Counseling Courses

Counseling Courses

A perfect symbol for the course of your counseling.

Counseling courses could refer to a couple of different ideas, one being the course of your work with your counselor, your goals, the decisions the two of you make in regards to the overall direction of your work, and another idea would be in regard to the counseling courses one would take in counseling school in preparation for becoming a counselor.

Most of the information that you will find online has to do with the latter counseling course idea, the courses offered at various schools in preparation for your beginning a career as a counselor.

Each university will have its own offerings, and a Christian university will have its own focus, which will be different than an online offering, which might be different than counseling psychology coursework from a bricks and mortar school.

Online counseling courses might offer a specialty, such as bereavement counseling courses or addiction counseling courses or you might find yourself at a University website that offers counseling tracks, like mental health, or school counseling, or career counseling.

Are you a parent looking at at an online degree? A WAHM or SAHD?

Those acronyms mean work at home mom or stay at home dad, and the following banner could be where you begin.

An online counseling course is very intriguing to me, and would have been if they had been offered in the mid 1990's when I decided to return to school. If you click on the Walden banner above, you will be taken to a catalog of schools offering online counseling courses. It may take a bit of searching to find the counseling program from which the description below is taken, but it is there.

"We're proud to announce that Walden University's M.S. in Mental Health Counseling program is now accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP, a specialized accrediting body recognized by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), which is a requirement for licensure in many states). Walden is one of the only schools that offers a CACREP-Accredited M.S. degree in Mental Health Counseling online. When you earn an online degree in human services or mental health counseling, you'll have the flexibility to gain new knowledge and skills while you continue to work and grow in your field.

Through a mix of research, practical application, and coursework, Walden's newly CACREP-accredited M.S. in Mental Health Counseling program can prepare you to integrate knowledge and skills into a career as a successful professional counselor. Developed by leading experts in the field, the CACREP-Accredited M.S. in Mental Health Counseling program is designed to meet the high standards set by CACREP and to provide continuity throughout your learning experience, with each course building upon key competencies.

The program is designed to prepare graduates to qualify to sit for licensing exams and to meet the academic licensure requirements of many state counseling boards. Because no graduate program can guarantee licensure upon graduation, we encourage students to consult the appropriate agency to determine specific requirements".

The other kind of counseling course is the goal setting process that you and your counselor decide upon for the counseling issues you bring to your sessions.

That will usually involve taking a history, perhaps some diagnostic testing, a review, and regular updates.

I like to begin my clients with online tools so that they see that they can be successful learning sophisticated processes, even though there are some other problems to work on.

Two of the programs I ask clients to work on are the Mind Sparke Brain Fitness Pro, which teaches attention and focus, in 19 sessions, of 1/2 hour duration each, and actually increases IQ, and Heartmath, which is an extraordinary stress management tool.

Many issues which clients bring to counseling are impacted by attention and stress. More attention to strengths and less to stress often makes all the difference.

Clients who see themselves making progress with either of those tools are often delighted. And then we can generalize their success with Mind Sparke or Heartmath to other issues, and if clients make no progress, or are disappointed with their progress, that can become the issue we work on, their interpretation of their progress.

Here is a link to the Mind Sparke Brain Fitness Pro, which you can do without the aid of a counselor.

Heartmath is also a program that you can do on your own, and which you can learn to implement on any given heart beat.

I hope that latter statement intrigues you. In fact, Heartmath has a powerful impact on test taking. When we are relaxed, we actually open the higher perceptual centers in the brain, which makes for great recall, and stress management can have an important impact on your ability to implement changes and discoveries from your counseling.

Overcoming Emotional Chaos

Would You Share What You Are Most Grateful For?

Very early in my personal growth experience, a wise person taught me to use the phrase "gratitude is the attitude" when I was resentful or afraid and that phrase has helped me feel better tens of thousands of times.

Would you share your favorite gratitude story by clicking here? Your story may be just what another person needs to renew themselves.

Your story becomes part of this website (which shows the site's most recent pages) and a permanent part of Ask Mike the Counselor2 for others to read!

And I'll tweet your Web page at my Twitter account, too!