Treatment of Male Homosexuality Through Marriage Counseling: A Case Presentation

This case presentation describes the use of marriage counseling for the treatment of male homosexuality and examines several theoretical issues including mixed sexual and dominance-submission dynamics, a transference family concept, and the economy of the particular homosexual syndrome and its meanings. Editor.     

Divorce Counseling or Marriage Therapy? A Therapeutic Option

Divorce, if properly orchestrated by a specially trained therapist, can be a liberating experience that promotes, rather than undermines, family solidarity. Of course, a happy marriage is preferable to an amicable divorce, but some marriages are beyond repair. Gross incompatibility often leads to "emotional blackmail" and other coercive states within an unhappy marriage. The present paper, through the use of several case histories, addresses the foregoing issues and also delineates effective marital therapy strategies. The rationale and implementation of creative divorce counseling is also described.     

A Study of Clinical Change in Individual Career Counseling

This study examined the clinical significance of career counseling effects. Participants were 111 university students (83% women) who participated in individual career counseling sessions at their university. All participants completed the French version of the Outcome Questionnaire–30.2 (OQ‐30.2; Lambert, Finch, Okiishi, & Burlingame, 2005) immediately before the 1st session (pretest) and at the beginning of the last session (posttest). The OQ‐30.2 assesses 3 client life domains: subjective discomfort, problems in interpersonal relationships, and problems in social role satisfaction. Using Jacobson and Truax’s (1991) statistical approach to assessing clinical change, the authors compared clients’ pretest OQ‐30.2 scores with their posttest scores. Among clients with a “dysfunctional” score (n = 59) at the study’s inception, 34% recovered and 14% improved, whereas 41% of clients with functional scores (n = 52) at the study’s inception improved. The results suggest that individual career counseling can make a difference in the lives of many clients; they also highlight the importance of further outcome research that accounts for possible variability in clients’ responses to career counseling.     

Counselor Involvement in Marriage and Family Counseling*

Using a communications framework, a rationale is suggested for determining when a counselor's use of four basic communication styles is likely to be helpful, neutral, or harmful. High disclosure counselor styles are generally seen to be less harmful than may have been previously supposed. Counselor involvement in the style of the high disclosure speech, which conveys an attitude of openness to the clients' reality, is seen as the most. effective form of confrontation. Withholding self by failing to use high disclosure styles, especially in the presence of high rapport, is considered less than satisfactory counselor activity     

The Storied Approach: A Postmodern Perspective for Career Counseling

The author discusses the storied approach as a constructivist perspective on career counseling. The storied approach explores the client's world through story development as the client and counselor collaboratively co‐construct, deconstruct, and construct life stories. Story development encompasses the client's past, present, and future life experiences that are related to life roles (i.e., family, student, worker, leisure, community). Assessment consists of both quantitative and qualitative data that are woven into the client's story as the symbols or meanings that call for further exploration.     

Career Counseling With Black Men: Applying Principles of Existential Psychotherapy

Counselors may benefit from applying principles of existential psychotherapy to career counseling with Black men. Existential psychotherapy asserts that there are 4 issues that all people experience: death, freedom, isolation, and meaning. The life experiences of Black men, including difficulty with their careers, suggest that they may struggle with these existential concerns, particularly finding meaning in their lives. Because work and issues in other domains of life (e.g., family, community) often intersect, an existentially based career counseling approach may prove useful. An overview of existential psychotherapy is presented, followed by a discussion of its applicability to career counseling with Black men. In addition to suggestions for career counselors, recommendations for training and professional development are offered.     

Nationwide Newspaper Coverage of Same-Sex Marriage: A Community Structure Approach

Using the community structure approach to compare coverage of same-sex marriage in leading U.S. newspapers in 35 major cities nationwide, all articles of 250+ words were sampled from a 5-year span of January 1, 2007, to June 23, 2011, for a total of 577 articles. Articles were coded for “prominence” and “direction,” and then combined into a “Media Vector” score for each newspaper, ranging from .4523 to ?.1067. Initial Pearson correlations revealed three clusters had significant relationships: stakeholder (stakeholder proportions correlating with favorable coverage of stakeholder concerns), buffer (privilege correlating with favorable coverage of human rights issues), and vulnerability (vulnerable populations correlating with coverage favoring their perspectives). The stakeholder cluster includes: (percentage 25–44: r = .506, p = .001; gay market index: r = .432, p = .005; percentage 65+: r = ?.397, p = .009; percentage voting Democratic: r = .335, p = .025; percentage voting Republican: r = ?.330, p = .026). The buffer hypothesis was also confirmed (percentage college educated: r = .465, p = .002; percentage family income of $100,000+: r = .383, p = .012; and percentage professional/technical occupations: r = .300, p = .040). One vulnerability indicator, percentage below the poverty line, was also confirmed (r = ?.297, p = .041). A varimax rotated factor analysis and regression yielded 2 factors accounting for more than 29% of the variance: privilege/gay marketing/political identity, 24%, and Evangelicals, 5%.     

Individual Counseling for Sexually Abused Children: A Role for Animals and Storytelling

This article addresses the use of animal assisted therapy in individual counseling for sexually abused children. It focuses on how the animal can help the sexually abused child disclose abuse and express feelings. Storytelling forms a part of the treatment process. The author's clinical experience at Project Against Sexual Abuse of Appalachian Children in Knoxville, Tennessee, forms the basis for the article.     

The AIAC,A Design for Systematically Analyzing Marriage and Family Counseling: A Progress Report*

The Allred Interaction Analysis for Counselors is an instrument for systematically analyzing counselors' and clients' verbal behaviors. It was constructed to provide marriage and family counselors-in-training a method for acquiring meaningful, objective feedback on their counseling behaviors. The interrater reliability coefficients have been high. Results of validity studies have been encouraging. Though the instrument was initially designed from analysis of structured family counseling, research indicates it may have rather wide application for many different counseling approaches and settings.     

Career Counseling Is Personal Counseling: A Constructivist Approach to Nurturing the Development of Gifted Female Adolescents

Gifted individuals face many concerns when contemplating their futures. Often hindered by career indecision; perfectionism; and multiple personal, familial, and societal pressures, some gifted young people flounder when they have the ability to flourish. Many counselors and educators trust that a wealth of talents will propel these adolescents to automatic life success, and the unique needs of this population can go unmet. This article considers the complexity of challenges facing gifted young women, presents current and potential interventions, and encourages integrating developmental and constructivist theories with objectivist techniques. Implications for practitioners and future research suggestions are highlighted.     

Creatively Labeling Behavior in Individual and Group Counseling

The authors make a case for the accurate labeling of behavior at the appropriate time in the counseling process and caution against the kind of labeling of a person which results in stereotyping and counseling ineffectiveness. They present a list of seven criteria to be considered if behavior is to be accurately labeled and advocate the use of metaphors, especially in group counseling, to label certain kinds of behavior     

Decentering and Family Process: A Marriage of Cognitive Therapies*

Using the concept of decentering, as formulated by Piaget, to describe how the child comes to understand his impersonal world, the author has extended the concept to understand family patterns. After describing decentering, he shows how it can be used with Rational Emotive Therapy and Transactional Analysis, both cognitively oriented therapies. These theoretical ideas have served as the basis for a cognitive model of therapy which the author calls TARET Systems, a major goal of which is the increasing of awareness through shifting perspective on oneself and others.