When working with adolescents in a group setting, it is important to provide opportunities to explore, evaluate and process the dynamics that occur within their homes. After all, eventually they will be faced with the dilemma of figuring out how to apply what they have learned in therapy to situations
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Counseling individuals and families experiencing divorce is difficult work, often fraught with conflict that is challenging to contain. A great amount of anxiety, fear, anger and sadness may be present for all of the people involved, including one or both of the spouses and the children. Each individual may feel
The need for counselors to acknowledge and combine multiculturalism with social justice “cannot be overstated,” according to counselor educators and authors Manivong Ratts and Paul Pedersen. The two perspectives go hand-in-hand; counselors who don’t fully understand both can unintentionally harm their clients, Ratts and Pedersen write in the new edition
Thomas R. Insel has served as the director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) since 2002, gaining respect as a leader who supports research that will help us understand, treat and even prevent mental disorders. During his tenure, major breakthroughs have been made in the areas of practical clinical trials,
In the winter of 2014, I bedded down for a long-deserved rest. As a counselor educator, I basked in the idea that after posting final grades, the university would be closed for the holiday season. With a full private practice, often seeing 25 clients a week, I had made the
Through our traumas, we are often at risk of ingesting our perpetrators, continuing to perpetuate the same cycles of abuse and abandonment on ourselves and on others, and believing the messages of unworthiness communicated through the injuries that were inflicted. Left unchecked, these messages can be fully absorbed like toxins
Counselors Jeffrey Kottler and Richard Balkin delivered a fast-paced, information-packed keynote talk peppered with humor, visual clips and abundant insight this morning at the ACA 2015 Conference & Expo in Orlando, Florida. The duo kicked off the conference’s second day with an address about the importance of relationships – both
The most important thing a counselor can do is to provide a safe space for a person to explore and tell his or her own story. That was the message that Mariel Hemingway, an actress, activist and granddaughter of iconic novelist Ernest Hemingway, delivered to a standing-room-only crowd of counselors
Imagine if people reacted to a friend or neighbor’s diagnosis of bipolar disorder or depression no differently than if they just learned that person has breast cancer or heart disease. “Whether an illness affects your heart, your leg or your brain, it’s still an illness. It shouldn’t be treated differently,”
Highly trained and uniquely skilled, school counselors are often the first – and sometimes the only – mental health professionals a young student sees. They’re an essential piece of the American educational system — a piece that deserves support and funding. That’s the message a panel of counselors gave on