Born in the 50s with Carl Rogers, Counseling is a set of skills, attitudes and techniques aimed at “helping the person to help himself”. “The counseling relationship,” Rogers writes, “is a situation in which human warmth, objective acceptance, and the absence of any coercion or personal pressure on the part of a counselor allows for the client’s freest expression of feelings, behavior, or problems.

The relationship must be well structured, with limits of time, dependence, aggressive manifestations referring in particular to the subject and limits of responsibility, of affection that the counselor imposes on himself.

In this particular experience of emotional freedom, the individual is free to recognize and understand his or her impulses and behavioral structures, positive and negative, as in no other relationship exists.”

Counseling is structured as a non-directive helping relationship based on active and empathetic listening that, in an atmosphere of attention and respect, places the client at the center with his needs, fragility, aspirations and questions.

The counselor is called upon to focus and enhance the client’s potential for change and his or her unexpressed talents and resources. In this regard, Rollo May, one of the founding fathers of Counseling together with Carl Rogers, states that “the counselor has the task of encouraging the development and use of the client’s potential, helping him to overcome any personality problems that prevent him from expressing himself fully and freely in the outside world […]

The overcoming of the problem, the real transformation, however, is up to the client alone: the counselor can only guide him, with empathy and respect, to rediscover the freedom to be himself”.

Counseling is a transversal profession that can involve many areas. 

The applications of Counseling are in fact many; In addition to the individual one, specific declinations in various sectors should be considered, in which the quality of interpersonal communication is fundamental for the proper functioning of the entire structure.

“In every organism, including man, there is a constant flow of the constructive realization of its intrinsic possibilities, a natural tendency to growth” – (Carl R. Rogers)