TPC-Journal-V2-Issue3

The Professional Counselor \Volume 2, Issue 3 212 Seidman’s (2006) distinction between the two relationships and their goals, the first author was present with the participant to learn, rather than to treat. In addition, CS served as a clinical supervisor of counseling students in this master’s program for three years. Thus, she also was cognizant of the differences between an interviewing relationship and a supervisory one. CS purposefully had no teaching or supervisory contact with this cohort of master’s students prior to the study and had only met them as a group on two occasions. She relied heavily on colleagues in her community of practice for reflexivity work given her position in the study. The second author is an associate professor in this counselor education program, and did know the potential participants in the study. However, the second author had no knowledge of which students in this cohort chose to participate in the study. The third author is a professor specializing in graduate research, and did not know the participant pool for this study. All data collection and initial analysis for this study was completed by the first author; however, all authors participated in reviewing the code and theme development throughout the analytic process. Results Findings from this study resulted in themes for CITs and clients. Eight themes, with many subthemes, emerged for CITs: Counseling Relationship, Insights, Immediacy, Nonverbals, Transference and Counter Transference, Emotion, Goals and CIT Negotiating the Counseling Process and their Role. Six themes emerged from the client participant interviews: Goals, Counseling Relationship (with many subthemes), Insight, Immediacy, Emotion and Reflections on Counseling. The CIT themes are presented first, followed by the client themes. Many of the same themes emerged for clients and CITs, as is shown in Table 1. Nonverbals and Transference and Countertransference were additional themes specific to CITs, and although the final themes shown for CITs and Clients in Table 1 are labeled differently, they seem to parallel each other for the respective perspectives. Table 1 Themes of Meaningful Experiences CITs Clients Counseling Relationship Counseling Relationship Insight Insight Immediacy Immediacy Goals Goals Emotion Emotion Nonverbals Transference and Countertransference CIT Negotiating the Counseling Process and their Role Reflections on Counseling CIT Themes: Counseling Relationship The interview protocol contained a broad question regarding the counseling relationship, prompting the CIT to describe the relationship they have with their client. Therefore, discussion of the relationship was inevitable, however the way participants spoke about the relationship resulted in the various subthemes. The theme of the Counseling Relationship consists of five subthemes describing meaningfulness in the relationship according to CITs including Depth of Connection, Trust, Depth of Understanding, Boundaries, and Collaboration. Depth of Connection represents CITs’ descriptions of how connected the counselors-in-training are with their clients. Some experienced feeling very connected, while others portrayed their relationship as improving and