Stacee Reicherzer

Recently, when supervising students, the topic of disclosure came up. As you might expect, the group was all over the place in thoughts on the value of disclosure, as well as the ethical implications that come along with it. Although I had my own thoughts on the appropriateness of vulnerability, I wanted the students to arrive at their own decisions. I gave them two instructions in this: 1) Determine their own limitations about sharing in counseling, understanding this may be a fluid boundary that is client-specific. What is safe territory from their own lives? 2) Be clear on the benefit of disclosure to clients: What would the student be doing to move counseling forward through disclosure?

I begin this week’s blog by revealing that I survived my father’s 1994 suicide. Since that time, I’ve also lost two clients and one student to suicide. This probably sounds overwhelming for you as a reader, but I think that the most important thing I can give you is to say that my felt sense in this discussion isn’t that of being overwhelmed, but really one of humble resolve. My resolve is in this: it’s time to de-mystify client suicide survival. In truth, counselor training does a lot of great work in sharing assessments and decision-making models for addressing suicidal clients. Yet, I think that we do little to prepare counselors for the likely fact that they will lose current or former clients to suicide. Is it that as counselors and educators, we are at a loss of how to describe the feelings that are associated with a suicide loss? Do we simply have no instruction or guidance to give because, in truth, there is no ability to feel settled with client suicide?

The greatest teachable moments I have as a counselor educator are those that my students and I have together. The particular moment that I’m writing about occurred last summer in a group skills development. The group was comprised of 15 students, 10 of whom were women of African-American or of mixed African-American descent. Of the other students, one was from a Latin American country and the others were White and from the U.S (I’ll get to why this is important, later).

Cultural competencies- how far we’ve come! There are so many real and transforming learning experiences being shared within ACA- this is a truly amazing time in our evolution as a profession. Yet, I also wonder this- at what point do we transform multicultural training so that, outside of the multicultural counseling class that is standard in all master’s level courses, it can be something other than an end-of-chapter or end-of-book quickie? It’s as if an author is saying “Oops, before we go- let’s spend a few moments talking about (fill in the blank) theories/ethics/group counseling in work with (fill in the blank) special populations/minorities/women’s issues.” Often, these add-ins seem to be only means by which authors or editors can produce a new edition (and more money!) with minimal effort (and I do mean, minimal!)