Preface

You may have picked up this book because you feel just as lost and overwhelmed as we feel sometimes. Some days you’ve got it, and other days you just don’t. We are not promising this book will help you find yourself or whatever you are looking for, but we can promise that you will feel less alone in this profession as you turn each page. We do not want this book to be a stuffy, professional, or esoteric manuscript we wrote from some mountaintop to get tenure. We most certainly are not on a mountaintop, and we don’t have tenure—yet (fingers crossed). Before we get into specifics about what we will discuss throughout the book, we want to share a couple of things about ourselves and our motivations for writing the book. Our hope is that this brief description will help you position us correctly in your mind while reading our thoughts.

We are still raising babies and learning how to balance work and family. Our practices are not in tall office buildings where you call our assistants to schedule an appointment. We don’t drive new cars, and money is most certainly not inconsequential. Over the last 8 years, we have gone through our graduate counseling program and a doctoral program in counselor educator and supervision, finished our licensure processes, and became counselor educators and licensed supervisors. There is still so much for us to learn. So much so that we ask ourselves, “Do we even know enough about anything to write a book?” Although we would love to usher you into our book with confidence, please know that this book isn’t about giving you confidence. Instead, we are trying to invite you to think about who and how you are within the work we do together. To do so, we’ll share ourselves, our journey, our failures, and our successes with you in each chapter.

A chief motivation in writing this book is the dissonance we sometimes feel around our identity as counselors of color and the invisible culture of Whiteness within the “how to do counseling” space. This invisible culture doesn’t just hurt counselors of color but also hurts White counselors who may not identify with the traditional way of doing counseling. When we say “the invisible culture of Whiteness,” we mean that when you think of an effective counselor, you don’t imagine them wearing Jordans.

That is the problem. This invisible culture whispers, “Be more like us and less like you,” until many counselors forget who they are. This subtle message is reinforced in research, writing, education, art, and film and television. The image most counselors have of what a counselor looks like when they enter the field does harm to a counselor’s development of self-efficacy. Now, we are not saying this book will undo decades of whitewashing in the counseling field. We just want to invite you to consider that counselors can be tweedless, uncouth, imperfect parents who cuss, laugh, and cry through sessions, listening to A Tribe Called Quest while wearing sneakers.

This book is written for two populations: (a) students enrolled in prepracticum, practicum, and internship courses and (b) new professionals seeking clinical licensure. Learning to do counseling is complicated. There is so much information and only a fraction of it is tested through comprehensive exams and national licensure exams. Over the course of 12 chapters, we hope to simultaneously condense and focus all that information while sparking reflection regarding your counselor identity and style.

The chapters in this book are chosen in an attempt to scaffold clinical information. The book starts by introducing readers to doing counseling. As we move through different types of therapy, we focus on helping you integrate counselor training directly into practice. We spend a considerable amount of time discussing the therapeutic relationship. Specifically, we focus on meeting the clients, building the therapeutic relationship, managing the process, and trusting that therapeutic process. We then introduce more complex skills including, but not limited to, integrating theoretical orientations into therapy, moving clients through their treatment plan from session to session, and ending therapy with positive outcomes. We also cover the work counselors do after the session is over. Then our discussion shifts to more contemporary issues in therapy, such as taking advantage of supervision, doing multicultural counseling, and, finally, doing distance counseling. We include a continual case example that we work through in most of the chapters to help us concretize many of the concepts and ideas we discuss within the chapter.

Chapter 1: An Introduction to Doing Counseling

The word “counsel” comes from the Old French counseil and Latin consilium, meaning consultation, advice, deliberation, or thought. Doing counseling requires us to do all of these things and more throughout our work with clients. Doing counseling requires us to listen to both our thoughts and emotions. To listen means to attend closely to what is being shared. The skill here involves staying with the client rather than jumping in readily with advice or problem-solving; it introduces readers to the idea of attending to clients as a way of doing counseling. In the chapter, we define counseling and the principles that guide our work. We pool information from therapeutic outcome research to explore counseling done well and not well. We then discuss using the self as a therapeutic tool, a concept that we will explore in more depth in later chapters. The chapter ends with a discussion of ways counseling is done and how it is done ethically.

Chapter 2: Doing Different Types of Sessions

After introducing readers to doing counseling well, ethically, and with principles and perspective, we want to outline the different types of sessions students and new professionals will find themselves conducting. We often hear practicum and internship students as well as new professionals say, “I have an intake session today” or “I had to do a crisis session last week.” Our goal in this chapter is to prepare readers to walk into these different types of sessions with confidence. We will identify some common types of sessions: intake, general therapy, treatment planning, assessment, individual, couples, family, child, crisis, and termination. We will discuss the purpose and major objectives for counselors in these sessions, the client’s experience, and important details counselors should consider when conducting these sessions. This chapter will highlight the voice of Dr. Judith Preston as she discusses ways to do crisis counseling sessions.

Chapter 3: Presession Preparation

Now that readers know the different types of sessions they may conduct, we next discuss presession preparation strategies. Many counselors have presession rituals just as baseball players do before they step into the hitter’s box. In this chapter, we will discuss strategies to use when preparing to attend a session, highlighting the importance of preparing for sessions. Also, contacting clients over the phone or email is explained. Readers can learn about the tiny important details that get lost in preparing for the more obvious therapeutic focal points, such as knowing what to wear and how to act, deciding on sitting placements, taking notes in session, developing an ambiance, and preparing the room for a session. This chapter also includes plans for approaching a session, strategies for managing emotions and improving therapeutic timing, and suggestions on how to prepare for termination during the early sessions. Finally, we will discuss perhaps one of the more sobering experiences of counselors-in-training and new professionals: no-shows and why they happen.

Chapter 4: Meeting the Client

Our job as counselors is to meet our clients where they are, although this is easier said than done. Meeting the client takes a great deal of vulnerability, safety, connection, and intentionality. This chapter will guide readers through some of the complex processes involved in meeting the client. We will cover the topic of building a therapeutic relationship with clients, which involves the skills of reflecting feeling, content, and meaning. Also discussed are ways to foster vulnerability within clients, ensuring safety, enabling change, personalizing their problem, diagnosing, and using assessments when meeting the client. This chapter will highlight the voice of Dr. Dave Howard as he discusses vulnerability within the therapeutic relationship.

Chapter 5: Managing the Therapeutic Process

Once the client is met well and a therapeutic alliance is fostered, counselors must manage the therapeutic process. This is often a critical area of interest for our students and new professional colleagues. This chapter pools information from the existing literature and our personal experience to walk readers through ways to manage the therapeutic process. Discussed in this chapter are topics such as seeing the field, mapping the territory, and first- and second-order change. We will then focus on the different phases of the therapeutic process—initial, working, and closing phase—to help readers see the process as something tangible they can touch and feel in session. This perception of the process can help readers learn to manage it. This chapter will highlight the voice of Dr. Jason Martin as he discusses ways to manage the therapeutic process.

Chapter 6: Trusting the Process

The phrase “trust the...