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Mastery and expertise in counseling.

Article Excerpt
As one of the great inventions of the last half of the 20th century, counseling offers great hope and promise. Yet for counseling practitioners, within this hope and promise, there is confusion about how to help and what constitutes mastery and expertise. It is like being in a fog and searching for mastery. And it matters because the counselor's contribution to counseling outcome is significant. Factors in counselor mastery and expertise are explored.

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Counseling is one of the great inventions of the last half of the 20th century. It has been of enormous help to thousands of people. And we, as counselors, have a noble vocation. Yet, sometimes trying to answer the simple question "How can I help people?" is a confusing, distressing, and lonely search through the fog. It is the fog of more questions than answers, of the circle of not knowing expanding as fast as the circle of knowing, of the reality of human complexity. The fog of not knowing can build in a graduate school practicum. It can start before graduate school with a human service job. And it can emerge later during one's career. It operates as a circle, there and then gone, and again appearing later. Palmer (1998) illuminates this fog struggle in the allied field of teaching:

[Sometimes] the classroom is so lifeless or painful or confused--and I am so powerless to do anything about it--that my claim to be a teacher seems a transparent sham. Then the enemy is everywhere: in those students from some alien planet, in that subject 1 thought I knew, and in the personal pathology that keeps me earning my living this way. What a fool I was to imagine that I had mastered this occult art--harder to divine than tea leaves and impossible for mortals to do even passably well! (p. 1)

We, as counselors, often are hoping for the fog to lift and for counseling mastery and expertise to...

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