Impacting lives with counselling – Marion House

A healthy relationship with clients is key to achieving the best results from counselling sessions.

This is the view of persons associated with the Marion House, a walk-in counselling centre, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this month.

As he addressed media officials {{more}}at a conference on October 2, counsellor Wendel Parris declared that the Marion House has been making a significant impact on the lives of youth in St Vincent and the Grenadines. He further opined that counselling is extremely effective.

“I have so many clients coming to me, whose lives have been improved as a result of the exposure to the individual counselling that we provide and to some extent the group counselling,” Parris said.

He noted that developing a relationship with clients is an extremely important step.

“You sit down and listen, which is the key thing in counselling; you show empathy and you show that you care. That can change everything,” the counsellor, who has been at the Marion House for approximately six years, said.

Chair of the Marion House board of directors Jeanie Ollivierre also highlighted several methods that the institution employs, in order to gain the trust of their clients.

“We don’t just use a one-to-one counselling client-counsellor approach. We also use different methods. We use music. If you go into the senior counsellor’s office, you will see a flip chart board with notes on it, musical notes on it. We use the computer, we use games. We play dominoes with them. Those who are autistic, we allow them to draw, so we use art; we use different methods to get the client to express what is within. We use different methods to develop the relationship and to get the client to speak, so that over a period of time the relationship that you develop with that client, the client is always here; they always want to come back because for them, it works,” Ollivierre said.

The Marion House was founded in 1989 by a collaborative of the Roman Catholic Church in St Vincent and the Grenadines and a United Kingdom Methodist Agency, National Children’s Home.

The not-for-profit organization offers a number of different programmes to the public free of cost and is heavily utilized by a number of institutions, including the local courts, to effect change in troubled youths.(BK)