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Teaching counseling students to understand and use immediacy.

Article Excerpt
The authors examine the counseling skill of immediacy, emphasizing its importance in counselor education. Ways of addressing and teaching the skill are proposed, with an emphasis on a "gentle approach" to reduce risks associated with applying the skill and to minimize students" resistance to applying it. Examples are provided of narratives that model immediacy throughout the counseling process.

Immediacy, as it relates to counseling, is one of the most important skills a beginning counselor can learn (Egan, 1976; Hazler & Barwick, 2001; Turock, 1980). This skill, which Carkhuff and Pierce (1977) placed at "the highest level of helping" (p. 201), focuses on using the here and now and the therapeutic relationship to explore what the client may be communicating about his or her world. Conversely, counselors may use immediate responses to disclose how they feel about clients or their relationships with their clients (Hill & O'Brien, 1999, p. 236).

During the 1960s and 1970s, when encounter groups were popular, immediacy became synonymous with blunt confrontation between individuals or between a counselor and his or her client. Examples from that period include scenarios wherein the counselor expressed anger, frustration, and annoyance with the client. The purpose of this article is to reexamine the concept of immediacy and to suggest ways that counselor educators might teach immediacy to beginning counseling students, using a gentle, supportive approach to counseling.

Immediacy involves a certain amount of risk for the counselor (Hazler & Barwick, 2001): the risk of being wrong, the risk of derailing the process, and the risk of verbalizing what he or she is feeling. To be effective, the counselor must be open, honest, and vulnerable. These risks make immediacy one of the most difficult counseling skills to learn and one that is especially difficult to teach.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF IMMEDIACY

The concept of immediacy seems to be related to Freud's psychoanalytical concept of transference, wherein attitudes "are transferred to the therapist which were originally directed, with more justification, toward a parent or other person" (Rogers, 1951, p. 198). In other words, the counselor, or the client, transfers feelings and attitudes to others as they are being experienced in the here and now of the counseling setting.

In describing client-centered approaches to therapy, Rogers (1951) added to Freud's notion of transference and wrote extensively about the importance of attending to issues related to the therapeutic relationship. Although Rogers wrote in terms of transference in the early 1950s and did not refer specifically to immediacy, it is clear that his description of the importance of the therapeutic relationship relates to current views of immediacy.

IMMEDIACY DEFINED

Although the definition of immediacy varies from author to author, the definition always centers on the here and now and on the importance of the current therapeutic relationship. Fairhurst (1997), for example, defined immediacy as "the current interaction of the therapist and client in the relationship" (p. 3). Ivey and Ivey (1999) described immediacy as "being in the moment with the client" (p. 161) and dealing with what the client and counselor are experiencing in the here and now. Stewart (2001) described immediacy as "you-me talk" (p. 195) in which the counselor helps the client to experience the relationship as it unfolds. Hill and O'Brien (1999) specifically identified the sharing of feelings by the counselor as being a focal point of the skill: "Immediacy refers to the helper disclosing immediate feelings about self in relation to the client or the therapeutic relationship" (p. 236). For example, the counselor might say, "I'm wondering if you are telling me what you think I want to hear rather than how you really felt about that event."

Egan (2002) described immediacy in more detail. He divided immediacy into three, types: relationship immediacy, event-focused immediacy, and self-involving statements. Relationship immediacy refers to the "ability to discuss with a client where you stand in your overall relationship with him or her and vice versa" (p. 210). Emphasis is placed not on a single incident, but on the development of the relationship and how it has promoted or impeded therapeutic progress.

Egan (2002) described event-focused immediacy (also referred to as here and now immediacy) as the ability of the counselor to bring up and discuss immediate interactions between the counselor and client as they occur. The focus is on the immediate interaction rather than on the entire relationship. The counselor makes self-involving statements that relate to feelings toward the client or the therapeutic relationship (Egan, 2002). These statements can be either positive or negative and are generally challenging in nature.

Egan (2002) found immediacy to be especially useful in several types of situations. These included situations in which there is stagnation in the therapeutic process, there is tension between the client and the...

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