Implications of Counselor Impairment

Counselor Impairment Paper
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Abstract
Counseling is an important part of the healthcare system and one that helps many patients recover from physically, emotionally, and mentally traumatic events in their lives. Counselors are the unsung heroes that play the central role of helping patients recover from such events. However, this constant routine of offering compassion and helping patients overcome their traumas leaves many counselors traumatized, depressed, and burnt out. This leads to counselor impairment. Impairment not only affects the ability of counselors to perform well, but also inhibits their ability to help patients fully recover and overcome their traumas. There is a need to ensure that counselor impairment is avoided and that counselors are healthy. By providing counselors with the skills to practice self-care, observe wellness, and even subjecting them to counseling sessions helps ensure the realization of these goals. In this way, it becomes possible to guarantee that instances of counselor impairment can be reduced as much as possible, thereby ensuring both patient and counselor health in the short and long-term.
Keywords: counselor, impairment, health
Counselor Impairment Paper
As far as counselors go, impairment is one of the biggest challenges that they are forced to grapple with on a regular basis. This is mainly because impairment can easily creep into the lives of counselors based on trauma incurred from the work they do and the help they provide to patients. Impairment is the inability of counselors to practice or offer their services as required by the guidelines of their practice and in doing so fail to provide adequate counseling services to their patients.
Notably, there are several reasons behind why counselors suffer from impairment. One of the most significant of these reasons is the development of compassion fatigue as well as the onset of depression. Compassion fatigue generally refers to the condition in which counselors are unable to truly feel compassion for their patients due to their repeated exposure to cases or instances similar to or worse than those of their patients. As a result of this, such counselors become desensitized to the plights of their patients and end up developing compassion fatigue. Ultimately, this impairs their ability to perform optimally and as required by their practice guidelines (Hunter, 2016). At the same time, it is equally worth noting that many counselors tend to easily suffer from secondhand depression inflicted upon them as a result of feeling burnt out and experiencing continued negative and distorted thinking based on their conversations and encounters with their patients. As a result of this, counselors tend to become fatigued with the process of counseling and its associated challenges, resulting in their complete impairment. This can not only affect the attitudes of counselors during sessions, but can also contribute towards impairing the recovery and improvement of patients seeing as they are being counseled by an indifferent individual with a severely reduced interest in helping patients recover.
In order to fully appreciate the significantly negative implications occasioned by counselor impairment, it is n...