Guides to Counseling Careers & Other Resources

Many counselors offer therapy for substance abuse in private practice counseling offices, community mental health agencies, hospitals, correctional facilities, and juvenile detention centers. Services include individual counseling, group therapy, family counseling, and referrals to medication management, as needed.

Counseling is designed to focus on the client’s issues, feelings, thoughts, and experiences. Is self-disclosure okay to use in counseling sessions? Although there are some concerns with self-disclosure, it can be helpful to your client and the therapeutic relationship, when used for the client’s benefit.

When a client and a counselor connect with humor or laughter, this can help the client relax, let go, decrease symptoms and engage in creative problem-solving.

One of the most effective tools you will use, as a counselor, is your self-awareness. In a therapeutic session, this perspective allows the counselor to question his or her own thoughts, feelings, and biases. Without this process, counselors may react to their own and their client’s subconscious programming.

When swiping through apps or dancing at the club, have you ever felt like you didn’t vibe with the dating scene? A lot of factors contribute to this feeling of displacement, like beautyism, sexism, the focus on youth culture, or just a lack of shared interests. Yet what if there’s something deeper at work? What if our unique need for love changes our expectations of courtship?

A lack of motivation can be caused by a variety of sources. Some of these include stress, change, or an underlying mental health or physical condition. Other times, a lack of motivation can be a signal to make important changes in your career and lifestyle.

Journaling is one self-care method counselors can recommend to their clients. Clients can use this tool on their own and incorporate these entries into a therapy session. Counselors refer to journaling in therapy as writing therapy, journal therapy or expressive art therapy.

Since Kinsey, there have been many studies exploring the spectrum of heterosexuality and homosexuality, yet there has been little to no research measuring the spectrum of aromanticism to alloromanticism, and asexuality to allosexuality.

Some religious and spiritual practices can be healing to the individual, while others cause harm. If the counselor strives to treat the client as a whole person, religion and spirituality must be included in the therapeutic work.

Gambling disorder is the only behavioral disorder included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5). It appears alongside substance use disorders and is formally considered to be a type of addiction. Like other addictions, gambling disorder represents persistent, recurrent behavior that continues despite significant harmful consequences.