Personal Values in Counseling
Counseling is beneficial to many people experiencing substance use issues, this is a clearly known fact. So often though, we forget that counseling does not mean GOOD counseling. By this I mean, just because someone is a counselor it does not mean they are great counselors, or even good counselors. There are many ways counselors can actually hurt clients ability to find recovery. which is why a counselor needs a degree AND years of training before they can be independent. It is easy to forget the ways a counselor with good intentions can actually do more damage than good.
Everyone has values, a set of beliefs that are at the core of who he or she is, this is good! Sometimes, though not often, personal values that the counselor holds can actually be detrimental to a clients treatment if the counselor does not consistently evaluate his or her values and his or her ability to remove them in the counseling process.
What do I mean? What values are you referencing?
When I speak of personal values being detrimental in the counseling process I mean the counselor holds a value so tightly that he or she cannot be objective with the client. Change needs to come from the client, thus, the client must want the change. If a counselor has a value and tries to impose it on his or her client, the client is bound to suffer, if not immediately, then in the future. The values I am pertaining to include values of things like: family, gender roles, religion, abortion, sexuality and sexual orientation, and cultural and racial identity.
If the counselor has the personal value that family is “everything” and no one should ever walk away from their family, that is ok. If that same counselor gets a client who has a history of emotional abuse from his or her parents and has walked out on his parents and does not wish to ever see them again, that is ok. But what would happen if the counselor continuously, in various ways, encouraged the client to “give his/her parents another chance” because the counselor disagrees with the clients value? The client may go back to his or her parents and suffer further abuse, and this time, it may even be more difficult for the client to walk away because he or she will feel shame or guilt. All this because the counselor had the value that family should stick together no matter what and the counselor was not professional enough to keep it out of the counseling process with a client.
The past three and a half weeks at my internship have been quite exciting and I can tell you that personal values do play a role in counseling, I didn’t just create a “never going to happen” story. I have seen clients who hold values I really agree with and am proud of, I have also seen clients make decisions based on their values that I completely disagree with.
At the end of the day, what makes a great counselor so great is not that he or she shares all the same values as his or her clients, or that he or she does not have strong values, it is that he or she is professional and can keep his or her values separate from the clients. This is done differently by everyone. but the way I see this issue and how I will handle this issue is by asking open ended questions and really listening to the clients story. I know why I have my personal values. I have seen people marginalized a lot in my life and so my values are almost always long the lines of be yourself. However, I know that NO ONE has had MY life.
Now that may seem arrogant at first, but it is true. My family, my education, my college experiences, my pets, my friends, the time I spend on Facebook is just that, MINE. and all those things, in one way or another (some more than others) influence my values. So if no one has had the same exact experiences as myself, how could I possibly believe that someone else would have the same exact values I do?
In this way, I remember that all those things that have influenced my values have influenced my clients values, just differently. So by understanding what created the values, I realize that most values are actually pretty logical, even if I do completely disagree with them. I won’t try to fool you though, I have values that do/will need some extra attention for me to not get in the way of my counseling.
I have numerous medical issues and my parents were always great advocates for me. They stopped being advocates for me when I was old enough to advocate for myself. So by the time I was in middle school my parents wouldn’t need to talk to my teachers about what I could and couldn’t do, I already did that work. So when I see people with disabilities not advocate for themselves I get a little upset and annoyed at first. Then I remember to step back and realize that I had resources that they may not have, like a supportive family. Now I am not saying a supportive family is necessary to be a good self advocate, merely one factor that benefited me.
Overall, when I counsel clients I need to remember that I need to let o of my values during the session and accept theirs as being logical based on their lives. If, and only if, the client becomes ambivalent about his or her clients, will I help the client identify faulty values he or she holds. Should I ever receive a client with whom I cannot set aside my values for, I will simply refer the client to another counselor who will be able to suspend his or her values. I would rather lose one client than to hurt a client by imposing my values on him or her.
