Counseling Domestic Abuse Impact of perspectives

Transformative leadership in the counseling profession:

Domestic abuse

In general, three fundamental paradigms have been applied to the counseling profession: that of a change-based approach, a leadership-based approach, and an advocacy approach. The change-based strategy stresses the need for clients to fundamentally alter their lives by 'unfreezing' themselves and to create a series of defined goals to make changes 'stick.' The advocacy approach stresses the need for a counselor to act as an advocate for his or her client. However, a transformative leadership approach is perhaps the most fruitful strategy to take, particularly when dealing with victims of domestic abuse. Victims of abuse often exhibit profound change resistance, but counselors only have moral, rather than external, organizational pressures (as in the change-based model) to ensure the changes they are trying to encourage 'stick.'

While advocacy can be useful, fundamentally it is the victim who must act as an advocate and a witness for her own rights within the legal and social service system, by indentifying what she is experiencing as abuse. The counselor must place him or herself in a transformative leadership role, encouraging the client to...

Instead of encouraging the client to change by forcibly altering or controlling the client's behavior, as with the change-based theory, putting the client in the driver's seat of change is essential. Unlike the advocacy model where the counselor speaks for the client, transformative leadership requires a mutual exchange and mutual action.
According to West (et al. 2006), transformative leadership pertains "to a vision or outcome" versus a purely transactional exchange of 'tit for tat.' An example of a transactional exchange in the business world is one in which a manager might offer a raise for an increase in productivity on the part of the worker. However, this is of limited utility over the long-term in encouraging workers to remain at a company and change their behaviors. Workers with little organizational loyalty beyond a paycheck can be easily motivated to shift alliances and work for another company when offered a higher salary. Employers are more apt to invest themselves in a company that genuinely cares about them and also stresses that it upholds a higher vision and a sense of higher values along the model of transformative leadership (Kuhnert & Lewis 1987: 649).

Counselors must often challenge clients' current framework of assumptions…