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The First Session: What is it all about?
How was your first individual session? Do you remember how you felt before and after your first interaction with your client?
Share your thoughts, we want to hear about it!
Some of you may be wondering what to expect during your first session with a client. In this article, I am going to share my personal knowledge and experience with you on this topic. There are two main goals for the first session–to establish a therapeutic relationship and to gather information.
The most important thing to remember during the first session is, simply put, to be with the client. What I mean by this is that you must focus on what the client is saying at all times. Do not try to think of what to say next. You actually don’t have to. If you are with the client, this will come naturally. It may help to tell yourself you are going to have a conversation with the client. During the first session, you will employ everything you learned in your counseling skills course. Using these skills will not only…
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Welcome!
Welcome Counselor Interns from San Antonio, Tx!!
Hello and welcome!
This site was created for prospective and current counselor students and is designed to serve as a kind of a “safe house” for you to come to get information before, during, and immediately after completing a program in counseling. Though we’ll try to anticipate and post on topics you may be interested in, please feel free to send us requests for topics you’d like us to post on. Also, if you have some information you’d like to share, let us know and we’ll make arrangements for you to get your information to out there. I hope you find that this site resourceful and beneficial. Don’t forget to tell your friends and classmates about us. We look forward to helping you along your journey!
How do I find a Practicum or Internship Site?
How many of you have the same question?
Finding a practicum or internship site for most counseling students is a daunting task. We all hear the stories of how difficult it is to secure a site, let alone a site that is a great fit for us. For some programs they match you with a site but if you are in a program like mine, the responsibility to secure a placement for your internship is left up to you. Here are some tips to help you and maybe give you peace of mind as you start this journey.
1. Start Early! Seriously, I’m not joking you have to start as soon as possible. Everyone says start early and you may even think you are ahead of the game, but in reality you probably should’ve started when you began your program. I started looking for a site in January 2012 when I was scheduled to start to my practicum in August 2012 and every person I contacted said they were…
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Meet The Counselor Interns From San Antonio, Texas
Hello everybody!
I invite you to visit Counselor Interns HeadQuaters. Two of my colleagues, Tunisha Potter and Brittany Duncan, and I got together to create a blog were we can publish information about the different fields and licenses in counseling, such as the LPC. LMFT, and LCDC.
Some of you (subscribers) have requested that I publish information about the LPC, including a study guide for the certification exam.
Tunisha, Brittany, and I are academic advisors at San Antonio College in San Antonio, Tx. When I met Tunisha and Brittany, they expressed to me their dream of creating a blog where they could share with others all kinds of valuable information that they are receiving from working on their master’s degrees. So, since I have experience with creating and managing blogs, and they have all this knowledge they want to share, we decided to collaborate.
Come visit the new blog and let us know what you would like to get from this site and how we can provide information and guidance that will help you make a better decision when choosing your career path. Tunisha, Brittany, and I would love to read your comments, ideas, and suggestions. Just as I was excited when I created my first blog, and even happier when I received the very first comment, Tunisha and Brittany will be happy to receive a “welcome to blogging” message and lots of support from future students, counselor interns, professional counselors, and everybody out there with a genuine passion for helping others.
I hope that you like Counselor Interns HeadQuaters as much as you liked LCDC Exam Review.
– Samantha Delint-Neely
Tunisha Potter, Brittany Duncan, and I (Samantha Delint-Neely) are three counselor interns (CIs) working on our licenses in San Antonio, TX. Together we will share with all of you the experiences and knowledge we are getting from our internships. We invite you to get to know each of us better by reading our Bios.
Cravings are different from wants and desires. They are stickier.
Understanding and treating addiction requires an understanding of what cravings are and how they work. Helping someone overcome and recovery from addiction is not about helping them stop using. I believe it is important to help our clients understand the difference between wants, desires, and cravings. This is a great article addressing this issue.
Substance Abuse Counseling – The Profession
The substance abuse counseling profession is a vocation or occupation that requires advanced education and training. Twenty years ago, treatment was provided by people in recovery from alcohol and other drug (AOD) addictions, who would only use their own experiences to help others. The problem with this is that recovering individuals do not know how to treat different issues that co-occur with addiction such as poly-drug use and mental disorders. Although recovering individuals are able to relate to others dealing with addictions, mainly to the same drug of choice, they do not have the training and the skills to understand the differences among drugs of abuse, their effects on the brain and the body, and the believes and attitudes of people from diverse cultural and ethnical backgrounds.
The substance abuse prevention field is in its early stages, i.e., it is just developing as a discipline. The goal is to create standards of training and practice so that practitioners are able to handle the complexity of substance abuse and everything that comes with it. Part of the training for alcohol, tobacco, and other drug (ATOD) prevention professionals, is to explore their own attitudes about ATOD. It is not surprising to find practitioners who debate over terminology such as recovered vs. recovering addict, or the 12-Steps and the Big Book vs. religion and the bible.
Concepts such as use, abuse, misuse, dependence, and addiction vary from person to person. Substance abuse prevention professionals need to keep in mind that use and abuse of substances is not determined by their own experiences, but by standard definitions. For instance, substance use is the ingestion of alcohol or other drugs (AOD) without experiencing any negative consequences. Substance misuse is when a person experiences negative consequences from the use of AOD, or when the use of them is illegal. Substance abuse is the continued use of AOD in spite of negative consequences.
Addiction, also called dependence, is the compulsive use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs (ATOD) regardless of the consequences.
Substance abuse prevention strategies used in the past have been ineffective. Strategies such as Just Say No, Prohibition, and the illegalization of drugs that used to be legal, have not given the results expected. The criminalization of people who suffer from addiction is probably one of the least effective strategies.
Research in substance abuse prevention is helping develop effective theories that include risk and protective factors and resiliency, just to mention a few.
Reference: Substance Abuse Prevention – Julie A. Hogan
Why Assessment Skills are Important
Assessment skills are important because substance abuse counselors should be able to understand the basics of current diagnostic assessment tools and instruments. A competent LCDC should be capable of writing appropriate and professional descriptions of behaviors in regards to addictions. In order to gather relevant information about the client’s substance abuse history, counselors need to practice effective interviewing techniques; the interviews should include the client and other sources of information about the client, such as family members, friends, and coworkers.
A substance abuse counselor should be able to use these skills and explain to the client why and how the assessment takes place. In doing so, the client would have a better understanding of his/her own treatment process.
One of the most important things to remember about a client’s assessment is confidentiality. The assessment is the first opportunity for both the client and the counselor to interact with each other, therefore, confidentiality and professional work ethics should begin here.
Screening and assessment are two different tools. Screening is a process by which we can identify a potential problem with the client’s alcohol and other drug (AOD) use. This tool allows us to determine whether a client is eligible for a particular treatment program.
Assessment is a tool used to confirm the existence of a problem. This allows counselors to identify the nature of the problem and therefore suggest options for treatment. During the assessment process we can identify the client’s strengths and weaknesses, and his/her needs in order to develop an appropriate treatment plan.
Assessment instruments must be reliable and valid. Reliability means that consistent results are obtained under consistent conditions. Reliable assessment instrument provide consistent results when the assessment is repeated under consistent conditions.
Validity is the degree to which a test really measures what we want to measure, and not something else.
Nota bene: Reliability does not imply validity.
LCDC Exam Review 