Counselors Emotion Engagement During Counseling Sessions:a Qualitative Analysis

There is no doubt that emotion of counselor and its changes across counseling sessions play an important part.However,studies on counselors have mostly focused on counselors traits rather than their emotion. To know more about the emotion of counselors and how they do to it during counseling sessions, counselors emotion engagement is proposed. Counselors emotion engagement during counseling sessions is that for counseling outcome, counselors try to regulate their emotion and so on during counseling sessions.Fifteen counselors were interviewed with a semi-structured protorl,either face-to-face or through Internet,about their opinions and experiences of counselors emotion engagement during counseling sessions.Date were analyzed by a research team using Consensual Qualitative Research(CQR). CQR requires all research team members reach consensus about the classifications and meaning of all data. Method of consensus coding runs through domain coding, core ideas coding, cross-analysis and feedbacks from auditors.It spent more than 80 hours to finish. In this study, categories were classified as general if they applied to all 14 cases or 15 cases, typical if they applied to between 8 to 13 cases, and variant if they applied to between 2 to 7 cases. Categories that were applicable to only one or two cases were dropped from further consideration.Results indicated that there are two domains relevant to emotion engagement during counseling sessions: the understanding of the counselors emotion engagement and process of counselors emotion engagement. Counselors emotion engagement is essential.The processes include five phases: entering, arousing,became aware of,regulate and adjusted work.These phases are repeated and nolinear. It not only reminds supervisor could pay more attention and understand counselors by this way, but also the ethical issues that couselors who should pay close attention to self care. This study also provides the foundation of future studies about the factors which would influence the process of counselors emotion engagement during counseling sessions and how it relative with counseling quality.