Child Abuse And The Family

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorCollege, Undergraduate April 2001

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Marriage and family counselors play many roles in issues dealing child abuse and family violence. Although these issues are very serious, counselors can help their clients work through these problems using advising, counseling, guiding, sympathy and encouragement, both friend-like and professional. As a counselor, certain steps must be taken to provide the most high quality attention.

The type of method the counselor uses varies given the situation. Since counseling is less a profession than a technique or art, understanding the client becomes easier because there should be no professional pressures. The role of a counselor can be easily understood but really looking at individual cases make it more interesting.

Many techniques contribute the art of counseling. First, the counselor needs to develop a rapport with the client. This will help establish a healthy counselor/client relationship, which will in turn allow the client to feel more comfortable disclosing information about their personal lives.

The whole idea behind this step is the establishment of trust between people. It is hard to tell the most intimate details of ones life to a complete stranger. In most all-intimate relationships, there is a balance of self-disclosure. There will also be constant struggle (like a tug of war) to find appropriate times to self-disclose. This theory should help to realize how hard it is to self-disclose to a stranger. If disclosing in a relationship is like a tug of war, think about how much time it must take a person with trust issues to finally disclose.

Second, a counselor must use empathy to help ease the pain of the client. "Empathy comes the German origin "einfulung" which means "feeling into," and from the Greek origin "pathos" which means a deep and strong feeling close to suffering." (May, 1989) Empathy is used to help ease...