Leisure counselling, coping skills and therapeutic applications

Abstract

Leisure counselling is defined as the systematic exploitation of a client's past, existing or prospective hobbies, activities and interests for broad psychotherapeutic purposes. It functions as a powerful agent in the invigoration of a range of existing but inadequate coping skills, and can also act in an innovatory style when such key skills are absent. The effective functioning of leisure counselling, as this paper argues, requires a methodology of application, and the author's main contribution has been to identify a triad of approach techniques open to the leisure counsellor, namely, distraction, anticipation and confrontation, and to outline appropriate settings in which they may be fruitfully implemented. Effective leisure counselling requires a new mode of thinking, wherein leisure becomes instrumental and hobbies, activities and interests, its tools. So as to sharpen awareness of the full possible range of leisure counselling's application, this paper outlines how it may be applied across a wide span of coping needs and covers three broad domains: the need to ease phobias, panics, stress and tension states, and the aftermath of traumatic episodes; the need to create and sustain positive moods; and the need to contain and limit the destructive demands of habits and impulses as well as address the very sharp therapeutic challenge of obsessions and compulsions.