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1. –My, You are a professionally trained marriage guidance counselor. Could you describe your work?
-Yes, we deal with any type of relationship issue that comes our way. We used to
deal with marriages, but 1990s obviously reflect a change in the way behaviors are,
and very much now, people are cohabiting rather than marrying. And, therefore, open our doors to anybody who is in a relationship where things are difficult. So our
work is focused on either relationship breakdowns or marital breakdowns in the hope
that we can either help people to reconcile or help them to separate without too
much animosity and with more understanding.
2. The breakdown of marriage in Britain is about 33,34%, well higher than any other European country. With in fact, that’s first marriages, 50% of second marriages breaking down.
3. How long have you been doing this sort of work?
-I’ve been involved in counseling now for 8 years.
-What sort of qualifications do you need to do what you do as a profession?
-For counseling, you don’t actually need any formal qualifications, but the actual selection procedure is extremely stringent. It’s a two year training, and they way we select people, it means that most of our counselors are 99% of the way there. We then just put the skills around it. And the training’s ongoing. You have to read a lot, you have to attend these courses--there are day courses, seminars. We have training all the time.
4. So what are the most important qualities that make a good counselor?
-Well, the qualities are that you are a good listener, that your genuinely care about other people, that you can separate empathy from sympathy, that how you behave fits with what you say, that you have the ability to make people feel that they are important. To be a counselor of any sort you need to be emotionally quite strong yourself.
-Do you find the work stressful at all? Does it upset you?
-I would be a liar to say it didn’t ever upset me. It’s always interesting in what upsets me. Because if it upsets me, it means it touches a part of my life in some way. And this is why any good counselor has counseling available to them.
5. If someone in a relationship has got a problem and they come to your for help and guidance, that is a very big responsibility. Does that responsibility ever worry you?
-It used to worry me far more. For any counselor beginning on the route of counseling, it is an awesome responsibility. But what experience has told me is that people never do what they don’t want to do, and what a good counselor does is hands the responsibility back to the client. So I see counseling as empowerment for the individual, for them to choose what they want, so that they actually go and live their life in a more positive way. So the responsibility I try to hand back to the client.
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