Counselors as Clients Presentation Notes

Counselors as Clients: An Exploration of Personal Counseling

• Focus on mental health professionals and students in counseling programs.
• Applies across the board to helping professionals.
• Exploration of burnout in counseling practitioners.
• Personal counseling as a protective factor against burnout.
• Recognition of obstacles to engaging in personal counseling in this profession.

Personal Experiences & Topic Evolution

• Dr. Imhoff's experience with social anxiety and counseling:
  • Diagnosed in 2012.
  • Discussed in Counseling Today article.
• Jeff's perspective as a student:
  • Realizing professors are human and may have their issues.
• Creation of a CSI chapter at Liberty for online students.
• Podcast episode on pursuing personal counseling needs.
• Presentation as a result of personal experiences and self-discovery.
• Humility and self-awareness gained through counseling experiences.

Robert's Experience with Burnout and Self-Care

• 20 years in a high-stress consulting engineering field.
• Experienced burnout and destructive behaviors to cope.
• Counseling led to a career change to professional counseling.
• The importance of self-care.
• Mental health counseling as a one-way culture.
  • Daily pouring out of empathy and compassion without expecting anything in return from clients.
  • Double-edged sword: vulnerability to stressors and burnout.

Research on Stressors and Burnout

• Study by Simpson et al. (2018) of 434 clinical psychologists and counselors:
  • Stressors impacted performance for 79% of participants.
  • Over 18% experienced significant or severe burnout.
  • Approximately 84% experienced some type of burnout.

Definition and Causes of Burnout

• Maslach and Jackson (1981): Burnout is a syndrome of emotional exhaustion and cynicism that occurs frequently among individuals in the "people work prevention profession."
• Term first used by Herbert Freudenberger in 1974.
• Burnout can affect both practicing counselors and counselors in training.
• Common causes:
  • External: Environmental factors related to work demands (e.g., excess caseload, lack of resources, juggling school/work/family for counselors in training).
  • Internal: Personal-related factors (e.g., imbalance, coping mechanisms, fear of failure, fear of letting others down).

Dimensions of Burnout

• Emotional exhaustion: Depletion of resources.
• Depersonalization: Cynical attitude toward clients, lack of empathy.
• Lack of personal accomplishment: Feeling of incompetence.
• Diminishment of self-efficacy: Belief that one cannot accomplish goals.
• Early maladaptive schemas: Childhood histories affecting beliefs or coping mechanisms.
  • Unrelenting standards: Belief that one must strive for an unattainable goal.
  • Self-sacrifice: Belief that one must do things for others, feeling guilty if not.

Cycle of Burnout

• Demand → coping → increased demand → increased coping → exhaustion.
• Continues to repeat and magnify until it leads to burnout.

Impacts of Burnout

• Decreased level of care.
• Potential harm to clients (unethical issue).
• Job turnover and absenteeism, low morale.
• Personal issues: Trouble sleeping, stress, linked to drug and alcohol abuse, marriage and family issues, relationship issues, significant health issues.
• Depression, suicide, loss of license.
• Exponential growth of burnout studies since the 1970s.
• Ethical duty to ensure we're not causing harm to clients; emphasizes the importance of self-care.

Self-Care

• Pouring into oneself to have the fullness to pour out onto others.
• Holistic well-being and a reflection of attitude.
• Direct correlation with burnout.
• ACA Code of Ethics: Counselors required to engage in self-care activities.
• Self-care paradox: Counselors understand the importance of self-care but don't believe it applies to them.

Strategies for Self-Care

• Awareness: Ability to monitor one's own needs and balance.
• Balance: Maintaining equilibrium in personal and professional realms.
• Flexibility: Ability to adapt to situations. Perfectionism increases chances of burnout.
• Physical health: Sleep, exercise, diet.
• Social support: Connections with family, friends, supervision. Isolation is a major risk factor.
• Spirituality: Meaningfulness, being part of something greater than oneself, gratitude, thanksgiving, meaning-making.
• Intentionality and planning required to prioritize self-care.

Statistics on Counseling Attendance

• Approximately 80% of professional counselors will attend counseling.
• 44% of counseling students.
• 38% of general Americans.
• Reasons for attending counseling (Stevens et al., 2019):
  • Family concerns, sadness, loss, hopelessness, feeling on edge, worried, intimate relationships.
• Reasons for not attending counseling:
  • Lack of time, “I can deal with this on my own,” having the ability to access resources.

Jeff's Personal Story

• Raised as an only child from divorced parents.
• Entered seminary at age 17 to study to be a Roman Catholic priest.
• Lived as a monk in the South Bronx for four years.
• Began counseling due to exhaustion, anxiety, depression, hyper-vigilance, control issues, low self-worth, distorted images of God, OCD symptoms, and terrible self-care.
• Left the seminary and moved into a retreat center for priests and religious for 11 months.
• Counselor used theories of Anna Terruwe and Conrad Baars, who applied a rational philosophical approach to Freudian ideas about repression.
• Learned to guide emotions rationally instead of suppressing them.
• Mixed-up emotions and suppressed religious practices led to a sense of dichotomous thinking.
• Social isolation and narcissism due to the heart's cry for attention and love.
• Needed to unlearn what he had learned about his emotional life.
• Psychic rebirth through counseling, with the counselor stepping into the void.

Benefits of Personal Counseling for Counselors in Training

• Experiencing the role of the client.
• Increases conviction that counseling works.
• Improves personal and relational dynamics.
  • Personal: Self-awareness of issues, accountability, raised self-esteem, check motivations.
  • Relational: Increases empathy and authenticity.

Benefits of Personal Counseling for Professionals

• Change of role, from caregiver or teacher to being cared for.
• Opportunity to process personal lives uniquely.
• Unique empathy from someone who also does that job.
• Combating stigma by discussing issues openly.
• Reminds you of client vulnerability, promotes competence, emotional intelligence, etc.

Obstacles to Personal Counseling

• Time and busyness.
• Ego: Belief that one should be able to figure things out alone.
• Reaching out for help is not a weakness.
• Perception of helpfulness: Doubting whether it will really work.
• Credentials and fit: Find a counselor that can relate to you on a personal level.
• Stigma.
• Location (rural area).
• Fear of isolation, lack of adequate resources.
  Spiritual bypass
• Cost.

Solutions

• Intentionality.
• Advocacy.
• Partnership.
  • Between the school and educators from a supervision, a curriculum standpoint.
  • The professional identity in the industry being able to provide services for those counselors that may not be able to afford it.