Addictions Counseling Certification: An Emerging Counseling Specialty

This article summarizes the national standards for addictions counseling of 4 different professional groups or boards. The new addictions specialty certification standards that are being developed jointly by the National Board for Certified Counselors and the International Association of Addictions and Offender Counselors (a division of the American Counseling Association) are compared with the standards of 3 other groups.     

School Counseling: An Evolving Specialty

This article provides a review of school counseling as a specialty area of the counseling profession, including attention to historical development, training standards and accreditation, certification, and future trends and issues.     

Counseling in Malaysia: An Emerging Profession

The emergence of counseling in Malaysia illustrates the importance of a strong professional association and counseling training programs at the university level.     

Adult Education and Counseling: An Emerging Synthesis

Adult education and counseling are needed facilitative and helping functions for a nation growing older. The current challenge seems to be to make counseling and educational services more widely available to people of all ages. Fulfilling adult needs and helping them adjust to new life circumstances will stretch the counseling system far beyond its traditional settings in schools and public service agencies. Present trends highlight the need for accessible, even convenient, resources for stimulating lifelong learning, adjustment to change, and personal development. In fact, the need structure of most adults seems to be weighted far more heavily in the direction of developmental counseling and learning more effective ways to fulfill their needs. Opportunities for adult education, career planning and assessment, and counseling services head the list of needed resources.     

Marriage Counseling: A Christian Approach to Counseling Couples

An approach to marriage counseling aimed at Christian couples is described. The theoretical bases of the approach are cognitive behavioral therapy and structural and strategic marital therapies. Techniques are drawn from various schools of marriage therapy. Shared Christian values between counselor and clients are used to promote increased marital commitment, marital satisfaction, and personal spiritual growth. Marital satisfaction might be increased through helping the couple increase their intimacy, enhance their communication, improve their conflict management, and forgive each other for past and present hurts.     

Sports Counseling: A New Counseling Specialty Area

This article provides background information about sports counseling for student-athletes. A proposal for a Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs specialty training area for sports counseling is presented.     

Christian Counseling: A Synthesis of Psychological and Christian Concepts

Strong describes an approach to counseling that synthesizes psychological processes of change with theological concepts of the Christian faith. Clients are assumed to be self-directing and responsible for their behavior, including the changes that counseling is intended to facilitate. The counselor's junction is to equip clients to enable them to change. The key objectives in Christian counseling are described and the counseling process is reviewed in the light of these objectives. The author discusses the place of justification, responsibility, forgiveness, grace, sin, responsible loving, and prayer in the counseling process. Francis Mc Guire makes a response to Strong's article from a perspective that views Zen Buddhism as an integrated psychospiritual system capable of offering a critique and a complementary viewpoint. Herman Slotkin 's think piece is an attempt to define and clarify some of the language and goals of moral education and propose a civic, nonsectarian perspective regarding value and moral awareness.     

Counseling the Depressed Christian Female Client

Some researchers have suggested that traditional gender-role conditioning for women might relate to depression and, furthermore, that religion has played a major role in defining and reinforcing gender roles. Depressed Christian women, consequently, make up a unique population with special counseling needs. This article addresses these women as a group and offers suggestions for counseling them.     

Counseling Battered Women from Fundamentalist Christian Backgrounds

The author examines biblical issues that are of concern to battered women from fundamentalist Christian backgrounds and offers counselors suggestions on how to address them.     

Normative MMPI-2 Profiles of Christian Counseling Students: An Investigation of Subculture in Standardized Testing

This research sought to explore whether a normative profile on the MMPI-2 emerged for counseling students in a counselor training program at a seminary in the Midwest and the extent to which this profile compares to those proposed for counseling students or those preparing for pastoral ministry. Normative profiles of master’s level counseling students were compared to profiles of similar samples. Findings indicated that profiles of the current student sample are similar to those of other religious students. Implications of these findings are explored regarding the use of the MMPI-2 with counseling students who are members of the Christian subculture.     

Value Tensions Between Evangelical Christians and Christian Counseling

The evangelical wing of the American Protestant church has maintained an uneasy and uncertain relationship with the recently emerged Christian counseling movement. Whereas many evangelical Christian groups have been able to assimilate Christian counseling into their panoply of ministry tools, significant sections of this faith group remain very suspicious and doubtful that Christian counseling can be trusted. Most of the stated reasons given by these objectors revolve around theological reservations. This article, however, suggests that an even more powerful barrier between the two groups stems from significantly different values held by each. The article enumerates several of these value differences.     

Career Counseling Specialty: History,Development, and Prospect

This article contains an overview of the historical development of the specialized practice, preparation standards, and credentialing of career counseling. Discussion also focuses on commonalities of career counseling, general counseling, and other specialized forms of counseling, with attention to questions and implications for the future of career counseling practice and standards.     

Counseling Psychology in Israel: A Virtual Specialty in Transition

Le domaine de la psychologie du counseling ne s'est pas encore imposé en Israël comme une spécialité officiellement reconnue. Comme dans bien d'autres pays, la psychologie clinique représente le substrat des services de counseling, pour ce qui est du prestige et du nombre de praticiens. Cependant, les psychologues du counseling ont joué un rôle important pendant des années en faisant la preuve de leurs compétences aussi bien dans le monde universitaire que dans la vie pratique. L'une des retombées positives en est la promotion de la psychologie du travail où nombre de psychologues du counseling ont trouvé un refuge pendant des années, secteur qu'ils ont enrichi aussi bien théoriquement que pratiquement. La psychologie du counseling est en Israël appréhendée avec le souci de fournir une réponse à la demande particulière de counseling de la population locale et dans le cadre de l'évolution de l'ensemble de la profession de psychologue.
The field of counseling psychology has yet to take hold in Israel as an officially sanctioned specialty. As in many countries, clinical psychology constitutes the primary deliverer of psychological counseling services, both in number and in status. Nonetheless, counseling psychologists have been prominent over the years in applying their professional skills, both in academia and in applied areas. One local benefit is the boost granted to the vocational psychology field where many counseling psychologists have found a haven over the years and have enriched it, both academically and in practice. Counseling psychology in Israel is discussed in the context of providing a response to the unique counseling needs of the local population and within the structural transition of the psychological profession as a whole.     

A Stage Approach to Career Counseling With Christian Women

Almost 75% of married women ages 25–54 years are in the labor force in the United States. Many are in occupations that are below their potential or are not personally satisfying. Lack of role satisfaction can result in depression, but the career issues of women in treatment are often ignored. Christian women may be particularly vulnerable to role dissatisfaction. The authors offer a stage model for assessment of Christian women who present with symptoms of depression, in hopes of addressing issues of role satisfaction from work and lessening depressive symptoms.