Counselor Professional Identity: Findings and Implications for Counseling and Interprofessional Collaboration

The counseling profession has long struggled to establish a cohesive professional identity for counselors (e.g., Calley & Hawley, 2008; Gale & Austin, 2003; Hanna & Bemak, 1997; Myers, Sweeney, & White, 2002; Swickert, 1997). Despite attempts to define the profession, researchers have not examined the professional identity of practicing counselors, nor have they investigated differences in terms of counselor training, credentialing, and specialization, differences that could present real challenges to establishing one cohesive professional identity for counselors (Cashwell, Kleist, & Scofield, 2009; Gale & Austin, 2003). These challenges seem to be amplified by difficulties clearly distinguishing the tasks associated with specific counseling specializations from the profession of counseling (Cashwell et al., 2009; Hanna & Bemak, 1997). As a result, a shared identity for the counseling profession remains elusive, making it difficult for many counselors to articulate a clear professional identity and describe overlapping and distinct characteristics among counseling and related helping professions (Calley & Hawley, 2008; Cashwell et al., 2009; Gale & Austin, 2003). Although the counseling profession struggles to clearly articulate a unified professional identity, interprofessional collaboration with related helping professions is increasingly supported as a best practice strategy for addressing some of the nation’s most critical social problems, such as education, mental health, and health care (Keyton & Stallworth, 2002). The combined knowledge and skills of collaborators from multiple professions supports the generation of creative approaches for addressing these problems; however, an inability to articulate distinct professional identities among collaborators often results in (a) confusion about roles and responsibilities, (b) conflicts related to power and status, and (c) the proliferation of professional stereotypes that jeopardizes the effectiveness of interprofessional collaboration (King & Ross, 2003; Waxman, Weist, & Benson, 1999). This may result in unique