Counselor's Supportive and Constructive Confrontational Role

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Question 1
Being a counselor means to provide more supportive role and focus on understanding wider reasons leading to problematic behaviors, and the need to encourage people to creatively develop their own solutions to address problems facing them (Borck and Fawcett, 2013). Counselors are focused on facilitating supportive role to assist people adjust situations of issues and challenges affecting their lives. Counseling is directed to solve somatic, socioeconomic and psychological problems affecting people. Therefore, counselors are focused on assisting people to address such problems. In order to achieve their goals, counselors give both supportive role and constructive confrontational role to ensure that people obtain desired change in their lives. However, counselors need to strike a balance between being supportive and being constructive confrontational.
Although, supportive role is more important in counseling, there are situations where constructive confrontational is required. Swank, Lambie, and Witta (2012) explain that being supportive, counselors tend to focus on listening skills in order to enable people (now clients) become more confident, trusting and open to draw out issues affecting them. Being supportive, counselors focus on encouraging clients to talk about their problems and seek to help these people understand how to solve their own issues. In order to facilitate supportive role, counselors develop values such as empathy, active listening, encouragement, guidance, practical help and behavior modification to enable clients address their own issues.
On the other side, there are cases where counselors employ constructive confrontational role to tell identified people about issues need to be changed. This is a constructive and responsible approach used to tell people something they do not want to hear; it aims to challenge them. This approach is a deliberate attempt that counselors employ to assist people examine the impacts of certain aspect of their attitudes or behaviors (Adams, Vasquez and Prengler, 2015). In this way, a person confronted and is invited to self-examine his life. The confrontation is positive and constructively delivered. Counselors majorly employ constructive confrontational to deliver message to identified people to minimize their defensiveness and strongly invite them to change the attitudes or behaviors. A good example where counselors use constructive confrontational method is at workplace to confront employees, who are strong alcoholics, employees with bad attitudes, and those whose work performance are persistently poor.
Question 2
In counseling, self-disclosure can be a vital skill, though only if it is applied appropriately. Self-disclosure refers to when a counselor shares her own personal experience or views with a client for the aim of enhancing the client’s mental and emotional state. Self-disclosure should be performed mainly for the function of assisting the client, and not to meet the needs of the counselor (Swank, Lambie and Witta, 2012). For instance, if the client is angry over their divorce, the counselor may disclose that they also had survived a divorce. The aim is that the ...