Supportive counseling is designed to help patients deal with their emotional distress and problems in living.  The approach includes comforting, advising, encouraging, reassuring, and mostly listening, attentively and sympathetically.  The therapist provides an emotional outlet, the chance for patients to express themselves and be themselves.  Also the therapist may inform patients about their illness and about how to manage and how to adjust to it.  Over the course of treatment, the therapist may have to intercede on a patients’s behalf with various authorities, including schools and social agencies, and with the patient’s family-indeed, with all of those with whom the patient may be contending. (Psychology Today)