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Essay On Counselor Identity

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Professional Identity and Careers Paper Professional identity is prominent topic for licensed professional counselors and is a priority for many counseling organizations as they look to the future of the counseling profession (Kaplan & Gladding, 2011). I will discuss how professional identity is a combination of a counselor’s skill set, personal values and self-reflection (Young & Cashwell, 2017), consider how ethics interact with professional identity and apply this to my own personal career aspirations.

Counselor Identity Counseling has been defined by 29 counseling organizations as “a professional relationship that empowers diverse individuals, families, and groups to accomplish mental health, wellness, education, and career goals” (Kaplan, Tarvydas, & Gladding, 2014, p366). A counselors own professional identity is not as easy to define as it differs slightly from person to person. Having a professional identity as a counselor professional means belonging to a community of similarly trained and likeminded professionals, respecting the history of the profession of clinical mental health counseling that has been documented since 1976 and contributing to the future of the profession (Miller & Otis, 2021). Likeminded in this case meaning sharing a similar set of motives, ethical principles and perspective on mental health (Burns …show more content…

Counseling is a broad profession, for example the skills needed to for addiction counselling are different than the skills needed for family counselling, or school counselling. The American Counseling Association (ACA) has 19 divisions, each specializing in a different field of counseling. The ACA identifies different branches of counseling to “enhance professional identity” (ACA, 2023). Therefore, the specific division that counselor specializes in is part of their professional

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