Blog 8

When I saw that chapter four of Brown’s textbook was about ethics, I thought, “Hey, I just studied this for a Statistics exam. I know all about the Nuremburg Code!” Ha! There is plenty more to the ethics behind being a career counselor, which became obvious in the specific headings. My first question popped up in the first principle, “Above All, Do No Harm” (Brown, 2012, pg. 82). Brown mentioned that it would be detrimental to an adolescent or young adult if a career counselor expected them to make their own life decisions. I seem to remember that Savickas emphasized how important it was for a client to actively figure out their own patterns and not rely on the counselor to hold their hand the whole way, and Super said that adolescents typically have a stabilized self-concept, so I’m wondering why in this chapter Brown is making it seem like career counselors need to walk on eggshells lest they harm their clients unintentionally.

            Brown goes on to talk about how a career counselor needs to be culturally sensitive to a client, or otherwise they could be harmed (Brown, 2012). I had some issues with this as well because in the next chapter about value-based approaches to counseling, Brown’s example has to do with a counselor sensitively touching on the fact that a client has a mixed-ethnic name. Although it gives an example of how to approach a subject like this, I am wondering why it needs to be done in the first place. Lawrence Singh is aware that he has a mixed cultural background. Wouldn’t one think that it is doing more harm to act like that is something that needs to be addressed in a career counseling session? I believe that if a client brings it up or if a counselor can sense that it is a common theme running through their story, then the topic is on the table. I guess I am just confused with Brown’s differentiation between harm and help.

            Looking at this article from the perspective of the GLBT group, I can see that sometimes there are underlying problems that may not obviously surface in a career counseling session. As Krumboltz said, it is important to counsel a person’s entire life, not just help them find a career. Byars-Winston and Fouad helped my understanding of identifying cultural differences a bit when they talked about the “premature solution” (2006, pg. 189) because I can see that jumping to conclusions about your client without knowing all of the facts about their cultural history could not help them to progress as much as they potentially could.

Brown, D. (2012). Career Information, career counseling, and career development (10^th           ed.). New York: Pearson Education, Inc.

Byars-Winston, A. M., & Fouad, N. A. (2006). Metacognition and Multicultural           Competence: Expanding the Culturally Appropriate Career Counseling Model.         The Career Development Quarterly, 54(3), 187-201.