In all our activities, people work from some model of the world, some understanding of how Things are and how they interact. This working model guides our choices of what to do next, so the more accurate it is, the more effective our actions are likely to be. Most professional fields have a body of theory, the condensed wisdom of the ancestors that guides the work, and the further exploration, of contemporary practitioners. This heritage of knowledge is what allows each profession to develop. Without it, each generation would have to start again from scratch.
Counseling - like all psychology - is a relatively new field. There are many ideas about how people thrive and about how things go wrong for people, and many models, competing paradigms, for how to work with people for their healing and growth. Each of these theories of human development generates a set of techniques, a way of working that is consistent with that particular perspective. (Harrow, 1996)
The Role of Theory To be comfortable applying a variety of helping strategies, the counselor must be able to deal with others in the affective/humanistic domain (relating to feeling or emotion), the cognitive domain (relating to thinking or intellectual processes), and the behavioral domain (relating to action or deeds). By extension, the role of the counselor is to aid the client in functioning more effectively in all three domains.
Therefore, counselors must continually develop an understanding of themselves; they need to clarify their own social, economic, and cultural values in order to recognize and separate their orientation and problems from those of their client.
The strategy/theory selected for formally helping a particular client should depend on the counselor’s assessment of deficits in a particular domain (affective, cognitive, or behavioral) as well as the counselor’s own theoretical perspective.......
