In the last post you read about the first duty of a mental health counselor: doing assessments. In this post, you will read about the second step: establishing goals.
The second step in the mental health counseling process is to establish goals. Why? Well, how are you going to know what direction to take if you don’t know where you are going? Decisions about treatment interventions are dependent on both the client’s issue(s) and their goal(s).
Like assessment, goal setting will also vary a bit depending on the setting. If you are working at an agency, particularly a substance abuse agency, then there are probably treatment goals that have already been established. Things like “staying sober”, “increasing healthy coping mechanisms”, “finding a job”, etc. However, we don’t really know if these goals are important to the client, so counselors need to ask all clients what they want out of counseling, even if it may seem obvious what the client “should” want. It’s also another way of determining client readiness for change. For example, if the client simply repeats what they think the goals “should” be, they probably do not have much insight into their condition and therefore treatment readiness is probably low. But I digress.
If you’re in private practice, you should always ask clients what they want out of therapy. If you don’t, then you risk imposing your own goals on the client. You may be a brilliant counselor, but your values and worldview are probably different from your client, and so your goals may not be appropriate. If you are working toward goals that the client is not invested in, therapy probably isn’t going to go very far. Therapists can often interpret this as “client resistance” (a fancy way of saying it’s the client’s fault therapy isn’t working) when really it’s the counselor’s interventions that are inappropriate.
Once you’ve gotten buy-in from the client, you can then proceed with treatment, which I will discuss in my next post. One side note, however, is that the line between assessment and treatment is permeable, particularly in private practice. Meaning, often as therapy progresses you will learn additional things about the client, which will probably require some adjustment in goals, which in turn will require adjustment in treatment. So don’t marry the client’s goals, just date them.
Yours in the Joy of Knowledge,
Barb LoFrisco
Also check:
• https://mastersincounseling.org/resources/top-50-addiction-counseling-blogs/
• https://mastersincounseling.org/counseling/asian-american-considerations/
• https://mastersincounseling.org/counseling/essential-tips-for-using-facebook-effectively-keep-yourself-out-of-trouble/
