TPC-Journal-V5-Issue4

The Professional Counselor /Volume 5, Issue 4 465 counselors. Once noted, the program directors were able to address this gap in knowledge about participating professionals. For example, counseling and social work directors were able to educate the medical professionals about counseling and social work professional practice. This facilitated productive conversation about referral sources at the start of the subsequent training session; counseling and social work trainers were able to offer a more clear articulation of the professional training and role of their students. Anecdotes from a few of the medical residents and other trainers afterwards indicated that such information was useful for them in discussing referral to treatment in their practice groups. Clearly, knowing the practice parameters of colleagues is central to effective interdisciplinary practice (Wellmon et al., 2012). This knowledge should include some awareness of discipline-specific orientations, terminology and information regarding conceptual framework (McLean, 2012). Professional Orientation, Attitudes and Values Issues related to practicing in silos are further complicated by professional indoctrination, or professional identity orientation and development. Within each of the various helping professions, new practitioners are oriented to acquire their profession’s unique and specialized identity. For example, in the profession of counseling, the establishment of a unique professional identity is considered a foundational training practice, as demonstrated in the 20/20: A Vision for the Future of Counseling initiative (Kaplan & Gladding, 2011) and CACREP standards (CACREP, 2009). This intentional emphasis on professional identity in the counseling profession was promoted in order to emphasize the important philosophical beliefs that are the foundation of the profession (Mellin et al., 2011), to distinguish counselors from other helping professionals, to strengthen the profession, to assure licensure portability, and to establish a sense of pride (Mascari & Webber, 2013). According to Gibson, Dollarhide, and Moss (2010), new professionals are socialized into the language of their profession so as to learn what is expected of them, as well as what they can expect in practice— to behave as “native speakers” (p. 22) in their particular discipline. The challenge for counselor educators, as well as profession-specific educators in other related disciplines, is to teach students to navigate the complex dynamics of collaboration while maintaining a clear understanding of their own professional identity. When professional identities are established in the context of practicing in silos, as well as competing for resources and job opportunities, interdisciplinary tensions may flourish. The results often are distance, barriers, mistrust and a lack of collegiality between disciplines (Arredondo, Shealy, Neale, & Winfrey, 2004; Miller & Katz, 2014). All of this is further complicated by “hierarchical schemas” (Delunas & Rouse, 2014, p. 101) in health care practice that award some individuals and professions more social capital than others (Bemak, 1998; Meyers, Hales, Young, Nesbitt, & Pomeroy, 2013). Clearly, interdisciplinary practice is hampered when some practitioners undervalue the perspectives of others (McLean, 2012). In our training sessions, it was difficult to determine the extent to which differences in approach and conceptualization reflected different professional training orientations and professional identities or participants’ (and their professional mentors’) value orientations. That is, while it was clear that the different professions approached the practice components of SBIRT from a different lens, it also seemed that some of the participants valued their own training and knowledge over others. For example, in some of the discussion groups regarding the professional actor who played the role of a client who identified as transgender, some of the medical participants assertively questioned the utility of exploring gender orientation during the screening process. Most of the counseling and social work participants who actively explored the client’s gender orientation in their practice sessions sat in