I Am a Counselor: Now What!

I Am a Counselor: Now What! is a loving invitation to self-inquiry, full of tips and tricks shared from one counselor’s full career.

You can’t learn everything in a classroom, and it’s usually not until we’ve been out in the world for a while that we
really know how much we don’t know. With I Am a Counselor: Now What!, Betty Rounds provides solace for
counselors floundering with the realization that they still have much to learn. Drawing on her decades of practice,
Rounds offers illustrative stories and practical wisdom for counselors looking to answer all of the questions that aren’t on the National Counselor Examination.

I Am a Counselor: Now What! is a welcome invitation to counselor self-inquiry. Personal stories from Rounds’s life and career are followed by think pieces that prompt the audience to look harder at their own stories, habits, strengths, and areas for growth. These prompts are thoughtfully constructed to inspire counselor development, though there’s not much structure to their sometimes rambling content.

In addition to invitations to self-inquiry, counselors can learn much from the book’s more practical suggestions, like having a plan for what will happen to your notes in the case of sudden death or disability—a pragmatic concern that may not occur to new professionals. However, there’s little in the volume that goes beyond the basic knowledge provided in graduate counseling techniques courses. Instead, most of the book is an essay on the importance of a
counseling basic: unconditional positive regard. The exception to this is a chapter on con artists, which cultivates the opposite effect, seeming to recommend an almost adversarial relationship with a certain set of clients.

Most jarring are chapters on becoming a “Composed Professional Woman.” In illustrating what it requires to become a
CPW, women counselors are encouraged to move past their “womanly tendencies,” said to include choosing gossip
over professional talk, struggling with confidentiality, and neglecting to employ logical thinking. While all of these behaviors are chalked up to unfortunate socialization rather than innate feminine failing, the chapters still ring of internalized misogyny enough to turn off contemporary professional women. Equally tone deaf is a suggestion that counselors learn to cope by emulating the survival mechanisms of those who endured slavery, contained in a section stridently titled “The Secret History of Black Slaves.”

Reading like a letter from a generous mentor, I Am a Counselor: Now What! is a loving invitation to self-inquiry, full of tips and tricks shared from one counselor’s full career.

- Foreword Reviews

Debut author and licensed clinical social worker Rounds offers an introspective guidebook for counselors looking to learn new skills.

The author begins by asking her readers to define their motivations for becoming professional counselors. She shares her own personal stories (“I was fascinated by the discussions I heard my father having with other men….I was able to focus on how I could effectively enter the conversation without being told to leave”) as well as her counselor husband’s (“People come to pastors with many emotional, intellectual, relationship, spiritual and other needs. I found myself ill prepared to deal with the depth of needs which were presented to me”) and her student intern’s. Along the way, she gives readers lots of opportunities for self-reflection. For example, she asks them when they first learned about injustice, how they learned to be good listeners, and who were the biggest influences in their lives. (She includes blank lines for readers to write their responses down.) Later chapters include information on different counseling approaches, the use of transference when relating to clients, and how to know when it’s time to retire. Rounds also pays a great deal of attention to methods for dealing with clients who may be con artists and manipulators—something that a typical social worker’s grad school curriculum may not cover. The book’s second half offers “Tool Box” sections—practical scripts that counselors may use to employ concepts described earlier in the book. For example, a “THOUGHTS-TO-FEELINGS-TO-ACTION” chart can show at-risk clients how to avoid getting into trouble that could land them in jail. The author’s personal anecdotes give her book a conversational tone, as if she’s mentoring the reader. Some of the tales don’t serve a clearly defined purpose, though, including one about her parents having lunch in a restaurant, which she repeats. The table of contents is also excessively detailed, reading more like an outline of the book rather than a list of chapters. Still, social workers will likely find the author’s counsel to be entertaining and informative throughout.

A pleasantly informal guide for new and midcareer social workers.

- Kirkus Reviews