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Professional counselors face a number of difficulties in their work that can lead to compassion fatigue, burnout, and/or secondhand traumatization. Contemporary research into counselor wellness has demonstrated that many counselors are not practicing at a level of wellness that is required of them per the American Counseling Association (ACA) (2014) code of ethics. The Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) standards also call for counselor education programs to equip their counselors-in-training with the tools needed to maintain wellness in the program and after graduation. Research into counselor education programs has demonstrated that they are not always succeeding in this. Several researchers have noted this deficit in wellness within the counseling profession and have developed models or approaches to supervision that place more emphasis on wellness. However, many of these approaches to wellness do not engage the discussion of human flourishing more broadly and miss the full picture of what flourishing entails qua being human and qua being a counselor. This presentation proposes a Christian psychology vision of what wellness entails for Christian counselors that engages and incorporates the disciplines of philosophy, Christian theology, and positive psychology into the supervision process of students and provisionally licensed counselors to lay foundations for flourishing in clinical practice.
Counselors1 and counselors-in-training spend much of their professional and academic career not just learning about but actually walking with people through some of the most difficult experiences of their life. This aspect of the profession can, quite understandably so, lead to what researchers and practitioners have labeled "burnout," "compassion fatigue," "vicarious traumatization," or some combination of these terms (Craig & Sprang, 2010). Accordingly, it stands to reason that in order for professional counselors to remain in the profession, they need to be able to resist becoming overwhelmed and possibly impaired in their ability to provide competent care. This is a concern both for their own health and well-being-as clinicians are humans first, professionals second-and for the people that are seeking out their services. This call to wellness is not an abstract ideal a clinician should be striving for when they can; it is an ethical requirement incumbent upon professional counselors and, therefore, should be addressed in counselor education programs.
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