Psychological counseling as a process builds upon the therapeutic relationship between the client and the counselor and the nature of this relationship. In this context, the psychological counselor is expected to be appropriate personality structure, spiritually healthy and resilience, well equipped with the technical and theoretical knowledge that can integrate the personal, interpersonal and scientific competencies. Within the vocational training process, counselor trainees should be given the opportunity to learn, acquire and experience these skills. Psychological Counselling in Group course provides the trainees suitable environment to experience the skills.

In this study, it was aimed to develop group psychological counseling program for counselor trainees to develop the ability to recognize and express emotions, establish healthy intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships. Moreover, the effect of the group practices, applied during 10 weeks, was also investigated.

Parallel with the aim, the quasi-experimental design including pre-test post-test control group was used. The sample of this study is the 3th-grade students attending in Guidance and Psychological Counselling in Marmara University, Turkey. 24 students (10 males, 14 females) were randomly assigned to the training and control groups.

Integrative Hope Scale, The Need for Affect Scale, Resilience Scale for Adults, Emotional Expression Questionnaire, and Scale of Interpersonal Relationships Dimensions were used as instruments. Two-way ANOVA and repeated measures analysis of variance were used to analyze the data. The results indicated that developed group counseling program yielded differences between experimental and control group, and pre-test and post-test scores of the training group in terms of hope, emotion expression, resilience, and interpersonal relationships dimensions.

These findings show that the program strengthens the ability not only to recognize and appropriately express feeling but also to gain self-awareness. Therefore, group counseling contributed to improving hope and psychological resilience by relying on healthy relationships.