When Clients Stop Following: A Cognitive Conceptualization Diagram-driven Framework for Strategic Counseling

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04389v1
• Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2026 03:09:10 GMT
• Title: When Clients Stop Following: A Cognitive Conceptualization Diagram-driven Framework for Strategic Counseling
• Abstract summary: Existing benchmarks rely heavily on highly cooperative simulated clients.<n>These clients often rapidly shift from resistance to compliance after only a few turns.<n>We propose a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)-grounded resistance-aware framework.
• Score: 7.733715213738371
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in psychological counseling, yet existing benchmarks rely heavily on highly cooperative simulated clients. We observe a critical counselor-following phenomenon: these clients often rapidly shift from resistance to compliance after only a few turns, creating an illusion of therapeutic progress and inflating scores under current evaluation protocols through superficial empathy. To address this evaluation mismatch, we propose a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)-grounded resistance-aware framework. We introduce CARS, a client simulator that explicitly models dynamic resistance via Cognitive Conceptualization Diagrams (CCDs). We present STREAMS, a dual-module framework that decouples strategic reasoning (Thinker) from response generation (Presenter) and optimizes it via reinforcement learning. We further propose EWTS-MI, an entropy-weighted metric for evaluating responsiveness under high-friction interactions. Experiments across resistant and non-resistant counseling settings validate our findings on evaluation mismatch and demonstrate the effectiveness of resistance-aware training for improving strategic robustness under challenging counseling interactions.

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