Establishing and maintaining a rapport

There are some other contributions which the counselor can make to the establishment and maintenance of rapport. The realization that everything the client says is kept in strictest confidence and not disclosed to anyone without permission is of great value to him as he comes to face things about which he does not feel at all happy. Also the fact that he does not have to face the counselor except by his own initiative and desire. This may not always be the case, for example when a minister acts as counselor to one or two of his own parishioners with whom he may have continuing pastoral relationship. This is dealt with more fully in the section relative to the minister’s assets and his hindrances as a marriage counselor.

There are many factors which affect the quality of the rapport which are to be found in the client, and these deserve some consideration. In the first place the degree of motivation for coming will have a very profound effect. The client who only comes to please someone else and not from a genuine desire for constructive help will obviously need more delicate and sensitive handling for the establishment of rapport than will the client who is anxious for help and confident of the value of counseling as a channel of help. In some cases the second partner comes with considerable doubt and very much “on guard,” wondering how much has been reported about him, and what the counselor may be thinking about him. It is interesting to watch the progressive relaxation of such people as they come to feel the counselor’s non-critical acceptance.

An occasional handicap to the establishment of rapport is in the fact that the client has been referred by someone with whom he has built up a good relationship. Every attitude the counselor may show at the beginning may then be compared with those of the previous counselor, and it may need some patience and tact for the new rapport to build on the previous one. The necessary repetition of some of the more painful or irritating parts of the narrative already given to the previous counselor may be distasteful to the client, and this feeling needs to be realized and accepted by the new counselor-or consultant-even though it delays the counseling process to some extent.

When clients are actually directed to attend the counselor, for example by the courts, there may be still more difficulties in the establishment of rapport. If the counselor is not an officer of the court, or an “official” of any kind, but a private individual working under an oath of secrecy which applies even to the courts, the situation is more workable. Such clients may have failed to come on their own initiative simply from lack of awareness of the availability of this kind of counseling or through passivity, or procrastination, or they may have been indifferent, skeptical, or even actively hostile to counseling. They may have been determined to separate, even though the judge feels that there is some hope of possible reconciliation.

When clients come by direction in this way the helping attempt is called conciliation to distinguish it from counseling, which involves willing clients who come on their own initiative. In such directed cases the counselor has first to attempt to win sufficient confidence for them to become willing to make any effort to cooperate at all in the interviews. One of the first steps in this is to encourage the clients to express fully their feelings about being sent for conciliation in this way. The counselor’s warm acceptance of such negative feelings, and the clients’ growing realization that there will be no pressure put on them to stay together will do much to break down any hostility or to overcome any indifference or skepticism which they may have had. When this has come about the conciliation leads into normal counseling.

When these adverse feelings have been overcome the clients will have developed good rapport with the counselor, and it seems obvious that he is by far the most appropriate person with whom they should have the opportunity to go on in the counseling. To set apart some people as “conciliators” with the idea of transferring clients who come to accept further help to “counselors” would ignore or do violence to one of the most essential principles of counseling, the delicate relationship known as rapport. Those who are given the responsibility of conciliation should be the most experienced and highly trained and sensitive counselors obtainable, and they should be able to give all the time necessary for continued counseling where that is accepted by the clients.

Rapport, then, provides the essential framework in which all aspects of the counseling process can go on. It enables the clients to become progressively less inhibited and defensive, and to allow deeply “bottled up” feelings to come to the surface and be dealt with. It also allows the counselor to suggest many things for their consideration which might otherwise have been quite unacceptable to them. As we have seen it is not something fixed or constant, but something which has to be maintained as well as established, and if possible progressively deepened. Rapport always tends to fluctuate at the beginning, and at some points in the counseling process when the counselor may feel that there is not sufficient understanding by the clients as to what is being attempted, he may help greatly by pausing to define the aims and even the methods of the counseling.

In particular at the beginning of any subsequent interviews it may often be necessary for the counselor to set out to restore some of the rapport that is often lost during the period between the interviews for various reasons, such as the client’s feeling that he has said more than he intended, the negative influence of well-meaning and sometimes “all-knowing” relatives and friends, or the attitudes of the marital partner. The first few minutes of all subsequent interviews are often very important for the improvement or lessening of the rapport.

Tags: Counseling