Stephanie Adams

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Crisis Intervention. Disaster preparedness training. They all say the same thing. Attend to primary needs first. Maslow depicts them as the following: breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, and excretion. Not as an attractive a goal, perhaps, as self-esteem or friendship, but without the base of the pyramid a person cannot focus on that which is of higher importance, including and leading up to self-actualization. Sometimes I think in counseling practice, we forget this. We jump to the tip of the pyramid first, and forget to think about the basics.

A lot of our clients want to be our friends. But are we good friends to those people that aren’t our clients? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, as I’ve been working a lot more than usual and therefore have much less energy to interact with my friends and family. I owe an email to my friend Brittany, who faithfully reads my blogs and always brightens my day. My college roommate’s birthday was in April and I still haven’t sent her a card or present. I really would like to catch up with my brother who’s thinking about switching schools, and my brother who’s about to graduate college and is going on tons of job interviews, and my third brother is about to have a major band performance next week…(Why’d my parents have to have all these kids?)

Hopefully we have a pretty secure self-image of how we do in counseling sessions. Every workday we practice how to be the best counselor we can be. But sometimes that can backfire, and being the counselor can seem more attractive than being a normal person. The counselor, after all, seems to have all the answers. The counselor can hide what’s inside because it’s not “about them”. The counselor is confident, competent and self-assured. They always have something optimistic to say. They wrap up life in neat little 50-minute segments and tie them with a bow.

A member of my counseling listserv started a discussion this week that piqued my interest. She asked, “Why counseling?” I already really like the word “why”. I use it with my clients quite a lot, and although I’m sure it annoys them sometimes, it usually has positive results. “Why” makes you think. “Why” makes you own your decision.

Being a solo practitioner in private practice, sometimes I can identify with the idea that “it’s lonely at the top.” Not that I believe, mind you, that I am at the top of my profession, but in the counselor-client relationship, who needs to be in charge of the session? The counselor. The counselor must also maintain calm even when their own emotions are triggered, either by countertransference or by a client in jeopardy. I work in an office with two LPCs and two other LPC-Interns, but in my office, it’s just little old me.