Mindfulness-based awareness and compassion were examined as predictors of empathy and anxiety among 152 master's-level counseling interns. Results of hierarchical multiple regression analysis supported that awareness and compassion differentially contributed to explaining the variance in counselor empathy and anxiety. Implications for counselor education are discussed.
Mindfulness has garnered interest as a counselor development tool for enhancing the therapeutic relationship and increasing counselor trainee effectiveness, yet empirical study of counselor mindfulness is limited. A study of the relationship between mindfulness and client perceived empathy among 55 client-counselor trainee dyads is reported. The relationships between counselor trainee mindfulness, self-compassion and ambiguity tolerance, experiential avoidance, and session depth were also examined in this exploratory study. Counselor trainee mindfulness was associated with client perceived empathy and both mindfulness and self-compassion were associated with lower experiential avoidance and greater session depth as rated by the counselor trainee. Self compassion was positively related to tolerance for ambiguity. Implications for counselors, educators, and supervisors and suggestions for practical application of mindfulness for counselor development are discussed.
To determine if counselors integrate clinical behaviors for addressing religious/spiritual issues in counseling consistent with their ratings of the importance of such behaviors, the authors conducted a national survey of American Counseling Association (ACA) members. Seventy-eight ACA members rated the importance of and frequency with which they engaged in a set of 30 clinical behaviors that were identified in the existing literature as addressing religious/spiritual issues within counseling. Results indicated possible disparities between importance and frequency ratings. Potential barriers to counselors' utilization of religious and spiritually directed clinical behaviors were identified. W ithin the counseling field, the integration of religion and spirituality into counseling has garnered more attention over the last 15-20 years. In the 1990s, the Association for Spiritual, Ethical and Religious Values in Counseling (ASERVIC, n.d.; see also Miller, 1999) developed competencies to guide practice in this area, and recently these competencies have been revised to reflect factor analytic investigation of their validity (Cashwell & Watts, 2010). These competencies address four areas of counselor competence: (a) knowledge pertaining to spiritual phenomena, (b) self-awareness related to spiritual views, (c) understanding of clients' spiritual outlook, and (d) interventions related to spirituality (Young,
Mindfulness and self‐compassion have garnered interest as tools for improving counselor wellness and performance, yet little is known about how they relate to compassion. Compassion—for oneself and others—is considered important to counselor well‐being and effective counseling. In Buddhist and current models, mindfulness is theorized to increase self‐compassion and, subsequently, compassion for others, but the study of these proposed relationships is limited. Using mediation analysis, the author confirmed self‐compassion as a mediator of mindfulness and compassion for others among 152 master's‐level counseling interns. Implications and practical application of mindfulness and self‐compassion for counselor development are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.