The Counselor as a Professional and as a Person

Source: Nystul, M.S. (1999). Introduction Counseling: An Art and SciencePerspective. Boston: Allyn andBacon.

Becoming a Professional Counselor

Deciding to undertake formal study in counseling constitutes the first step toward becoming a professional counselor. Being a professional counselor is an ongoing process that involves work, study, and commitment.

The Building Blocks of Professional Counseling Professional Involvement

Continuing Education
Seek Certification or Licensure Begin Formal Study of Counseling and Professional Affiliation

Formal Study and Professional Affiliation

Formal study Program Accreditation from one or more organization.

Certification or Licensure

Certification and Licensure are important to all profession. They provide professional recognition. Certification and licensure are similar processes in which the applicant must meet certain requirements in education, training, experience, and clinical competence.

Certification or Licensure

Forester (1977) identified several differences between certification and licensure. Certification recognizes the competence of practitioners by authorizing them to use the title adopted by the profession. Since licensure is a legal process, legal sanctions can be imposed on and individual who is licensed.

Certification or Licensure

Licensure also has more specific and comprehensive regulations, necessitating greater training and preparation than in the certification process (George & Cristiani, 1990).

Continuing Education

Some form of continuing education is essential for the ongoing development of professional counselors. Most certification and licensure regulation also require counselors to take continuing education course to maintain their professional credential. This usually involves attending workshops or presentations at conferences or taking courses that have been approved for continuing education credits.

Continuing Education

Other professional development activities can help counselors remain current and refine their clinical skills. Some of these are reading professional journals and books, attending in-service training programs, co-counseling with an experienced clinician, seeking ongoing supervision, and attending institutes for advanced training in a counseling specialty.

Professional Involvement

As mentioned, being a professional counselor requires ongoing work and effort. As individual embark on a career in counseling, they initially draw help and guidance from the profession. As they advance in the profession, they find themselves in a position to make a contribution.

Professional Involvement

Some ways that counselors can contribute are taking an active role in professional organizations, supporting efforts for certification and licensure, and writing in professional journals. Professional involvement help support and maintain the profession, but it also enriches the counselor. As counselors become professionally involved, they develop a network of friends who can often become an important support system.

Professional Involvement

The experience can also diversify their interest and professional activities, which can be stimulating and professionally rewarding.

The Art and Science of Ethical-Legal Issues

Ethical-legal issues reflect on both art and science of counseling. To a large degree ethical codes and legal statutes are not written in black-and-white terms but serve as principles to guide ones clinical practice.

The Art and Science of Ethical-Legal Issues

The art of counseling suggests that practitioners engage in creative approaches to ethical-legal decision making that are sensitive to multicultural issues. The science of counseling also recognizes that ethical codes and legal statutes also have some clear statements as to what is ethical-legal behavior for a practitioner.

The Art and Science of Ethical-Legal Issues

For example, there are legal reporting duties when child abuse or neglected is suspected. Meara, Schmidt, and Day (1996) conceptualize ethics in a manner that complements the art and science of counseling.

The Art and Science of Ethical-Legal Issues

They suggest that are two dimensions to ethical decision making-principle ethics and virtue ethics. Principle ethics (like the science of counseling) are the overt ethical obligations that must be addressed in clinical situations such as duty to protect when a client becomes homicidal.

The Art and Science of Ethical-Legal Issues

Virtue ethics (like the art of counseling) suggest that practitioners go beyond the obligatory and strive toward the ideals to which professional aspire. Central to this task is development of virtuous character traits such as sensitivity to the cultural milieu, which can impact on ethical decision making.

The Art and Science of Ethical-Legal Issues

These authors go on to suggest that principle and virtue ethics be integrated to create a balance in ethical decision making that is not only ethically and legally correct but also in the best interest of society as a whole.

The Art and Science of Ethical-Legal Issues

Ethical legal issues are becoming increasingly prevalent in the day-to-day practice of the professional counselor. This is as true for school counselors as it is for mental health counselors and other practitioners in the helping profession.

Ethical Issues

Discussion about ethical codes and standards of practice that have been formulated by the ACA. Please refer the ACA code of ethics. (it can be accessed online).

SOURCES OF COUNSELING ETHICS

Source: Bond, T. (2000). Standards an ethics for counseling in action. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

Introduction

The construction of counseling ethics is fundamentally a social process, which draws upon many different sources of ethical insight.

2. Ethics and values implicit in theraputic models 1. Personal Ethics (incl.: religious and political beliefs 3. Agency policy

Counseling ethics
6. Law 4. Professional codes and guidelines 5. Moral philosophy

PERSONAL ETHICS

Counselor who seem most at ease with dichotomy appear to recognize a distinction between their personal and professional ethics but have integrated both ethics In a deeper sense of self. The sense of overall integrity will be high and will enrich the ethical dimension of counseling.

ETHICS AND VALUES IMPLICIT IN THERAPUTIC MODELS

Our choice in therapeutic orientation will have ethical implications. i.e: Carl Rogers emphasized the clients capacity for self determination.---client autonomy. In contrast, a Freudian psychodynamic model.

AGENCY POLICY

If a counselor works within agency, it is commonplace to be required to follow specific protocols and procedures with regards to some ethical and therapeutic dilemmas.

PROFESSIONAL CODES AND GUIDELINES

Professional codes and guidelines are a valuable source of ethical information. They will be the first points of reference for many counselors. At their best, codes are a source of collective wisdom validated by a process of consultation and voting during their adoption procedures by organization that produced them.

MORAL PHILOSOPHY

Moral philosophy is primarily concerned with identifying what constitutes good and bad and using logical reasoning to consider the implications for ethical dilemmas. A subsidiary area of moral philosophy is professional ethics: this rapidly growing discipline within moral philosophy, which also draws on other sources from social sciences and the law.

MORAL PHILOSOPHY

In Europe and North America, this has typically taken the form of competition between deontological ethics founded on the ideas of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Utilitarian ethics based on the writing of David Hume (1711-76), Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John stuart Mill (1806-73).

MORAL PHILOSOPHY

The deontological approach is based on deducing ethical obligations from a particular set of beliefs about the nature of reality. These obligations are viewed as universal and can be typified by an emphasis on treating people as ends in themselves.

MORAL PHILOSOPHY

In contrast, the utilitarian approach is founded on an evaluation of the consequences of any action and can be typified by a commitment to achieving the greatest good for the greatest number.

MORAL PHILOSOPHY

Utilitarian also known as consequentialists judge moral good in terms of value outcomes Deontologists judge moral good according to fidelity to ones duties to others. Both positive and negative. Because no perfect system for decision making in any enterprise exists, employment of one or the other of these principle-driven approaches is usually elected.

MORAL PHILOSOPHY

The most influential ethicists of this kind in medical ethics are Tom Beauchamp and James Childress (1994). Their Principles of Biomedical Ethics, now in its fourth edition, has had a major influence on the development of ethical principles for counseling and psychotherapy. The propose four major ethical principles:

Respect for individual autonomy (literally self-government) Beneficence (a commitment to benefiting the client) Non-maleficence (avoiding harm to the client) Justice (a fair distribution of services within society)

MORAL PHILOSOPHY

Andrew Thompson in A guide to Ethical Practice in Psychotherapy (1990) adds a further two principles:

Fidelity (honoring the promises upon which the trust between client and counselor founded) Self-interest (the counselors entitlement to all the preceding five principles.

MORAL PHILOSOPHY

The American counseling Associations Ethical Standards casebook cites five principles: autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, justice and fidelity (Herlihy and Corey, 1996).

LAW

Being aware of the law has a number of potential gain. Frequently the law and counseling practice are mutually compatible.

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