Counselors’ skills and expertise as mediators, relationship builders and client advocates are critical to improving the lives of children in foster care and providing support to both foster and biological families.
Tag: trauma
In the client-counselor relationship, describing traumas from past experiences can reveal unresolved suffering in which a client’s beliefs, emotions and behaviors are filled with deep negative images. Ideally, clients will share their trauma with therapists and how images from the past continue to affect them. By describing their trauma, many
As professional counselors, we enter this field with a desire to understand and help others. There comes a time in every counselor’s career, however, when intellectual understanding is overpowered by the need for empathic understanding. This is particularly true when counselors work with clients who intentionally cut, burn, scratch, hit or otherwise
By understanding how brain chemistry and the human nervous system work, counselors can help their clients shift into use of their social engagement system and become more flexible in their coping styles.
Mark was 16 when he found himself in a youth detention facility again. The reasons for his incarceration aren’t necessarily important; he had committed plenty of crimes in his life. His past actions came as no surprise. His father had been incarcerated for the entirety of Mark’s life. His mother
Trauma is as old as humanity itself. In fact, for nearly 3,000 years, such epic poems as The Odyssey and The Iliad have given eloquent voice to the psychic scars of war. These “hidden wounds” of combat included overwhelming feelings of anxiety, horrific nightmares, heightened startle reactions, flashbacks of battle
Trauma, suicide and bullying are not new topics for most counselors, who at some point in their careers have likely worked with clients on each of these issues. However, as research and practice continue to progress, some counselors are using emerging approaches or perspectives to tackle these problems. At the
One of the most widely published statistics on child sexual abuse, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2005, asserts that 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys are sexually abused before the age of 18. Furthermore, research by John Read and colleagues in 2004 estimated
A small town celebrates a homecoming. Parties are given in honor of the combat veteran who has returned home triumphantly. Families and loved ones are reunited, and community leaders show honor to the warrior by offering laud in public ceremonies. All appears to be whole again. But as the dust settles and
Since 9/11 and the United States’ subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many Americans have grown all too familiar with the term posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which was first popularly applied to veterans of the Vietnam War in the 1970s. Today the term shows up regularly in headlines and in