What is interpretation and how would you use this skill as a counselor?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

?Broadly speaking, interpretation refers to a counselor’s ideas about a client’s situation that the counselor shares with the client.
?Interpretation is typically used to draw connections between the events or patterns of behavior in a client’s life that the counselor sees as being interwoven.
This skill is the backbone of psychoanalytic, insight-oriented counseling and psychotherapy.
?For therapists and counselors trained in other orientations, it is one skill among many used to promote a client’s self-awareness and understanding.
?Interpretation allows the counselor the freedom to reflect most elegantly and thoughtfully on the client’s issues and to suggest connections between past and current happenings in the client’s life.
?Interpretation can be a useful asset in promoting introspective, insight learning.
It can help free a person from the constrictions of the past through understanding the connections—and the hold on the present—that those associations still have.
?Like paraphrasing and reflections of content and feeling, interpretation allows the counselor to consider the meaning of the material a client brings to counseling.
?Unlike paraphrasing and reflection, however, interpretation allows for the interjection of the counselor’s ideas about this material. This makes the skill a potent, tricky, tool in the arsenal. It should be used judiciously and tentatively.
?Interpretation should always be used to promote learning and to facilitate client growth, not to demonstrate counselor brilliance. It is always preferable for the client to discover aspects of herself for herself, and the best interpretations simply set the stage for that discovery.