COUNSED 250 · INTRODUCTION TO COUNSELING · UNIT 8
Career Paths & Places We Go With Others
Where a counseling career can lead — and how to stay compassionate without taking on everyone’s pain
Career Paths · Overview
Helping Professions: Pathways
- Mental Health
- School
- Rehabilitation
- Career
- College
Systems, resources, case management
Broadest range of work; most competitive
Couples, families, relationships
Addiction-specific
Coaching, consulting, teaching
Helping professions branch into counseling (master’s; specialty degrees in mental health, school, rehabilitation, career, and college counseling), social work (master’s), psychology (doctoral), marriage and family therapy (master’s), addictions (two-year in some states, four-year in most), and unlicensed work such as coaching, consulting, and teaching.
Career Paths · Helping Professions
Counseling: Specialty Degrees
Helping professions focus mostly on the socio-emotional wellness and internal experience of people — and generally require a master’s degree.
Counseling · Specialty degrees
Career Paths · Counseling
Counseling: Specialty Areas
Specialize by diagnosis or problem area:
Counseling focused on younger clients
OCD, bipolar disorder, PTSD
Postpartum depression, men’s health, life transitions, disability, acute crisis, complex trauma
Veterans, women’s health, minority populations (LGBTQ+, Native American, Hispanic…)
Career Paths · Counseling
Settings & Levels of Care
Beyond degree and specialty, the job setting shapes the work.
- Inpatient
- Partial hospitalization
- Outpatient therapy
- Forensic
- Private business owner
- …and more
Career Paths · Beyond Counseling
Related Helping Professions
| Profession | Focus | Education |
|---|---|---|
| Social Work | Can do therapy; more focused on social systems, resources, case management | Master’s |
| Psychology | Most comprehensive range of work areas — and the most competitive | Doctoral |
| Marriage & Family Therapy | Less individual therapy; more on relationships between people (couples, families) | Master’s |
| Addictions | Focused on addiction specifically | 2-year minimum in some states; 4-year in most |
| Unlicensed work | Coaching, consulting, teaching | Not licensed |
Places We Go With Others · Compassion
Compassion as Daily Practice
“What’s the most effective way to be in connection with and in service to someone who is struggling without taking on their issues as our own?”
A daily practice
A skill set — one of compassion’s most powerful tools
Compassion = recognizing and accepting our shared humanity so that we treat ourselves and others with loving-kindness — and take action in the face of suffering.
Places We Go With Others · Near & Far Enemies
Near and Far Enemies
Looks very much like a desired state — but actually undermines it.
Something like the opposite of that state.
In this unit: pity is a near enemy of compassion; sympathy is a near enemy of empathy.
Places We Go With Others · Pity
Pity: A Near Enemy
Four elements of pity
The suffering person is seen as inferior
A passive reaction that doesn’t include providing help
Emotional distance
Avoids sharing in the person’s suffering
Places We Go With Others · Empathy
Empathy: Skill and Risk
Empathy = understanding someone’s experience and reflecting that understanding back.
Mentally understanding the details being shared — often rooted in similar personal experience
Emotional attunement to another person’s experience
Necessary, but potentially dangerous. Empathy without boundaries can lead to burnout, overwhelm, and ethical problems — getting “pulled in” and losing our sense of self as healthy, whole, and separate from a person in pain.
Places We Go With Others · Sympathy
Sympathy: A Near Enemy
A near enemy of empathy — very similar to pity.
“I’m so sorry you’re going through that.”
- Creates emotional distance
- Portrays a lack of understanding of the person’s experience
Empathy misses — see textbook pp. 126–127.
Places We Go With Others · Boundaries
Boundaries
Holding people and ourselves accountable for behavior
…while maintaining empathy
Places We Go With Others · Comparative Suffering
Comparative Suffering
One-upping someone’s story, as if pain were a competition. Often an attempt to connect with the pain (“I know that hurt”) — but it doesn’t connect with the story.
Where it shows up
We panic about distributing resources to me
Justifying funding provisions
Unsure how to be present and let people hold their own pain