Assignment no: 1.

1
Understanding Unsaid: Verbal and Non-verbal skills of communication

Aim: To understand the relevance and practice the various verbal and non-verbal skills of
communication in the counseling room.

Plan: The main plans drawn out for the class were:

1. Screening of the documentary, ‘A Drop of Sunshine’ by Aparna Sanyal based on the life
of Reshma Valliapan in the class.
2. Class Lecture and discussion on the various verbal and non-verbal skills in counseling.
3. Role play activity to understand the applicability and the implication of verbal and
non-verbal skills in counseling.

Procedure:
As the first assignment aimed at understanding the relevance of verbal and non-verbal skills, it
became imperative to understand it first by discussing it in the classroom setting. The classroom
discussion gave the students insights into various verbal and non-verbal skills which makes for
an effective counselor. The class lecture began with the teacher pointing out certain key terms
and laying the groundwork for the students to further discuss it. Overall, it built a strong
foundation for students before inculcating and practicing these skills.

Once, students had a basic understanding, a documentary named ‘A Drop of Sunshine was
screened in the class. The documentary dwelled on the life of a teenage girl named Reshma
Valliapan who was diagnosed with Schizophrenia. It realistically portrayed her constant battle
with the illness and how she learned to live with it. The documentary helped students to get a
more practical approach at understanding and usage of these skills.

Following the documentary, as per the plan drawn for the class, the students were supposed to do
an activity based on role-playing. It was done to understand the applicability of verbal and
non-verbal skills. Here the group was divided into pairs and each pair was given a distinct
scenario to portray. Within each pair, one student played the role of a counselor while the other
played the role of the client in the session. The situation for each of the role-play scenarios was
provided by the teacher and each group prepared a short role-play script of their own. Through
this activity, students were able to incorporate the various verbal and nonverbal skills of
counseling.

Process Notes:
Verbal and nonverbal skills play a crucial role in determining the extent to which the counseling
process is successful. When a client first comes for the counseling session, they might likely be
hesitant and clueless at the same time. Here, the relevance of verbal and nonverbal skills is
highlighted and should be used by both the client and the counselor to make the process of
counseling more effective and beneficial for the client.

VERBAL SKILLS:

Open communication is the key to an effective counseling process, thus verbal skill of
communication cannot be neglected. It shows that the counselor is attentive and desires to listen,
comprehend and discuss the issues and problems with the client (Cormier, Nurius, & Osborn,
2017). These verbal skills indicate that the counselor is focusing on the person of the client.

Okun and Kantrowitz (2015) list other verbal and nonverbal behavioral aids that counselors often
display throughout counseling. Among the supportive verbal responses are using understandable
words, summarizing, being nonjudgmental and respectful, and occasionally using humor to
reduce tension.
Apart from communication, there are other skills called micro-skills. These are specific skills a
counselor can use to enhance their communication with clients. These skills enable a counselor
to effectively build a working alliance and engage clients in a discussion that is both helpful and
meaningful. The skills are discussed below:

1. Focusing- The counselor works as an anchor during the counseling session and focusing
enables the counselor to direct the client’s conversational flow into certain areas and
topics. It is a micro skill that is relevant to all stages of a counseling interview. This skill
however should be used sparingly.

Ivey and Ivey (2003) have identified seven areas a counselor can focus on in the counseling
session to bring about broader perspectives and potential solutions.
 2. Encouragers, Paraphrasing, And Summarising- A counselor must encourage a client
to continue to talk, open up more freely and explore issues in greater depth by providing
accurate responses through encouraging, paraphrasing, and summarising. Responding in
this way informs the client that the counselor has accurately heard what they have been
saying.
Encouragers, paraphrases, and summaries are basic to helping a client feel understood.
Encouragers, also known as intentional listening, involve fully attending to the client, thus
allowing them to explore their feelings and thoughts more completely. Paraphrasing and
summarising are more active ways of communicating to the client that they have been listened
to. Summarising is particularly useful to help clients organize their thinking.

3. Questioning- Questions during the counseling session can help to open up new areas for
discussion. They can assist to pinpoint an issue and they can assist to clarify information
that at first may seem ambiguous to the counselor. Questions that invite clients to think or
recall information can aid in a client’s journey of self-exploration.
Counselors should be knowledgeable about the different types of questioning techniques,
including the appropriate use of them and likely results. It is also important to be aware and
cautious of over-questioning. There are two main types of questions used in counseling:
 A. Open Questions- Open questions are those that cannot be answered in a few words, they
encourage the client to speak and offer an opportunity for the counselor to gather
information about the client and their concerns.
B. Closed Questions - Closed questions are questions that can be answered with a minimal
response (often as little as “yes” or “no”). They can help the counselor to focus on the
client or gain very specific information. Such questions begin with: is, are, or do.

4. Confrontation- Confrontation as a counseling skill is an attempt by the counselor to

gently bring about awareness in the client of something that they may have overlooked or
avoided.
There are three steps to confrontation in counseling. The first step involves the identification of
mixed or incongruent messages (expressed through the client's words or non-verbal). The
second step requires the counselor to bring about awareness of these incongruities and assist the
client to work through them. Finally, step three involves evaluating the effectiveness of the
intervention evidenced by the client's change and growth.

5. Reflection Of Meaning- Reflection of meaning refers to the deeply held thoughts and
meanings underlying life experiences. A counselor who uses the reflection of meaning in
their work, they will find that clients will search more deeply into the aspects of their
own life experiences.

6. Self-Disclosure- The benefits or advantages of self-disclosure include: helping the client

to not feel alone, decreasing client anxiety, improving the client's awareness of different
viewpoints, and increasing counselor genuineness.
Some disadvantages of applying self-disclosure include: moving the focus from the client, taking
too much counseling time (and thus reducing client disclosure), creating role confusion (who is
helping who?), possibly trivializing the client's issue by implying everyone goes through it and
interfering with transference.

7. Active Listening- Active listening is an essential skill counselor should capitalize on to

develop positive and healthy interactions with a client. Active listening intentionally
 focuses on who you are listening to, whether in a group or one-on-one, to understand
what he or she is saying. As the listener, you should then be able to paraphrase in your
own words what they have said to their satisfaction. This does not mean you agree with,
but rather understand, what they are saying.
There are numerous situations in which counselors can utilize active listening to build rapport
with clients and improve overall communication. Some of these are explored below.

A. Information - getting a clear picture. This means asking questions to find out about the
needs, instructions, and context of a client. Counselors should check back to ensure
they’ve heard and understood the relevant details, and that the client agrees with the facts.

B. Affirmation- affirming, acknowledging, and exploring the problem. Listening actively to

a person who would benefit from having their problem acknowledged by the counselor.
The problem may or may not involve the counselor directly. Counselors may reflect on
the client’s feelings and perhaps the content of the problem with a single statement of
acknowledgment or during a dialogue over some time, exploring the difficulty in more
depth.

C. Inflammation - responding to a complaint. When clients tell the counselor they are
unhappy with them, criticize them, complain about them, or get it off their chest, the best
thing the counselor can do (although challenging) is to effectively listen.

Active listening is an effective tool to reduce the emotion of a situation. Every time the counselor
correctly labels an emotion, the intensity of it dissipates like bursting a bubble. The speaker feels
heard and understood. Once the emotional level has been reduced, reasoning abilities can
function more effectively. If the emotions are high, counselors should deal with the emotions
first by using active listening skills. Effective use of active listening skills can turn a challenging
situation into a cooperative situation.
NON-VERBAL SKILLS:

Besides verbal skills, the non-verbal skills and behaviors of the counselor are equally important.
According to Mehrabian (1970), physically attending behaviors such as smiling, leaning forward,
making eye contact, gesturing, and nodding one’s head are effective nonverbal ways of
conveying to clients that the counselor is interested in and open to them. Egan (2014)
summarizes five nonverbal skills involved in initial attending. They are best remembered in the
acronym SOLER.

Highlen and Hill (1984) highlight the importance

of Non-verbal behaviors as channels of
communication, serving the functions of:
● Regulating conversations
● Communicating emotions
● Modifying verbal messages
● Providing messages about the helping
relationship
● Giving insights into self-perceptions
● Providing clues that people are not saying
what they are thinking.
There are various non-verbal skills as shown in the adjacent flow chart and discussed below:

1. Eye contact- Eye contact is a powerful communication tool. It is an important indicator

of showing interest and attentiveness. It can also be used to show care and comfort to the
client.
However, it should be used with caution. If the counselor doesn't make eye contact, it may seem
that the counselor is not interested. But, if stared fixedly, it may make the client uncomfortable.
In general, a moderate amount of eye contact, along with closely observing the client notice the
effect on them, is recommended.

2. Posture/Body position- Posture may be the most frequently noticed aspect of “body
language”. The goal is to go for a relaxed body position. This may include leaning
slightly forward, as part of your way of communicating involvement and interest.
Facial expressions. Psychologists have distinguished six primary emotions: sadness, joy, anger,
surprise, disgust, and fear. These register in our facial expressions regardless of culture (Ekman,
1975). In addition to the basic emotions, we can distinguish many more facial expressions, with
estimates reaching 5000 (Blum, 1998).

3. Gestures- These physical motions are an element of attending that we use both to convey
emotion and to emphasize important points. If our arms flail wildly, we are drumming our
fingers, frequently shifting body position, checking the watch, or playing with something,
we signal anxiety, impatience, or boredom. Looking like a stone statue, however, may
communicate aloofness or lack of interest.

4. Tone of voice- The way that you use your voice in a helping encounter encompasses
pitch, volume, intensity, inflection, speed of speaking, spacing of words, the type of
emphasis, pausation, silence, and fluency. Just as we can tell much about the helpee’s
emotional state from their tone of voice, so too does the helpee make assumptions based
on hearing the helper’s voice.
 5. Physical distance and touching- None of the non-verbal micro-skills are more
vulnerable to cultural differences and ambiguous interpretation than physical distance or
touching. Touching is open to interpretation.

Using it during a helping encounter communicates caring and concern, especially when the client
is dealing with grief. It also is shown to have a positive impact on the helping relationship. Touch
can enhance bonding. It does seem to increase the ability to influence the touched person
(Driscoll, Newman, and Seals, 1988; Willison & Masson, 1986). However, it should be used
cautiously. Alyn (1988) emphasizes that “the wide range of individual motivations for,
interpretations of, and responses to touch make it an extremely unclear and possibly a dangerous
means of communication in therapy” (p. 433). As a general counseling principle, Young (2017)
suggests that touch should be appropriately employed, applied briefly and sparingly, and used to
communicate concern.

Experiential Notes:
The importance of verbal and non-verbal skills in the counseling process has been thoroughly
discussed over the course of this assignment. But, what role does it play outside of the
counseling or clinical setting? As rightly said, “Human beings are social animals” and we live in
a society. We interact with each other every day, talk, listen and try to understand what the other
person has to say. But how much and how accurately are we able to communicate and
comprehend each other’s thoughts and feelings is what matters. This ability to analyze and then
respond is what sets us apart and makes us human.

We all agree that some of us are intellectually more competent than others. In simple terms, the
IQ of some people is higher than others. But there is also something known as EQ- Emotional
Quotient. It is the ability to understand, use and manage not only one’s own but also others’
emotions too to overcome challenges and conflicts. EQ also varies from person to person and
some of us are higher on it than others. And verbal and non-verbal skills are a crucial part of
being emotionally competent.
Personally, all the discussions and activities were really insightful for me. Apart from discussing
the importance of these skills in the counseling room, we also tried to understand their
significance in our personal life. How sometimes when faced with a difficult situation, these
skills can prove to be a saving grace. There are endless situations when these skills can come to
our rescue. If I talk about my past events, something that immediately comes to my mind is the
art of active listening. And yes, I called it art. It’s a skill that enhances as time passes, you
become mature. Being empathetic is always in congruence with active listening. This might
seem like an exaggeration but just listening to others or being listened to can be therapeutic.
Another verbal skill that stood out to me was confrontation and my inability to do it. On most
occasions, I try to avoid confronting people which is not something to be proud of. I am trying to
inculcate this skill and learning more about it was definitely helpful. Overall, class discussions
formed a basic layout of what these skills are and gave us a theoretical understanding. Besides
theory, practical understanding, application, and the implication of these skills were understood
by doing activities in the class.

We started off with the documentary ‘A Drop of Sunshine’ by Aparna Sanyal based on the life of
Reshma Valliappan. The protagonist of the documentary, ‘Reshma’ is diagnosed with
Schizophrenia and the course of the documentary shows how she triumphs over it. The
documentary was particularly very insightful to understand the applicability of the skill.
Reshma’s doctor, on my occasions, showcased both verbal and non-verbal skills to understand
her better and also to communicate with her. It was because of these skills Reshma was also able
to build trust in her psychiatrist. The documentary successfully achieves its goals by capturing
the essence of schizophrenic patients and their life. In contrast to the general notion that people
with schizophrenia cannot lead a ‘normal’ life, Reshma proves everyone wrong and her parents
and doctors play an important role in this victory.

The next activity was role play. It was a pair activity wherein we were given a specific situation
by the teacher and then we were supposed to enact it. The situation given to me and my partner
was that of a counselor and married woman who was not happy and satisfied in her marriage. I
enacted the role of the counselor and my partner that of the married woman. Even though the
situation given was way out of our comfort zone, we were able to portray the situation well. I
tried to apply the verbal and non-verbal skills that we learned during discussions. When my
partner was talking about her dilemma of taking a divorce or not and if society will approve of it,
I tried to use the skills of empathy, eye contact, and focus to validate her feelings. I felt it was
important to make her feel heard and understood in order for it to work. I also realized that these
qualities cannot be mastered in a day, it takes time, effort, and practice.

Overall, these discussions and activities were quite insightful in getting a larger look at the
picture. And also in realizing that not every counselor is an effective one. Thus, we should aim at
not just becoming a counselor but imbibing these qualities in us to become an effective
counselor.
 Appendix

(Poster of the documentary ‘A drop of Sunshine’)

(Snippets of the Role play activity)

(Summary of Counseling Skills)