Brandon Ballantyne would like to see the use of therapeutic games expand outside of the counseling profession. Ballantyne, a member of the American Counseling Association and the Pennsylvania Counseling Association, has long advocated for an increase in creative interventions within the counseling profession. In July he was able to present
Month: September 2013
Once you master the skill of riding a bike, you will always be able to ride a bike, or so the theory goes. But counselors would be mistaken if they apply that same logic to multicultural competence, says Michael Brooks, president of the Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development, a
Maybe it’s because I live in New York, a city that offers daily encounters with artists from all walks of life, or perhaps it’s because I have years of songwriting and performing experience myself. Regardless of the reason, I have often sought out (mostly unsuccessfully) clinical research or counseling practices
Although the episode took place many years ago, R. Jane Williams still gets a lump in her throat when she thinks about the nine months she spent counseling a young mother dying of breast cancer. The client’s wrenching story of her husband’s initial denial of her illness would have pained any
Last month, I wrote about everyday heroes and how each of you works with clients and students as they face life’s challenges. In many ways, all of you are heroes, albeit ones who are unsung in so many cases. This column looks at another positive human action — namely, those random
I recently had the distinct pleasure of attending the centennial conference of the National Career Development Association, held, quite appropriately, in Boston. I have long asserted that the core value of social justice in counseling is an intrinsic part of our identity, as it has been since Frank Parsons’ early outreach
We are so lucky to be alive in the midst of a paradigm shift in counseling theory. For someone like me, who fancies himself a counseling philosopher and theoretician, nothing can be more exciting than living through a revolution in theory. Many currently practicing counselors probably were a bit young