Course Introduction

Hello everyone, and welcome to RHS 301: Introduction to Counseling as a Profession. I am very excited to have you on this journey this semester as we explore the world of counseling. Throughout the class, you will learn about the key values needed to be an effective counselor or other human service professional, the importance of ethical behavior and codes, and multicultural competency skills. You will spend much of your time learning and practicing the basic skills of helping, the counseling microskills, and the major theoretical approaches to counseling along with their interventions. You will then spend the last portion of the class exploring the possible settings and people encountered by helping professionals.

I hope you find this class thought-provoking, challenging, and fun. I expect for you to leave this course with a better understanding of the counseling process, ways to implement skills and techniques into your field, the major responsibilities of counselors and other helping professionals, and the major issues affecting the helping profession today. Finally, I hope this course will answer some of your questions (and challenge you to begin asking new questions!) about your interest in helping others promote change, as well as your beliefs about how people change. Questions may include

• What are the causes of psychological problems, dysfunction, and/or pathology?
• What makes for successful therapy?
• How do people make meaningful changes in their lives and maintain a healthy quality of life?
  

Counseling is a difficult term to define due to its broad meanings. On the one hand, there is the profession of counseling, in which a person studies and becomes licensed as a professional counselor. However, on the other hand, there is a general meaning for counseling, in which people across a wide variety of disciplines and educational levels may serve as counselors throughout the day. These are people from across the helping professions (counseling, psychology, social work, occupational or physical therapy, nursing, education, and human resources) who rely on the use of effective communication and problem-solving skills to help others. As students in this class come from a variety of majors and backgrounds and the purpose of this course is to introduce you to the counseling profession, we will focus on the general meaning of counseling and use the terms helping profession and helping professional.

This course is divided into three parts. Part 1 is your foundation, discussing microskills. This first part of the course will introduce you to what counseling is and will describe the personal and professional aspects of what makes for a good helping professional. You will learn about

• the importance of self-awareness of your own values and biases,
• genuineness,
• empathy,
• having a non-judgmental attitude,
• multicultural competencies,
• ethical principles and codes, and
• the counseling microskills necessary to be an effective helping professional.
  

Once you have an understanding of the foundations of counseling and have been able to practice the counseling microskills, in Part 2 of this class you will explore some of the major theories used in counseling. There is an endless list of theories, making it impossible to cover them all. This course will focus on some of the most common theories used in practice, including psychoanalysis, Adlerian theory, behavioral theory, cognitive theory, cognitive behavioral theory, and the humanistic theory. You will also learn about some of the techniques that each of these theories use.

For Part 3, you will learn about some forms of testing and assessment that lead to diagnosis, as well as some of the major therapeutic settings in which helping professionals may work, including schools, mental health agencies and other community organizations, and hospitals. You will also learn about some of the people that helping professionals may interact with, including children, teens, adults and the elderly, families, people with disabilities or mental health conditions, and people with substance-use disorders.