TPC Journal V7, Issue 2 - FULL ISSUE

204 The Professional Counselor | Volume 7, Issue 2 on client empowerment, prevention and advocacy. I have used evidence-based treatment approaches over the last 7 years such as the Maudsley approach, a family-based therapy, and cognitive behavioral approaches. I also assist clients negotiating the use of antidepressant medications with their prescriber. I am trained to use a variety of assessment, diagnostic and counseling techniques specific to individuals experiencing eating disorders in individual, family and group settings. I promote a healthy relationship with food and others as well as help to overcome barriers to goal attainment. I am a member of the American Counseling Association, as well as the American Mental Health Counselors Association, and am bound by their codes of ethics. This 7-step format can be used by counselors at all developmental levels and adjusted for various audiences. The 7-step format can help define counselor professional identity to ensure global audiences hear a unified voice of the hallmarks of the counseling profession. Future Research and Limitations Future research could examine how independently licensed counselors use the six formulations presented in this study to evaluate their professional identity statements, if they use them at all. Additionally, research could discern how independently licensed counselors view the importance of moving from lower to higher formula levels. Finally, research could determine how independently licensed counselors connect with the distinct hallmarks of counseling. Limitations of this research include: Likert scale-based surveys suffer from self-report and social desirability bias, recruiting participants from the state counseling boards lists of only eight states across the United States, the $5 incentive could have influenced participant responses or attracted a certain type of participant, and a certain type of participant may have been drawn to respond to the survey topic. Additional limitations include the use of non-parametric data, which may lack power as compared with more traditional approaches. There is a potential bias of interpretation and research embeddedness in the topic with qualitative coding. Lastly, we do not know if any study participants hold doctorates in counselor education. Conclusion As inequities exist for independently licensed counselors, there has been much discussion for five decades about counselor professional identity, along with many attempts by various counseling constituencies to address this critical issue. We investigated how independently licensed counselors expressed their role as a professional counselor to others and evaluated their consistency in expressing a counselor professional identity. This study provides a concrete description of how independently licensed counselors are expressing their professional identity when describing their role as a counselor to others. Counselors may wish to review the various formulations outlined to evaluate their own communications to see if and how counselor professional identity can be strengthened. Conflict of Interest and Funding Disclosure The authors reported no conflict of interest or funding contributions for the development of this manuscript.