The Ethics of Being a Counseling Psychologist: Reflections From Training

Abstract

This reflective report evaluates my personal and professional development at the end of my counseling psychology training. As I understand counseling psychology practice as a way of being, working toward qualification has contributed to my self-actualization process in the coalescence of my personal and professional experiences. First, I position myself as a psychologist practitioner who endeavors to be an applied ethicist in my practice, anchored in a humanistic value base and a social justice ethos. Second, I elucidate my application of anti-discriminatory and anti-oppressive practice while reflecting on therapeutic relationships with clients and colleagues. Third, I discuss internal difficulties through a mindful and compassionate approach for helpful self-management and self-care. Lastly, I consider the realistic challenges in going into practice as a qualified professional. Thus, I hope to convey my personal and professional ethical stance as expressing the qualities of being a counseling psychologist.

To describe therapeutic endings, a transtheoretical model has identified consolidation, maintenance, resolution, and acceptance as interlocking phases (Shaharabani Saidon et al., 2018). First, upon revisiting the reasons to seek therapy and evaluating the learning that occurred, consolidation focuses on gaining ownership over the transformation resulting from the therapeutic process. Second, maintenance is the forward-looking challenge to manage difficulties for therapeutic gains to continue after therapy. Third, resolution involves repairing ruptures to provide a corrective emotional experience whereby responsibility is shared and collaboration is restored. Fourth, as a present-focused acknowledgment of ending, acceptance leads to a future orientation toward life without therapy (Shaharabani Saidon et al., 2018).

Drawing from this framework, this report is structured into four sections to highlight how my counseling psychology training has resembled a therapeutic experience by contributing to the coalescence of my personal and professional experiences (Amari, 2021c; Fabian, 2020). By outlining my resonance with counseling psychology’s humanistic ethos and pluralistic philosophy, the first section provides a critical understanding of my professional identity as a practitioner psychologist. Relating my personal experience to my practice, I outline the consolidation of my stance as an applied ethicist. The second section evaluates my practice in relation to anti-discriminatory values. It proposes a communitarian-based competence to delineate how I endeavor to maintain my personal functioning in professional practice. From an illustration of how feedback helped me examine tensions inherent in the interconnectedness of the personal and professional spheres of my practitioner psychologist identity, the third section considers my social positioning within the counseling psychology profession and humility as the ethical resolution toward the irreducibility of otherness. By appraising factors impacting my employability and showing initiative in career planning, the final section indicates my acceptance of surprise as foundational to “being-for-the-other.” Thus, I hope to convey my personal and professional ethical stance as expressing the qualities of being a counseling psychologist.

Consolidation: “Being With”

In choosing counseling psychology, I was inspired by a profession that makes its humanistic value base explicit (Cooper, 2009). As I was studying philosophy, I gravitated toward the phenomenological exploration of human relationships. Examining Martin Buber’s (1957) work, I discovered his dialogue with Carl Rogers, whose person-centered psychotherapy resonated with an understanding of the therapeutic relationship as an “I-Thou” encounter (Anderson & Cissna, 1997). While Buber (1923/2000) conceptualizes the “I-Thou” relationship as affirmation of the transcending nature of otherness, Rogers (1961) underscores how bringing oneself as a whole person is the precondition for effective moments in the therapeutic relationship. Similarly, research suggests that clients are interested in the person-to-person encounter with psychological practitioners (Allen, 2013). If therapeutic presence is the foundation of relational depth (Geller, 2013), effective moments in therapeutic relationships are relational experiences where clients and therapists are changed as they meet in their vulnerability (Anderson & Cissna, 1997). Combining my personal experiences with a professional stance, training in counseling psychology was my calling to put these humanistic values into practice and live by them (Amari, 2020).

Understanding my professional identity as a practitioner psychologist became the driving question to explore how to encounter my clients as a Thou (Amari, 2021a). As a counseling psychologist, I espouse a pluralistic philosophy (Gabriel & Reeves, 2024). Pluralism assumes the irreducibility of human beings to predetermined conceptualizations (Hanley et al., 2017). Ontologically, pluralism is rooted in an existential understanding of reality with the primacy of ethics that acknowledges the self as relational and embedded in a sociocultural and political context (Hanley et al., 2017). Epistemologically, pluralism considers individuals as goal-oriented and meaning-making beings that practitioners endeavor to understand phenomenologically (French, 2024). Systemically, pluralism advocates social justice by examining psychological distress as resulting from oppression and exclusion (Hanley et al., 2017). Methodologically, pluralism appreciates different research paradigms (Rafalin, 2010). As an example, I considered both quantitative and qualitative research throughout my training to investigate compassion-focused interventions for trauma-related presentations (Amari & Mahoney, 2022a), practitioners’ experiences working in trauma (Amari & Mahoney, 2022b), and the relationship between compassion and attachment (Amari et al., 2023). Clinically, pluralism encourages practitioners to consider different orientations to psychotherapeutic practice (Draghi-Lorenz, 2010). In the final stage of my training, I reflected on my professional identity by considering assimilative integration (Messer, 1992) and pluralistic practice (Cooper & McLeod, 2007). Assimilative integration meant incorporating interventions from other approaches, such as cognitive behavioral techniques, into my preferred therapeutic models, including person-centered, experiential, and psychodynamic psychotherapy, to improve clinical skills and meet clients’ needs (Messer, 2019). Pluralistic practice involved choosing therapeutic approaches in collaboration with my clients (Kupfer et al., 2023). As a reflection on the therapeutic process, metacommunication is utilized to discuss goals, indicating what clients want, tasks, describing ways of working, and methods, referring to interventions (Cooper & Dryden, 2015). Because involving clients is necessary for practice to be ethical (Gerger et al., 2020), I resonated with the collaborative focus of pluralistic practice.

During one of my final placements, working alongside clients presenting with difficulties indicative of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (World Health Organization [WHO], 2019b) challenged my professional identity. Following a history of interpersonal trauma, my clients assumed unsafety and untrustworthiness as they had lived experiences of how people offering care can also be a source of threat (Karatzias et al., 2018). Because of attachment disruptions, their ability to collaborate was compromised (Brown & Elliott, 2016). Although accommodating client preferences can facilitate therapeutic outcomes (Swift et al., 2018), expressing their wants was trauma-activating, as historically followed by abuse (Nardone et al., 2022). Despite explaining the rationale for reprocessing to reduce trauma-related re-experiencing (Ehlers & Clark, 2000), my clients and I could not foresee the level of traumatic distress that would have been provoked. While informed consent is an ethical obligation fundamental to collaborative pluralistic practice (Cooper & Dryden, 2015), its limitation lies in the recognition of therapy as an experience requiring my clients’ trust in me beyond my role as a professional (Chouliara et al., 2024). Collaboration was further complicated by trauma-derived self-fragmentation because my clients appeared to present with different parts at different times or in dissociative states (van der Hart & Steele, 2022). For our relationship to become therapeutic, my clients and I had to establish safety for all their parts to be willing to collaborate. Rather than the precondition of a therapeutic relationship, collaboration was the goal of interventions, such as chairwork, to establish a dialogue among multiple selves (Bell et al., 2021; Brown & Elliott, 2016).

While there may not be straightforward solutions, as a pluralistic practitioner, I am challenged to sit with uncertainty. In the acknowledgment that emerging therapeutic approaches include interventions from multiple orientations (Heer et al., 2022), unification has been advocated as a framework to encompass and transcend existing theories for a holistic understanding of human nature (Marquis et al., 2021). However, unification might conceal an intolerance to “not knowing,” which counseling psychology’s pluralism appeals to embrace as the birthplace of the potentiality that my clients and I enshrine. Although having a preferred therapeutic approach as a “safe therapeutic haven” might help when navigating the uncertain waters of therapeutic relationships (Messer, 2015), its choice should result from a collaborative assessment to avoid clients experiencing being tailored to interventions (Li et al., 2024). If my anchor is the commitment to meet my client as a Thou, the allegiance to a model is subordinate to my clients’ welfare (Li et al., 2024). As a reflective-scientist practitioner (Hanley & Amos, 2017), I engage with theory, research, and practice in an iterative process to collaboratively refine formulations and choose the right interventions at the right time (Thrower et al., 2024). While cherishing my clients’ otherness as mystery transcending objectification, I respect my individuality as a practitioner. This means that my professional identity cannot be reduced to one therapeutic model. If the therapeutic process is a right brain to right brain encounter (Schore & Schore, 2008), the focus on doing risks overshadows how to be with clients as the primary intervention. “Being with” is an inherently ethical stance that transpires into how I want to practice. Entering a therapeutic relationship with clients is a process of revelation wherein bringing my whole self means being transparent (Gerger et al., 2020). Transparency requires the critical evaluation of my values as I engage clients in a self-other exploration of who they are (Proctor, 2019). Ethically, transparency promotes clients’ autonomy and self-determination (Gerger et al., 2020). Therefore, I aim to develop responsiveness to tailor interventions to clients’ changing needs (Li et al., 2024).

My stance is that counseling psychology is an ethical endeavor, whereby my clients and I explore what living well with oneself and others means (Allen, 2013). As a practitioner psychologist, I identify as an applied ethicist who aspires to translate counseling psychology’s ethos into socially just action. Although I resonate more with a pluralistic practice based on its emphasis on how we treat clients (Kupfer et al., 2023), counseling psychology’s pluralism challenges me to hold different models of practice in a dialectical tension. Through metacommunication, I can create distance from the embeddedness of interconnectedness so that my clients and I can decide together how to be in the therapeutic relationship (Cooper & Dryden, 2015). As an applied ethicist, intentionality signals my decision to enter anew the therapeutic relationship with agency and choice. Being clear about who I am as a practitioner without holding onto my identity shows my openness to be changed by the encounter with my client as a Thou (Anderson & Cissna, 1997). If the person of the therapist and the person of the client create a magical synergy (Allen, 2013), consolidation expresses my willingness to keep striving to be a good practitioner and live by my values.

Maintenance: “On Being”

As therapeutic presence means bringing oneself to the therapeutic relationship (Geller, 2013), reflective practice requires self-awareness through examining my history, values, and needs (Wise & Reuman, 2019). Growing up as a person of color in a majority white society, my experience with groups was characterized by exclusion due to my ethnic diversity and emotional expressivity violating gender norms of stereotyped masculinity (Gough, 2018). Experiencing traumatic shame as rupturing interconnectedness (Benau, 2017), counseling psychology’s emphasis on relationality spoke to my need for belonging and worthiness as I could contribute to restore common humanity by actualizing an ethics of compassion (Amari, 2021b). However, carrying unmet developmental longings for connection into my training made me vulnerable to experience my difference as shameful (Amari, 2023). As I imagined my contribution would be superfluous, personal development groups and peer group supervisions evoked shame-based anxiety. Against the inadequacy when comparing myself to my full-time peers, the connection with the part-timers’ group provided me with a neuroception of safety to motivate me toward proximity-seeking actions (Porges, 2022). Coming to the final peer supervision group, our tutor encouraged us to share feedback about our experience with one another. Disconfirming my beliefs, both my peers and tutor valued not only my contributions but also my presence, encouraging me to appreciate the value in sharing more of myself. With increasing confidence, I have tried to forge “competence constellations” by joining peer groups of practitioners to discuss personal and professional concerns, develop Focusing partnerships, and deliberate practice for skill building. By securing psychosocial flourishing, competence constellations reduce isolation as a risk factor for professional malfunctioning (Wise & Reuman, 2019). As a practitioner psychologist, I can become a moral agent in my accountability to my colleagues’ functioning and the communities we serve (Johnson et al., 2014).

Exploring my professional identity challenges me to consider the meaning of being a practitioner psychologist generally and a counseling psychologist specifically. To assure quality, practitioner psychologists engage in evidence-based practice (Health and Care Professions Council [HCPC], 2023). While demonstrating an understanding of the knowledge base of the psychological profession, counseling psychologists are additionally required to examine the philosophical underpinnings of evidence-based models of therapy (HCPC, 2023). If ethics is “the first philosophy” (Levinas, 1979), moral analysis is necessary to guarantee the primacy of the other (Cooper, 2009). Ethically, evidence-based practice assumes that interventions that maximize the best therapeutic outcomes for the greatest number of individuals are better (Berg, 2019). Effectiveness in symptom reduction, time efficiency, and cost-benefit can be socially just parameters when psychological distress overwhelms a publicly funded healthcare system (Stevens & Al-Abbadey, 2024). However, exposing the utilitarian ethics underpinning evidence-based practice allows for the evaluation of its presumed neutrality (Soto, 2024). By focusing on presenting difficulties, evidence-based practice might overlook intersectionality (Knapp et al., 2024). For instance, recognizing an idiosyncratic understanding of recovery, clients from a collectivistic background might expect expertise (Winter et al., 2015). Supporting a client with a culturally minoritized identity, they requested “treatment” for social isolation. As we explored their interpersonal avoidance, they disclosed fears of “being crazy” due to trauma-derived voice hearing (Shinn et al., 2020). Cultural humility meant considering social determinants that shaped the understanding of their suffering, including how their family and community perceived their presenting difficulties (Tehara et al., 2024). Ethically, psychoeducation was an act of epistemic empowerment for my client to gain a research-based destigmatizing understanding of re-experiencing linked to memory processing (HCPC, 2023). Exemplifying metacommunication, my client and I considered reprocessing as a task and reliving as a method to achieve their goal (Ehlers & Clark, 2000). While their culturally driven respect toward me as a practitioner could have been interpreted as consent, cultural awareness meant discussing mental health systems in their native country to recognize power dynamics and their right to decline interventions (Tehara et al., 2024). Fostering their active participation, we could develop a culturally sensitive therapeutic plan including narrative exposure therapy (Wright et al., 2020). As an applied ethicist in my counseling psychology practice, I acknowledge ethical pluralism whereby multiple value-based frameworks coexist with a commitment to respect sociocultural embeddedness (Berg, 2019).

Counseling psychology’s relational ontology calls for a dialectical perspective that considers both individuals and their communities as having ethical responsibilities toward each other (Neville, 2024). With ethics as a foundation, I espouse a communitarian-oriented competence that is bolstered through practitioners’ collaboration (Wise & Reuman, 2019). Wanting to grow as a person and as a professional, I sought opportunities to deliver therapeutic groups. Co-facilitating with a psychologist colleague an all-men compassion-focused group to address trauma-derived difficulties (Lee & James, 2012), I was not immune to participants’ interpersonal trust problems. Focusing on unmet attachment needs, one of the sessions ignited anger in most participants. Becoming a conditioned response cued by shame, anger can dispel vulnerability (Pascual-Leone et al., 2013). As my colleague and I validated the unfairness of their childhood trauma, we acknowledged how anger was arguably shielding participants from intolerable powerlessness as a shame-provoking experience within unquestioned notions of masculinity (Loewenthal, 2022). Witnessing other men, one participant was, however, surprised to reconnect with a previously unacknowledged part that felt anger as an adaptive expression of needs (Kolts, 2022). I resonated with the internalized shame, which can make me fearful of revealing myself. Working on breaking the self-protective barrier of perfectionism, I have started expressing my relational needs more explicitly as I want to show myself with authenticity. The group was an opportunity to uncover gender norms and the societal repercussions of shaming emotional expression in perpetuating aloneness (Gough, 2018). By acknowledging common humanity in suffering, a communitarian-based ethics highlights interdependence to promote social justice (Johnson et al., 2012). Against epistemic violence, both justice and joy can become expressions of a shared humanity for collective healing (Neville, 2024). While individual work remains my preference, group work is an experience that I have learned to appreciate without experiencing anxiety. Becoming intentional in initiating constellations with professionals from different backgrounds, I can develop my competence (Johnson et al., 2013).

As foundational to competence, looking after myself is necessary to maintain professional integrity (Stevens & Al-Abbadey, 2024). As a standard of proficiency, practitioner psychologists must have self-care strategies (HCPC, 2023). While the commitment toward optimal performance indicates perfectionist strivings, perfectionist concerns signal the shame of not being good enough (Richardson et al., 2020). Walking the “good enough tightrope” between improving my practice and a narrative of inadequacy, noticing how shame feels somatically, and my withdrawing response can help me break the automaticity of its loop (Lyon & Rubin, 2023). In my final research on trauma-experienced ethnically diverse individuals, utilizing Focusing helped participants transcend a predetermined meaning of compassion by accessing a state of being of metaphors and imagery (Amari & Martin, 2025). Similarly, I found that developing a Focusing practice can liberate me from shame-freezing definitions of who I am to honor myself and support my clients in this undertaking (Severson & Krycka, 2023). By increasing vulnerability to compassion fatigue, self-critical perfectionism is antithetical to the maintenance of my professional effectiveness (Ondrejková & Halamová, 2022). Conversely, compassionate self-correction can be a protective factor by increasing self-awareness, interconnectedness, and kindness toward myself (Gilbert, 2022). If the ability to care for others is linked to my ability to care for myself (Pintado, 2019), cultivating compassion and reflexivity can augment my therapeutic presence (Bourgault & Dionne, 2019).

Ethically, ensuring competence post-qualification is an obligation for a safe practice environment (HCPC, 2023). For effective practice within the legal and ethical boundary of the psychology profession upon qualification, maintaining competence requires ongoing professional assessment through a variety of learning activities, including consultation, teaching, specialized training, and the identification of knowledge gaps (Neimeyer et al., 2012). As learning is fruitful when engaging in goal-related activities linked to professional aspirations (Horn et al., 2019), I intend to continue to refine my practice working with trauma-related presentations and oppressed communities. Beyond maintaining competence, a flourishing lifelong practice aims to promote relationality (Wise & Reuman, 2019). To foster my professional development, I can develop my competence by connecting to a community of colleagues both as an independent practitioner and in multidisciplinary team contexts (Johnson et al., 2013). Locating professional standards within a communitarian perspective, I recognize myself as embedded in networks of mutually developmental relationships to promote learning and well-being (Wise & Reuman, 2019). Thus, a virtue ethics appeals to my aspiration to be a practitioner psychologist embodying compassion in my practice, with colleagues and for myself (Johnson et al., 2012).

Resolution: “Being Toward”

By reflecting on the tension between personal and professional spheres as a practitioner psychologist, resolution involves mending ruptures to restore personal functioning in my counseling psychology practice. During my placement in a psychotherapy department, my compassion for others was challenged while working with a client presenting with interpersonal and depressive difficulties. From a psychodynamic perspective, our work aimed to unveil unconscious motives and emotions driving their problems and relationship with care (Lemma, 2015). Finding this exploration difficult, my client directed their distress toward me. Notwithstanding my efforts to convey empathic understanding, they experienced me as uncaring. Under what I perceived as a persistent attack, my reflective functioning was challenged (Cucco, 2020). Although I conceptualized my client’s distress as signaling shame encompassing loss of self-cohesion and connection (May, 2017), supervision helped me notice how focusing on cognitions arguably intensified my client’s sensitivity to emotional rejection.

Despite completing therapy as planned, my client and I failed to explore their shame as stemming from developmental experiences of misattunement (Hahn, 2000). Nevertheless, my supervisor’s feedback prompted me to examine the autobiographical meaning of my countertransference, which manifested in my struggle to connect with my client’s suffering. As a non-relational resource, intellectualism had been my way to escape societal and interpersonal shaming and find some safety and self-esteem through emotional distance. To protect myself from my unresolved shame stemming from unmet developmental longings for belonging, I had similarly withdrawn from connecting with my client’s internalized shame (Hahn, 2000). Because of an inter-affective process involving shame resonance, extricating myself from the projection of a devaluing other was difficult as awakening my self-experience of unworthiness (Kelly & Lamia, 2018). Instead of being with, my prioritization of thinking exposed my inability to bear the experience of shame with my client for a transformative experience of togetherness. Differently, I could have judiciously used self-disclosure to share my shame avoidance and disentangle us from re-enactment or empathic confrontation to strengthen the therapeutic alliance (Alfi-Yogev et al., 2021).

Acknowledging what I can do within the available time and competence means admitting fallibility. To inform practice, counseling psychologists draw from their lived experience of therapy (HCPC, 2023). Exploring the relationship with myself and others in personal therapy, I discovered my ambivalence in accepting compassion (Matos et al., 2017). Despite feeling seen, I found compassion wounding because it exposed a void which I feared could exceed my receptive affective capacity (Watson & Wiseman, 2024). While anticipatory shame led me to conceal my longing for connection, sharing this in therapy has helped me start building shame tolerance, management, and resilience as I keep working toward acceptance. Aware that I cannot accompany my clients where I am unwilling to go, I am learning to tolerate powerlessness and helplessness to connect with their experiences. In one of my placements in a trauma service, I recognized a trafficking-survivor client’s self-attack as internalized shame compounded by fear of separateness (Hahn, 2000). Reflecting on their hypervigilance as preventing a focus on their needs allowed us to detect dependent tendencies that increased their risk of revictimization (Kinnish & Hopper, 2024). By helping my client verbalize their shame, they reported experiencing connection through sharing within our therapeutic relationship (Hahn, 2000). In meeting shame with compassion, failure can thus propel my learning to help future clients.

As a social practice, counseling psychology is embedded in sociocultural and political contexts vulnerable to power dynamics inherent in structural inequalities (Abe, 2020). In the United Kingdom, there are currently over 3,000 counseling psychologists (National Health Education [NES], 2024). While social identities intersect with power, privilege, or marginalization, diversity demographic data reveal a non-diverse profession (HCPC, 2024b). Recognizing that counseling psychology is embedded within the same systems of oppression which it aims to address through social justice endeavors, such as whiteness and heteronormativity, reminded me of my developmental experiences of minoritization. However, being different became the organizing principle that shaped my choice of placements. To counteract biases that from power-governors, such as regulatory bodies, training institutions, and statutory services might filter through practitioners (Liu, 2017), I resolved to reach out to oppressed and marginalized populations, such as gender, sexually and relationship diverse adults, people with problematic substance use, older adults living with dementia, individuals hearing voices, refugees, and asylum seekers. Acknowledging my power, publishing has been an additional way to communicate ideas to specialist and non-specialist audiences and express my belongingness to the psychology community.

Complementing power with the ethical obligation to repair systemic ruptures, humility reflects a way of being towards the other as a commitment to challenge unequal distribution of privilege, causing health disparities (WHO, 2024). As a self-reflective practice, humility challenges me to hold the ambivalence inherent in my social location in relation to my professional group, clients, and communities that I serve (PettyJohn et al., 2020). In one of my placements, I worked with a child with an anger presentation following their newborn sibling’s death. The parent was a wheelchair user with a social care package, which did not include the child. Having conducted school and family observations, I discussed in supervision how an environment where multiple carers were taking over caring responsibilities toward the child without consistency arguably contributed to attachment insecurity (Liotti, 2016). My supervisor encouraged me to additionally consider the parents’ vulnerability to depending on carers for physical support and health professionals who scrutinized their parenting capacity. As a non-disabled practitioner, feedback from supervision made me aware of my power to depathologize the child’s attachment-derived difficulties, which would have been otherwise understood diagnostically as an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (WHO, 2019a). Therapeutically, I worked on fostering parent-child attunement to build the parents’ confidence in their ability to care for their child. Systemically, I advocated for a separate care package for the child and encouraged the parent to have an advocate to represent them in what they experienced as intimidating multidisciplinary meetings.

Intrapersonally, humility calls for awareness of my social positioning linked to the intersectionality of my contextual identities, power, and privilege. Increasing self-awareness is proportionate to developing compassion toward myself and my clients (Wolf et al., 2013). Interpersonally, recognizing otherness without othering, I can foster autonomy (Abe, 2020). Collectively, social justice questions sociocultural construction of psychopathology and ideologies that rupture interconnectedness (Singh et al., 2020). Ethically, I can join counseling psychology as a social justice agent to advocate anti-discriminatory and inclusive practice (HCPC, 2024a). Therefore, my commitment to reflect on and review my practice exemplifies a good enough internalization of my training experience to propel my ongoing development.

Acceptance: “Being for”

As I become an autonomous practitioner psychologist, the post-training period is an opportunity to discover my work niche while facing real-world concerns related to workforce challenges and economic reality (Horn et al., 2019). Predisposing factors impacting my employability include the cost-of-living crisis, government policies, funding, and increasing pressures on services following the COVID-19 pandemic (Byrne et al., 2021). As one example, with an overall rate of 18 psychologists per hundred thousand inhabitants working for the National Health Service (NHS), the demand for psychological help in Scotland continues to increase (NHS Education for Scotland [NES], 2024). While maintaining a representation of counseling psychology in the NHS is important for public awareness of the specialty (Jones Nielsen & Nicholas, 2016), the rate of practitioners’ turnover, indicating the number of leavers divided by the average number of staff, has almost quadrupled in the last 6 years (NES, 2024). Signaling a “global compassion fatigue” that highlights systemic determinants, exhaustion, internalized powerlessness, and diminished motivation are likely to occur as presenting problems during my career (Stevens & Al-Abbadey, 2024). Precipitating incidents may entail ethical dilemmas if I felt unable to alleviate clients’ suffering due to organizational constraints (Stevens & Al-Abbadey, 2024). Insufficient line management support, complex caseloads, and pressures on delivering cost-effective interventions may be perpetuating conditions affecting my job satisfaction (Jones Nielsen & Nicholas, 2016). While the weight of these factors may need to be endured as it shifts throughout different stages of my professional life, developing a personal strategy regarding career planning can be protective by increasing my compassion satisfaction (Stevens & Al-Abbadey, 2024).

To anchor myself into the coalescence of being indicative of my self-actualization process (Fabian, 2020), I considered how to continue living by the values that brought me to counseling psychology. If social justice expresses the commitment to engage with marginalized groups to create a more equitable society (Johnson, 2021), ethical practice includes serving communities who have the least power, advocating against oppressions, and promoting collaboration (Wilcox et al., 2024). My first placement at the start of my training was with young people presenting with offending behaviors. It exposed me to the reality of a system that attempts to deny otherness by enclosing it within stereotypical labels. However, psychological practice cannot be consonant with social justice without actively reducing inequities (Paquin et al., 2019). As an environment where I had no prior experience, a vacancy in a prison service sparked my curiosity. During my visit to the prison, I discussed with a psychologist the commitment toward making a trauma-informed environment against practical challenges, such as room availability, time constraints, lack of control over routines, and the impact of imprisonment on trust and safety (McMinn et al., 2024). Arguably, people with justice involvement exemplify an othering process whereby humaneness is denied (Harney et al., 2022). By 2029, the UK prison population is estimated to be around one hundred thousand people, posing increasing pressures on the prison estate capacity and aggravating existing mental health challenges (Government UK, 2025). Despite the importance of psychological interventions in prisons (Beaudry et al., 2021), their limited availability does not fulfill the obligation to provide equitable services.

While society creates physical prisons, I have experienced clients condemning themselves to relational prisons. Both actions represent the breakdown of trust (Laddis, 2019). I recalled one of my clients sharing how the people linked to their trauma-derived difficulties were in prison. To represent their relational boundaries, we utilized strings (Fisher, 2019). As my client enclosed themselves with a string, they shared a feeling of safety. Upon defining my boundary with a different string, they noticed their little space compared to mine, which evoked their feelings of aloneness (Lee, 2015). From a trauma-informed perspective, we linked this self-imposed isolation to what developmentally guaranteed interpersonal safety but was currently preventing interconnectedness (Lee, 2015). Whereas my statement that I would go toward their boundary physiologically activated their flee survival response, stating that I would not cross it, reconnected my client to a felt sense of safety (Porges, 2022). As my client fed back an experiential insight into their interpersonal beliefs, this creative intervention proved effective (HCPC, 2023).

If developing trust is the purpose of psychological therapy (Chouliara et al., 2024), socially just practice requires environments that mirror the trust that will be provided within therapeutic relationships. As compassion is about recognizing common humanity (Strauss et al., 2016), counseling psychology’s humanistic ethos appeals to practitioners to help individuals reconnect with humanness within oneself and others (Sims, 2016). By connecting to my values, I can accept challenges as opportunities to imbue my practice with purposefulness and meaningfulness (Stevens & Al-Abbadey, 2024). Purposefully, working in prison can be an act of societal reparation toward individuals whose fight-based trauma response overshadows unhealed shame that attempts to erase self-other humanity (Schuhmann, 2015). Meaningfully, counseling psychology’s pluralism fits with the tension of holding the suffering caused and the suffering endured, both resulting from adverse childhood or environmental experiences (McMinn et al., 2024). Considering the co-occurrence of mental health presentations in people in prison (Yoon et al., 2017), I can hone my therapeutic skills and presence. As I intend to continue specializing in trauma, I believe working in prison can expand my personal and professional development.

Conclusion

For an optimal experience of acceptance of its ending, it is important to acknowledge the value of my training (Shaharabani Saidon et al., 2018). Framing my professional developmental learning in terms of being underlines my ethical use of self to facilitate trust. Clinically, formulation and interventions can be ethical propositions underpinned by the principles of safety and responsibility (Koch & Cratsley, 2023). With pleasure being developmentally inherent in thinking (Zittoun, 2024), meaning-making creates space between experience and action for the encounter with otherness to emerge with surprise. Accepting the otherness in myself and my clients as a mystery means that surprise is a feature of relational depth (Mearns & Cooper, 2017). Recognizing that life is “being-for-the-other,” every activity is moral as being human is standing in obligation to the Other (Gantt & Yanchar, 2007). As a counseling psychologist, I want to devote my practice to respond to the call of the other as an act of social justice (Levinas, 1979). In the mystery of humanness, I cannot know who I am going to meet or who I am going to become. With awe, reverence, and wonder, I look forward to discovering it.