Counselors hold master’s degrees in counseling, clinical social work, or a related field. Depending on their unique training and clinical experience, they may work with individuals, couples, families, specific age groups or specific clinical populations. They may approach their work from a behavioral, cognitive-behavioral, supportive, psychoanalytic or systems theory orientation. Some counselors prefer to work with individual patients plus their partners or families. Others prefer to split the work between more than one counselor in order to maximize confidentiality or for other technical reasons. Some counselors do time-limited work for the Employee Assistance Programs of large corporations, divorce mediation for the courts, or in various capacities working for state agencies.
Key Benefits
- Counselors usually charge less than psychiatrists or psychologists.
- Counselors offer practical advice and support to cope with and work through current problems.
- Counselors provide a safe environment to discuss problems that are difficult to discuss with friends and family, plus provide expertise that other supportive persons such as pastors often lack.
Capabilities
Counselors provide straight-forward, practical advice and support to help people cope with stressful life circumstances such as medical problems, job stresses and marital and family problems. If emotional difficulties stem mainly from current stressful events, it is often unnecessary to do lengthy and expensive insight-oriented psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, or to work with professionals that have more training but charge more. Counselors provide a cost-efficient service to patients seeking brief treatment for current stresses. Some counselors have additional training and clinical experience to do insight-oriented psychotherapy should it turn out that the current problems have deeper, childhood roots and be part of a recurring behavior pattern.
Individual Counseling
Often people face overwhelmingly stressful life circumstances and lack the tools to know how to cope effectively. Individual counseling assists patients by giving them the advice and support they need to better cope with their situation. Later, these tools may help patients more effectively cope with future problems on their own.
Marriage Counseling
Even the happiest of marriages go through difficult times. Marriage counseling can help break down the barriers to communication and understanding that prevent couples from resolving impasses. Even when it is clear that a marriage cannot be saved, marriage counseling can help couples divorce with mutual respect and dignity. Finally marriage counseling can help parents be more attentive to how the tensions between them affect their children. Whether or not the marriage itself can be saved, parents going through marriage counseling can feel more confident that they have done their best to attend to the emotional needs of their children.
Family Counseling
Family life is never without its problems. However sometimes problems become severe and may destabilize the entire family. Tensions between parents in the same household, between parents living in separate households, between parents and their children, between siblings, and between nuclear and extended family members may generate depression, anxiety and related problems like substance abuse. Family counseling can uncover problems like the communication of mixed messages, splitting of parents’ rules, uneven limit-setting and consequences, and the enabling of irresponsible behavior via rescuing others from the consequences of their actions. Family counseling is often imperative when dealing with a child or adolescent who acts out the family conflicts because their misbehavior indicates a larger family problem that will likely be missed if the child is treated with individual counseling alone.
For more information about Counseling, please visit the official web site of the National Association of Social Workers.