Advocacy-oriented counseling and empowering student clients

¶ … Letter to Counselor in Training

Dear Friend,

You have chosen a field that first of all shows you care about the lives of others. I am very impressed that you are delving into strategies and policies that will, when you graduate and have learned and practiced your skills, impact the lives of others in a positive way.

Let me challenge you by pointing out some of the reasons why the field of counseling is so vitally important today. It is clear to me that there are many young people and students -- and adults -- that have serious distractions and complications in their lives. Especially middle school and high school students have recreational habits that take away from their seriousness regarding their studies, and lead them into psychological problems that they are not able to cope with or figure out solutions for.

We know many adolescent boys are addicted to violent video games, are joining gangs, are engaged in bullying, and are experimenting with drugs and alcohol as well. It is also true that many boys and girls are locked into their smartphones (texting, posting on Facebook and Twitter) with such intensity that class work and scholarship are simply interruptions from their digital, social media worlds.

Also, there are dysfunctional families that send their children to school, and society somehow expects teachers and counselors to be able to provide stability for those unfortunate children. My friend, your graduate work should be preparing you to face huge amount of responsibility, perhaps even more than teachers. That is because people (including students) turn to counselors for assistance in figuring out how to cope with a world around them that frankly, seems crazy, violent, unsettled, and sometimes dangerous. The challenges are enormous.

But here is some specific and practical advice for you. Your job will not just be to listen and advice troubled students when they arrive in your office. Your job will be to provide challenging interventions that will actually empower the student. I'm talking about advocacy-oriented counseling, which recognizes the impact of the social, political, economic and cultural issues that affect a student's life. The student coming to you may first of all need to be made away of the "external barriers that affect his or her development," according to the American Counseling Association (ACA).

Your job as a counselor will be to challenge clients, to alert clients to the outside influences that are negatively impacting his or her life. Then, secondly, you must choose a strategy for that client to develop "self-advocacy skills" through "action plans" (ACA). You will need to develop this action plan with the client, and once the client agrees, you then will work with the client to carry out the action plan. Having a plan for a client is a giant first step towards solving emotional, social, and psychological problems. Self-advocacy of course means helping yourself; it means becoming your own counselor, in a sense, with a written plan for self-support that has specific steps -- and each step is a challenge.