Three Maps for Helping Clients Change
Beginning with a Stuck Moment
Imagine a young adult, Aisha, sitting across from you on a grey, rain-heavy afternoon. Her shoulders are slightly hunched, eyes flicking toward the window but never quite meeting yours.
She says quietly
I feel stuck. I keep going in circles. I talk to friends, I journal, I make plans. But when I wake up, it feels like nothing has actually changed. (pause)
This is a moment all counsellors will meet in some form. A client who is not in crisis, not psychotic, not in immediate danger, but deeply entangled in the patterns of their own life.
In this blog, we will walk through three major counselling models that offer different “maps” for responding to a client like Aisha:
- Gerald Egan’s Skilled Helper Model
- Allen E. Ivey and colleagues’ Developmental Counselling and Therapy
- Sharon L. Cormier and Harold Hackney’s Model of Counselling
Each model gives us a way to listen, to structure the process, and to think about change. They overlap in many ways, but they invite the therapist to adopt subtly different stances and strategies.
Gerald Egan’s Skilled Helper Model: A Practical, Problem-Management Map
Gerald Egan developed the Skilled Helper Model to offer a clear, collaborative roadmap for helping clients manage problems and develop opportunities. It is often described as a problem-management and opportunity-development approach.
At its core, the model is built around three broad stages that can be summarised as:
- Where are you now
- Where do you want to go
- How will you get there
Within those stages, the therapist uses core helping skills such as active listening, accurate empathy, challenging blind spots, and facilitating action planning. Egan emphasises that counselling is not just about insight; it is about supporting clients to take responsible action in their real lives.
Aisha through Egan’s Lens
Return to Aisha. In an Egan-informed session, the therapist would begin with detailed exploration before rushing toward solutions. The stance is collaborative and pragmatic: “Let us understand what is going on, then clarify what you want, then support you to act.”
You might hear something like this in the first session:
Therapist: “When you say you feel stuck and keep going in circles, can you walk me through a recent day where that feeling was especially strong?”
Client: “Last Tuesday. I woke up late, scrolled on my phone, missed breakfast, and then spent the whole day feeling behind.”
Therapist: “So there is this chain: waking late, scrolling, missing breakfast, and a background sense of being behind all day. What else was happening around you that day?”
Client: “My phone kept buzzing, group chats, emails. I kept thinking I should start work, but I just… froze.”
Therapist: “Hearing you, I am getting a picture of a day that is noisy, pressured, and also frozen at the same time. Does that fit?”
Client: “Yes. Noisy and frozen. That is exactly it.”
In this brief vignette, the therapist is doing Stage One work: clarifying the story, listening for patterns, and reflecting the client’s experience in a way that is more coherent and usable.
Later, the therapist would support Aisha to:
- Identify desired outcomes (for example, “I want to feel more in charge of my mornings.”)
- Generate possible actions and evaluate them realistically
- Commit to small, specific steps and review what happens between sessions
Research on counselling processes suggests that approaches like Egan’s, which integrate relational depth with structured problem-solving, can support clients in making tangible life changes when the therapeutic alliance is strong and goals are clear.
Strengths and Tensions
The Skilled Helper Model is particularly helpful when:
- Clients can articulate problems but feel overwhelmed by complexity
- There is a need for structure and clear movement from talk to action
- The context calls for brief or time-limited work, such as university or workplace counselling
However, there are cautions. If used rigidly, the model can move too fast into problem-solving and inadvertently underplay deeper emotional, relational, or cultural layers of the client’s experience. Egan himself emphasises flexibility and the importance of starting where the client is, not where the model wants them to be.
Allen Ivey’s Developmental Counselling and Therapy: A Developmental Lens on Meaning-Making
Allen E. Ivey and colleagues approached counselling from a developmental perspective, integrating insights from cognitive-developmental theory, especially Piaget, into a counselling framework known as Developmental Counselling and Therapy (DCT).
The central idea is that clients make sense of their world using different cognitive–emotional styles. These styles are not fixed “types” but developmental modes of meaning-making. Commonly described levels include:
- Sensorimotor or elemental: highly concrete, bodily, present-focused
- Concrete or situational: story-based, focused on specific events
- Formal or reflective: abstract, pattern-seeking, reflective thinking
- Dialectic or systemic: complex, contextual, able to hold multiple perspectives at once
The task of the counsellor is to recognise the level at which the client is currently processing an issue, match that level to build connection, and then gently mismatch upward to support development of more flexible, complex ways of understanding and responding.
Ivey’s Microskills Hierarchy as a Companion Framework
Alongside DCT, Ivey and colleagues also developed the microskills hierarchy, a structured way of teaching the communication skills that make up intentional interviewing.
At the foundation are ethical practice, multicultural awareness and the core conditions of empathy, genuineness and positive regard. Built on this base are attending behaviours, questioning, paraphrasing, summarising and reflecting feelings, followed by more advanced influencing skills such as confrontation and self‑disclosure. Where DCT helps you understand how clients think and make meaning, the microskills hierarchy helps you organise how you respond in the moment with specific, learnable skills. Together, they form a practical training system for developmentally attuned, multicultural counselling.
Aisha through a Developmental Lens
Imagine Aisha again. This time, notice how she speaks about her difficulty. At first she may be mostly concrete and situational: describing specific days and events. Over time, she might begin to form more abstract patterns or see systemic influences.
Here is a short illustration:
Therapist: “Tell me about a recent day when you felt most stuck.”
Client: “Last Tuesday. I woke up late, scrolled my phone, and everything went downhill.”
Therapist: “So we have this specific Tuesday: late waking, lots of scrolling, day feels downhill. What stands out most in that scene for you?”
Client: “The scrolling. I knew I was wasting time, but I could not stop.”
Therapist: “If we zoom out a little, I am curious: Does this ‘scrolling and freezing’ pattern show up on other days too?”
Client: “Yes. It is kind of my thing now. Whenever I feel behind, I reach for my phone and then I lose the day.”
Therapist: “So one way of seeing this is: when you feel behind, your mind and body reach for a quick escape. The phone becomes a way to manage that uncomfortable emotion. How is it to see it in that way?”
In the early part of this exchange, the therapist stays at the concrete level, matching the client’s story-telling style. Then the therapist gently invites a more reflective, pattern-based understanding: “When you feel behind, you reach for the phone as an escape.” This is the upward “mismatch,” still grounded in the client’s language.
Ivey’s model gives counsellors a way to think not only about what the client says, but how they construct reality in the moment. Over time, the goal is for clients to become more flexible in shifting between concrete, reflective, and systemic ways of understanding their lives, and to broaden their repertoire of coping and problem-solving.
Strengths and Tensions
This developmental approach is particularly useful when:
- Clients are stuck in rigid ways of thinking, such as black-and-white interpretations
- There is a need to integrate education, skill-building, and deeper exploration
- Therapists want a framework for choosing when to be concrete and when to be abstract
However, it requires careful cultural humility. What looks like “less developed” thinking from one cultural lens may in fact be a highly adaptive, communal, or spiritual way of making meaning. The risk is pathologising non-Western or non-individualist meaning systems if the counsellor applies the model without sensitivity to context.
Cormier and Hackney’s Model of Counselling: A Stage-Based Process Framework
Sharon L. Cormier and Harold Hackney are known for their work on counselling strategies, interventions, and the helping relationship. Their model presents counselling as a stage-based process, usually described in terms of sequential phases such as:
- Relationship building
- Assessment
- Goal setting
- Intervention and action
- Termination and follow-up
The emphasis is on organising the flow of counselling and helping novice practitioners understand what tasks typically belong to each phase. This makes it a very practical teaching model and a useful scaffolding for early clinical practice.
Aisha through a Stage-Based Process
With Aisha, a Cormier and Hackney–informed counsellor will attend carefully to the stage of the process they are in. Early on, relationship-building and assessment dominate. Later, goal setting and intervention become central.
A first-session snippet might sound like this:
Therapist: “Before we jump into trying to change anything, I would like to spend a bit of time just getting to know you and what brought you here. How does that sound?”
Client: “That is fine. I have not really talked about this properly.”
Therapist: “You mentioned feeling stuck and going in circles. I would like to understand what ‘stuck’ means in your daily life and what is most distressing about it for you.”
Client: “It is like I cannot start anything important. I keep postponing, and then I hate myself for it.”
Therapist: “So part of our assessment is noticing that there is trouble starting tasks, and then a harsh self-judgment that follows. As we keep talking, I will also ask about your context, supports, and stresses so that we can see the whole picture. Would that be okay?”
Here, you can hear clear stage-based intentions. The therapist is explicitly naming the early tasks: relationship, assessment, context. Later, the counsellor might say:
“We have identified that feeling stuck shows up mainly around studying and starting tasks. Would it be helpful if we set some specific goals for what you would like to be different by, say, three months from now?”
This movement from broad exploration toward explicit, collaboratively defined goals is a hallmark of the model.
Strengths and Tensions
Cormier and Hackney’s model is especially valuable when:
- Training novice counsellors who need a clear sense of “where they are” in the process
- Working in settings that require documentation of goals, interventions, and outcomes
- Integrating multiple techniques within a coherent process structure
The model is intentionally flexible in terms of theoretical allegiance. Cognitive-behavioural, person-centred, or psychodynamic techniques can all be situated within its stages. The potential limitation is that, if treated as a rigid checklist, it can make counselling feel mechanical. The skill lies in holding the stages lightly while remaining responsive to the live relationship.
Comparing the Three Maps in Practice
Now imagine that you are the counsellor and Aisha has just finished describing a week full of procrastination, late nights on her phone, shame about productivity, and fear of disappointing her family. How might each model guide your next steps?
- With Egan, you are likely to ask: “What is the most important area to focus on first, and what small, realistic changes could we begin to experiment with?” You are thinking in terms of stages of problem-management and action planning.
- With Ivey’s developmental approach, you might first ask: “At what cognitive–emotional level is Aisha processing this experience?” You then match her current style and gently stretch her toward a more flexible, reflective, or systemic understanding.
- With Cormier and Hackney, your attention goes to: “Which stage of the process are we in, and what tasks are appropriate here?” Perhaps you are still building rapport and assessing patterns, or perhaps it is time to formalise goals.
In real practice, experienced counsellors often blend these perspectives. You may use Egan’s structure for problem-solving, Ivey’s lens for recognising how the client is making meaning, and Cormier and Hackney’s stages to keep track of where you are in the broader process.
A Brief Integrative Closing Story
Imagine a later session with Aisha. She has shared that her “scrolling and freezing” pattern shows up most when she thinks about family expectations and her own fear of failure.
You begin in an Egan-like way, clarifying the current picture and desired outcomes:
Therapist: “If therapy were useful, what would be different in how you face these expectations and fears?”
As she answers, you notice she is thinking in very concrete terms. Drawing on Ivey, you first match her concrete detail, then invite a more reflective stance:
“You have described three similar days in great detail. If you step back and look at them together, what do they have in common?”
She begins to see a pattern of feeling small and powerless. You sense the relationship is strong and the assessment reasonably clear. From a Cormier and Hackney perspective, you shift into goal setting and intervention planning, collaborating on one or two behavioural experiments to try before the next session.
In that moment, theory is no longer abstract. It is embodied in the timing of your questions, the warmth in your voice, and the shared effort to help a real person move from “noisy and frozen” to “aware and active.”
That is the heart of these models: they are not just ideas, but living maps that support you in being more intentional, more compassionate, and more effective in the counselling room.
Sources
- Cormier, S., & Hackney, H. (2015). Counseling strategies and interventions for professional helpers (9th ed.). Pearson.scribd+1
- Egan, G. (2018). The skilled helper: A problem-management and opportunity-development approach to helping (11th ed.). Cengage Learning.cengage+2
- Ivey, A. E. (1986). Developmental therapy: Theory into practice. Academic Press.psychologyfanatic+1
- Ivey, A. E., Ivey, M. B., & Zalaquett, C. P. (2018). Intentional interviewing and counseling: Facilitating client development in a multicultural society (9th ed.). Cengage Learning.bahai-library+2
- Sweeney, T. J., Myers, J. E., & Stephan, J. B. (2006). A developmental counseling and therapy approach to supervision. Journal of Counseling & Development, 84(4), 440–444.dergipark.org+1
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