COUC 500 Week 2 Counselor Identity Paper Example

Counselor Identity Paper: From Emergency Nurse to Counselor, Learning a New Professional Self

From the Emergency Room to the Counseling Room

For eight years I worked as an emergency department nurse. My training taught me to assess quickly, stabilize and move on to the next patient. I saw many people in mental health crises, and I often wished I could do more than keep them safe until a psychiatric bed opened. That wish led me to counseling, and it also raises the question this paper addresses: what does it mean to take on a counselor's identity after years in a different helping profession?

Two Professional Outlooks

Emergency nursing is organized around problems: find what is wrong, treat it, prevent the worst outcome. Counseling, as Granello and Young (2019) describe it, takes a different starting point. It views clients developmentally, as people facing the challenges of life stages and transitions, and it aims at wellness and prevention rather than only the treatment of disorder. The shift is larger than it sounds. In the emergency department, a patient's story mattered mainly for what it revealed about the diagnosis; in counseling, the story is often the work itself. I expect my nursing habits of quick assessment and calm under pressure to serve me well in crisis counseling, but I will have to unlearn the urge to fix and learn to tolerate slower change. The two professions also relate to clients differently. A nurse often tells a patient what will happen next; a counselor more often asks what the client wants to happen and helps them find the way. Learning to hold back advice, and to trust that clients can discover their own answers, may be the hardest part of my new identity.

Identity as a Process

Research on how counselors form their identity helps me understand this transition. Interviewing counselors in training, Gibson et al. (2010) identified three transformational tasks: finding a personal definition of counseling, internalizing responsibility for one's own professional growth, and developing a systemic identity within the profession, all while moving from dependence on experts toward self-validation. A later study of practicing counselors at different career stages found that identity keeps developing, as counselors move from idealism toward realism, from burnout toward rejuvenation and from compartmentalization toward congruence between personal and professional selves (Moss et al., 2014).

I can see myself at the very beginning of that process: still defining counseling largely in terms of what my professors say it is, and still measuring my competence by others' approval. The research suggests that this is normal and that the task of the next two years is to develop an internal sense of what counseling is and how I practice it.

A Professional Community

Identity also means belonging to a community and speaking for it. Myers et al. (2002) argue that advocacy for the counseling profession requires consensus about professional identity, a positive public image, collaboration within and beyond the profession, and the participation of every counselor. As a nurse, I belonged to a profession with a clear public image; counselors are still building theirs. As a student, I will take out memberships in the American Counseling Association and the American Mental Health Counselors Association, pursue the National Certified Counselor credential through the National Board for Certified Counselors, and meet my state board's requirements for licensure as a professional counselor. These memberships and credentials are not only career steps; they are ways of joining the work of defining the profession to the public. As a nurse, I sometimes heard colleagues describe counselors as people who "just talk," which suggests how much the public image Myers and colleagues describe still needs work. I want to be able to explain clearly, to physicians and nurses I once worked beside, what counselors do and how their work complements medical care.

Faith and Identity

My faith is the reason I moved from one helping profession to another. Clinton and Ohlschlager (2002) describe Christian counseling as compassionate soul care that is both clinically competent and spiritually grounded. In the emergency department, I could pray for patients quietly but had little time to know them. In counseling, I hope to offer the patient attention that I believe reflects God's care for each person, while respecting clients' own beliefs and following the profession's ethical code. Integration, for me, means that my faith shapes my motives and compassion, while the profession's standards shape my methods.

Next Steps

Over the program I will seek a practicum in a crisis stabilization unit, where my nursing experience can be a bridge, and I will ask my supervisor to help me notice when I slip back into fixing rather than counseling. I will also keep a journal of how my definition of counseling changes, so that by graduation I can see my own identity taking shape, and I will seek out a counselor who also began in health care and can describe what eased that change.

References

Clinton, T., & Ohlschlager, G. (Eds.). (2002). Competent Christian counseling: Vol. 1. Foundations and practice of compassionate soul care. WaterBrook Press.

Gibson, D. M., Dollarhide, C. T., & Moss, J. M. (2010). Professional identity development: A grounded theory of transformational tasks of new counselors. Counselor Education and Supervision, 50(1), 21-38. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-6978.2010.tb00106.x

Granello, D. H., & Young, M. E. (2019). Counseling today: Foundations of professional identity (2nd ed.). Pearson.

Moss, J. M., Gibson, D. M., & Dollarhide, C. T. (2014). Professional identity development: A grounded theory of transformational tasks of counselors. Journal of Counseling & Development, 92(1), 3-12. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-6676.2014.00124.x

Myers, J. E., Sweeney, T. J., & White, V. E. (2002). Advocacy for counseling and counselors: A professional imperative. Journal of Counseling & Development, 80(4), 394-402. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-6678.2002.tb00205.x