alliance
at a distance. The paper explored the possibility of counsellors
using telephone and computer/internet technologies to
communicate their generic skills, receptive and responding
skills to the clients vis-à-vis facilitating clients’ self
disclosure, growth towards self autonomy and learning new coping
strategies that would have more generalised application in the
whole life of the client. The counsellors’ generic attributes,
receptive and responding skills identified in this paper
include; empathic understanding of the clients and unconditional
respect for clients and to be perceived as congruent, genuine,
honest, and non judgemental acceptance of clients. The objective
of the paper is to sensitise the counsellors of the advantages,
prospects, challenges, and ethical issues that might arise from
telephone and computer/internet counselling. The use of
technologies for counselling at a distance could only be
effective if the process is ‘humanised’ and also not with
intension of substituting face-to-counselling process with
technology. The choice of mode of counselling in any situation
must be mutual agreed upon by the counsellor and counselee
before the commencement of the process.
Key words:
Establishing, promoting, maintaining, counselling, therapeutic,
relationship, technologies, telephone, computer/internet.
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