Wellington Rd 13 copy

The transcription discusses the importance of professional counselors exploring their own attitudes towards spirituality and religion, evaluating how these beliefs influence their work with clients. It emphasizes the need for counselors to be aware of their own biases and seek supervision when facing challenges like counter-transference or moral incongruence. The speaker reflects on personal struggles with understanding and empathizing with clients who hold beliefs conflicting with their own, highlighting the need for creating a safe space for clients to share openly. The speaker also contemplates strategies for personal growth and avoiding over-researching sensitive topics. Overall, it underscores the complexity of navigating differing beliefs in counseling and the importance of self-awareness and seeking support. So, this is under a cervix in their Ways framework of their best practices. Under the first section, Ways of Being, the professional counselors, Section B, actively explore their own attitudes, beliefs, and values about spirituality or religion, including varying world religions, spirituality outside the context of organized religion, agnosticism, and atheism. This reflection is an ongoing practice that allows for an awareness of changes that can occur across time in light of influences of the past and present-day context regarding one's own spiritual slash religious beliefs and one's attitudes toward the spiritual and religious beliefs of others. C, continually evaluates the influence of their own spiritual and or religious attitudes, beliefs, and values on the person they work with and the counseling process in both conceptualization and intervention. This one's especially important, this part. The counselor is able to acknowledge and recognize the presence and clinical use of their own spiritual and or religious beliefs, using themselves as a tool to create a supportive environment, i.e., coming from a place of curiosity and not over or under-identifying with the beliefs of the people they work with. Consistent with the ACA Code of Ethics, counselors make every effort to avoid causing harm, i.e., allowing their beliefs to impede the therapeutic process. D, identifies the limits of their understanding of the person's spiritual and or religious perspective. Counselors are encouraged to seek supervision or consultation when counter-transference or moral incongruence occurs when addressing a person's spiritual and or religious perspective. Well, I think that's the big deal. Section D, especially, is the big deal. Counter-transference and moral incongruence sound like exact descriptions of what I'm imagining and what I'm still finding challenging. Not relating to the person, the problem would not be in relating to the person, the problem would not be in even connecting to the person, I don't think, because I don't have any trouble at the most foundational level, just being human to human with people, right? Everybody's imperfect. Everybody is flawed. We all make mistakes. I can see you as a person when I am one-on-one talking to you, but what happens when you express an opinion that I find morally disheartening? Then what do I do? I think that's where the strategies have to come from for me, is that's where the change has to come right now, at least, in step one, because as of right now, I'm not going to be able to get to, I don't know, I don't even think I can get to how is this an appropriate or understandable or valid coping mechanism for people's anxiety about the way the world is, right? The world is a scary place, yes. We all do things and some of them are maladaptive and hurt other people to make ourselves feel better about the world being a scary place, yes, and then I can't get past that part. That's the part where you start hurting people in the name of something good, like doing bad stuff in the name of something good and then saying that everybody else is bad and that you're the good one. That's what I can't get past. Anyway, I think that the consultation and the supervision is going to be a big deal and I think watching it happen in real life, like maybe gathering some videotapes of people engaging in these topics in a therapeutic setting, because it's not as if people's politics or their religion don't come up, right? The last thing that I would want to do is have any kind of client, regardless of their beliefs, feel unsafe to disclose something, right? Like if I'm, and this is very important and I'm actually kind of blowing my mind a little bit here because that's so not what I'm saying, but it's so important to build this safe space where your client feels like they can tell you everything that's happening deep down inside so that you guys can work together on it. And here I am saying like, oh, well, I would love to hear all of your flaws except for these very specific ones. And if you have them, you cannot tell me because I cannot help you with them, right? That's not good. We got to get over that. Anyway, I think it's going to be like mentorship, supervision, modeling, like no stakes practicing like role play or like something where I literally can do absolutely no harm, like only good things can happen. Only my personal growth can happen. I think I have to be careful with not over-researching it, which is, this is just something that's true about me as a person in general, is I over-research everything. Something about knowing as much as I can possibly know about something helps make it feel safe to me. So my instinct is just to like research the hell out of this and learn all about the psychological underpinnings to being drawn to not even so much religious extremism as like the use of religion instrumentally to inflict violence or oppress. I don't know, I mean, why is it, why is it the white people? Like I don't know. I know that it's, I don't know. Why do I have sympathy and empathy? Why does it seem like it would be so much easier to understand somebody who doesn't look like me, who's, I don't know, maybe it's like too close to home. Maybe it's because it's like, you know, if I'm talking face to face with like a privileged white lady who's like well-educated and, you know, we can relate on a lot of common ground, but then there's Christian nationalism popping up and hateful things are coming out of her mouth. I guess that's why it's so much worse for me because it's like, oh, that's white people. Maybe. I really don't know.