DIGEST - Volume 10, Issue 1

5 TPC Digest C ounselors pursuing licensure as full, independent professional counselors are mandated to complete a postgraduate supervised field experience. The supervisor’s evaluation of the prelicensed counselor’s clinical skills is highly influential to that counselor’s ability to obtain full licensure. As such, it behooves prelicensed counselors to present themselves in a manner they perceive will lead to positive evaluations from their supervisors. As compared to university-based supervision, prelicensed counselors are often asked to more autonomously self-identify their clinical concerns and developmental needs and to convey these concerns and needs to their clinical supervisors. Thus, supervisors of prelicensed counselors often rely on supervisee self-report to facilitate supervision, which can be problematic. Given the stakes of supervision, it is understandable that supervisees sometimes omit or distort information. In these instances, a supervisee identifies a concern as significant to their clinical work or supervision experience but decides to withhold it anyway. Supervisee intentional nondisclosure is a well-established phenomenon in the supervision literature. Supervisee intentional nondisclosure is widely conceptualized as either supervision-related incidents (e.g., negative reactions to a supervisor, evaluation concerns, fears of correcting a supervisor) or client-related incidents (e.g., clinical mistakes, general reactions to clients). The rate of supervisee intentional nondisclosure ranges from 60% to 97.2%. To date, no study has examined supervisee nondisclosure in a sample of prelicensed counselors. We found that 95.3% of prelicensed counselors in our study reported some degree of intentional nondisclosure (i.e., partially or fully withheld) for at least one item. The number of incidents of intentional nondisclosure ranged from 0 to 26 (of 30 possible incidents). Further, 53.3% of participants reported that they fully withheld information from their supervisors for at least one item. The most commonly withheld or partially withheld nondisclosures were “disagreement with one’s supervisor” (69.2%), “negative reaction to supervisors’ behavior or attitudes” (66.3%), and “perceived that my supervisor was wrong” (60.7%). Results also revealed that 22.4% of participants reported completely withholding their negative reaction to their supervisor’s behavior or attitudes and 16.8% of participants did not discuss their concerns about their supervisor’s competence. In sum, prelicensed counselors were far more hesitant or completely unwilling to discuss their supervision-related concerns as compared to their client-related concerns. These findings underscore the inherent power imbalance between supervisees and supervisors. Prelicensed counselors who are considering withholding information from their supervisors may want to consider their ethical obligation to clients and seek help from a trusted colleague if needed. In order to mitigate some of the commonly occurring client-related concerns, supervisors may find it helpful to discuss with their supervisees the lifelong growth and challenges of being a professional counselor. These discussions may aid in normalizing some of the client-related concerns. Further, supervisors should work to create an open and safe environment in order to facilitate supervisee disclosure. Finally, state licensure boards and nationwide credentialing bodies may want to consider more clearly defining the requirements of supervision (e.g., frequency of supervision, direct observation requirements) in order to address some of the concerns expressed by supervisees in this study. Ryan M. Cook, PhD, ACS, LPC, is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama. Laura E. Welfare, PhD, NCC, ACS, LPC, is an associate professor at Virginia Tech. Connie T. Jones, PhD, NCC, ACS, LPCA, LCAS, is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Correspondence can be addressed to Ryan Cook, 310 Graves Hall, Box 870231, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, rmcook@ua.edu. 5 | Incidence of Intentional Nondisclosure in Clinical Supervision by Prelicensed Counselors Ryan M. Cook, Laura E. Welfare, and Connie T. Jones