Professional Counseling & Ethical Practice Flashcards
Multicultural Competence
The ability of counselors to effectively work with clients from diverse cultural backgrounds, demonstrating awareness, knowledge, and skills to address cultural factors and promote culturally responsive counseling interventions.
Dual Relationships
Situations in which counselors have multiple roles or relationships with which may pose ethical challenges and potential conflicts of interest clients, such as personal, social, familial, professional, or financial connections
Transference
The unconscious redirection of feelings, attitudes, or expectations from past relationships onto the counselor, influencing the dynamics and interactions within the counseling relationship.
Countertransference
The counselor’s emotional reactions, biases, or responses triggered by the client’s words, behaviors, or transference dynamics, requiring self awareness, reflection, and ethical management.
Informed Consent
The process of obtaining voluntary agreement from clients to participate in counseling services, providing them with relevant information about the counseling process, risks, benefits, confidentiality, and their rights and responsibilities.
Supervision
The process of receiving guidance, support, and feedback from a qualified supervisor to enhance counselors’ professional competence, self-awareness, ethical decision-making, and adherence to ethical standards and practices.
Boundary Crossing
Occasional and unintentional deviations from professional boundaries in the counseling relationship, which may occur due to factors such as lack of awareness, ambiguity, or client needs, and require ethical awareness and resolution.
Boundary violation
: Deliberate and unethical breaches of professional boundaries in the counseling relationship, such as exploitation, abuse of power, or self-disclosure for personal gain, which can harm clients and undermine trust and integrity in counseling practice.
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT)
Focuses on identifying and amplifying clients strengths, resources, and solutions to their presenting problems, emphasizing goal setting, solution-building questions, and scaling techniques to facilitate positive change and progress.
Narrative Therapy
Focuses on exploring and reconstructing clients’ life stories, meanings, and identities, with an emphasis on externalizing problems, identifying, alternative narratives, and fostering agency and empowerment through story telling and reauthoring.
Trauma-informed Care
Integrates knowledge about the prevalence and impact of trauma into counseling practice, emphasizing safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, and empowerment in working with trauma survivors and addressing trauma-related symptoms and needs.
attachment Theory
Examines the impact of early attachment relationships on individuals’ emotional development, interpersonal patterns, and coping strategies, emphasizing the importance of secure attachment bonds in promoting resilience, intimacy, and emotional well-being.
Motivational Interviewing (MI)
A client-centered counseling approach that aims to explore and resolve ambivalence about change, using strategies such as reflective listening, open-ended questions, and affirmation to elicit and reinforce clients’ intrinsic motivation for behavior change.
Crisis Intervention Theory
Focuses on providing immediate and short-term support individuals experiencing acute distress, trauma, or crisis situations, emphasizing safety assessment, emotional stabilization, coping strategies, and referral to appropriate resources for ongoing support and treatment.
Resilience Theory
Examines the factors and processes that contribute to individuals’ ability to adapt, cope, and thrive in the face of adversity, such as personal strengths, social support, positive coping strategies, and meaning-making, guiding interventions to enhance resilience and promote well-being.
