INTRODUCTION TO COUNSELING

Introduction to Counseling

Introduction to Counseling

Introduction

Transition is a series of different changes that occur throughout life. It may be going from one school to another. Transition in life takes place in several stages. These composed of periods of crisis a person suffers or the different events which lay an enormous impact on the overall life. A transition may also be getting a job, or for someone with a sense of sight, may be driving a car for the first time. I have experienced several transitions in my life, like everyone else. In this article, I want to tell you about different transitions for which I had and how they changed my life (Carstensen, Mikels, & Mather, 2006, Pp. 362-73).

Life transitions counseling has evolved as a branch within the larger field of psychotherapy and mental health counseling. The theories underlying psychotherapy initially based on what known as the medical model. This model proposed that mental illness, or any emotional problem, is biological in nature and can be alleviated through medication or some biological alteration. Any problem that a person displayed understood as purely the symptom of a problem within that individual.

The goal was to identify the symptom and cure or fix it. People who sought treatment for psychotherapy thought of as sick or defective in some way; this perception continues to be culturally and situation bound. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR) is a primary criterion measure used to assess and diagnose clients. Although the DSM-IV-TR is a valuable tool when a common language needed to describe clients, its reliability and validity have consistently been quite low.

Discussion

Life transitions counseling as a recent offshoot of traditional psychotherapy based on the premise that all individuals encounter changes, both developmentally and experientially, that require an ability to navigate through the transition process that follows significant turns in the road. Although people often do this successfully, using their own resources or support of family and friends, certain transitions impact a person in such a significant way that the aid of life transitions counseling is useful. It is a counseling model designed to assist people who are coping with normal and quite often inevitable environmental change; as such, the emphasis is not on disorder within the person, but changing conditions in the life of the person and their skills for adjusting and adapting. For clinicians using a DSM-IV-TR diagnostic model, the diagnoses of adjustment disorders and the V-Codes provide some means for specifying and diagnosing transitional issues in a clinically relevant way. The model is a collaborative one, based on the normalizing tenet that change and transition are inevitable (Dohrenwend, 1973, Pp. 167-75).

For me, the change involved moving from one stage focused on various interests, and the realization of an option, which defines my goals to achieve in life plan that includes professional life and career. The first and true transition that I faced was the sudden death of my mother when I was 12 years ...