The client’s request is what the client wants to get as a result, his task, which he must formulate as a goal.
The first thing a counseling psychologist encounters is a lack of requests. People come with complaints, not requests.
Of course, there are exceptions. Business people who come to coaching often come with very competent and thoughtful requests. But housewives and young girls with personal questions often come with vague complaints and inadequate requests. It is easier for them to worry than to think and precisely formulate their request. «I’m sick, help me!» “I have such problems…” and “What should I do?” — these are not requests, but a scam for pity. Answering the question “What should I do?” without understanding what the client really wants is not worth it. “What is wrong with you is understandable. What you do not want — heard. What do you want?» — As a rule, general words are heard, often in negative formulations (get rid of, stop), but this is already a step forward.
For example. “What did I understand from your letter? You have many problems: you are lonely, you are angry with your parents, while you are reasonable and energetic. Your letter is long, but I didn’t understand the main thing in it: what do you want, what tasks do you set. If you want to work — come up with, guess, determine what you want. Write me, please, one, two, three of your goals. And I’ll tell you which ones I’ll work with.»
At this stage, the main task of the consultant is to translate the client’s complaints into his goals and objectives.
Not every request you need to work with. Sometimes it is necessary to make sure that the client came to you exactly with what he says, and not with some other, extraneous goals for psychological counseling. Maybe he just hits on you? Another not uncommon variant of an “empty” request is when the client invents a problem that does not really exist.
Often this is a conversation about fears. Be sure to specify how often she has a fear that worries her, what it specifically expresses itself and what real concerns it brings. If it turns out that this is a fear of heights that occurs once every few years when a girl approaches a precipice on a mountain, then, apparently, it is cheaper for a girl not to approach the abyss’s edge than to work on this topic with a consultant for money.
Who should formulate the client’s request? — It would seem a strange question, since it seems to be obvious: the client himself must determine and formulate his request. This is his life, this is bad for him, he knows what he needs. However, not all so simple. The usual situation at the beginning of a consultation is the absence of a clear request. The client is ready to describe his problem over and over again (problems after problems) and look at the consultant with plaintive eyes in the hope that he understood everything and will tell him what his request is. Option — waiting for treatment … Here, a mistake can be both formulating a request for the client, and the lack of assistance to the client in choosing and formulating his request.
If the client is too lazy to think and wants the consultant to work for him: makes unhappy eyes and plays the position of the Victim, it is not worth doing the work for him to formulate his request, you should not reinforce his bad habit of feeling sorry for himself and exploiting others. Here it is good to insist that the client defines his request himself. He talks about his problems over and over again, you listen calmly over and over again and are interested: “I see. What do you want?» Answering the question “What should I do?” without understanding what the client really wants is not worth it. To the question “What should I do”, the simplest answer is the question: “What do you want?”
Sometimes you can help a little, but the forms and sizes of help here are varied, from the ironic “Do you want to talk about it?” «Do you want to be terrified with me?» to the more constructive: «You want me to do for you — what?» or “What will be the real result of our consultation for you?”
Have patience, don’t expect to always get reasonable answers to this. And don’t be misled by the wording: «I want to change the situation, I don’t know how.» “There are several solutions – I can’t choose.” “I know what I want to do, but I can’t decide on the first step” — options for psychotherapeutic response.
Don’t be fooled: this continues to be a scam for pity. Listen carefully: these are negative formulations, there is only a complaint about the problem, but there is no setting of any specific goal. And the client is waiting for you to do his job for him.
If the client is trying, honestly looking for a solution to the problem, but he lacks the experience and qualifications to analyze his situation correctly in order to correctly formulate the problem and set the task, it is quite possible to help him by once offering him certain formulations of his possible goals, and when — having completely decided for him what his problem is, what he needs to strive for now, what tasks to set and what exactly should be done now. An experienced consultant solves such questions independently.
A common situation is when the client himself does not know what to complain about, because he is ready to complain about everything. It’s even harder if it’s family counseling, and the spouses are dumping problem after problem on the counselor. In this situation, if the client gives us, in fact, several problems to choose from, it is up to the consultant to determine what should be done. Guidelines for selection: what will the consultant cope with (do not take on tasks that you don’t know how to solve), what will the client cope with (take the easiest task for the client), where the result will be more obvious (close and observable, which can be controlled and the fact which you can refer to later).
It should be taken into account that in many cases the client formulates his request and goal based on the myths of popular psychological literature: in case of bad relations in the team, he may be convinced that the whole point is in the manipulations of others, respectively, he sets the task of learning to resist manipulations, not noticing how conflicting with his own communication. Or, in another situation, behind a situation of uncertainty, the girl immediately sees the problem of the lack of parental love in her childhood and asks to teach her to love herself, since she did not have enough parental love in her childhood. In these cases, following the path of a client request is not constructive; in such cases, the task of consultation is formulated by the consultant, as a person more competent in such situations.
Just like a doctor decides how to treat you properly. If your stomach hurts, one or another direction of treatment after the examination should be determined by a specialist: he is a specialist, he knows better.
As a rule, dead ends are requests like: “It is important for me to understand what I want”, “Why does this happen to me all the time?”, “I just want to understand the situation”, or “I don’t understand why he does this!” More productive are formulations that are not intelligible, not phenomenological, but effective, behavioral: “Help me decide which institute to enter”, “I want to learn how to build long-term relationships with worthy men”, “I want to draw conclusions on how I should behave in such a future -some situation”, “What position should I take in relation to my young man, if I have such and such plans for him, and he took the following position…”
As with the formulation of any goal, the most important points in the formulation of the request are usually the positivity of the formulation, specificity and responsibility. The sooner the consultant moves the client from the position of the Victim to the position of the Author, helps to formulate the specific task of the consultation in one way or another, the more successfully the whole thing will go on.