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4
TRANS FORMAT ION
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
by Clifford J. Powell, Ph.D.
GIVING
FOCUS
TO THERAPY
Counselors need to know how, and to what end, they are trying to help
people with problems. Currently the field has a proliferation of de-
scriptive labels to help guide this process. Many of these are helpful,
some, less so. This article offers Incarnational Counseling: a growth-
oriented approach as a helpful descriptor and argues for its value in
providing focus for Christian counselors.
T
here is value in having an over-arching construct
or descriptive label to provide focus in the work of
therapy. Over the years, a number of modalities
have suggested content-based descriptive words for
their favored focus. Thus, we have the names of the
major “schools”—psychodynamic, behavioral, and cognitive,
as well as combinations or hybrids of these labels, to provide us
with an understanding of the approach each of these therapies
focuses on. Further, we have labels such as Gestalt, existential,
humanistic, narrative, and solution-focused, all of which denote
a central focus for the particular counseling theory and method-
ology. All of these, along with a host of other descriptive terms,
are used to capture something that is seen to be distinctive,
something that provides a focus, for the counseling enterprise.
In writing
FromWoe to Go
, our training text, specifically
designed to serve the needs of novice counselors undergo-
ing counselor training, Graham Barker and I considered each
label, each instance of an umbrella descriptor, before coming