The Professional Counselor | Volume 12, Issue 1 59 Discussion After conducting an exhaustive literature review, we found no other study that examined the relationship between a counselor’s personal history of childhood adversity and protective factors (i.e., ACEs and PCEs) and their professional experience with burnout, STS, and CS. As the counseling profession is placing a greater emphasis on counselors becoming trauma-informed (e.g., Bemak & Chung, 2017; Debellis, 2001; Webber et al., 2017), recent research has examined counselor wellness, burnout, PTSD symptoms, and possible contributing factors (Can & Watson, 2019; Cook et al., 2021; Lanier & Carney, 2019). In line with other studies, we found that some individuals drawn to the profession of counseling are more likely to have had adversity and hardship events in their personal histories (Conteh et al., 2017; McKim & Smith-Adcock, 2014). What is unique in this study is the examination of how both adverse and positive childhood experiences may impact the CS, burnout, and STS of MHCs. Similar to Thomas (2016), who found that social work students had higher rates of ACEs than the general population, the results of this study indicated that counselor participants had higher rates of ACEs for all 10 experiences than the original Felitti et al. (1998) ACEs study. This was also aligned with Conteh and colleagues (2017), who found that counselors-in-training may have higher rates of trauma than the average population. The results also indicated that almost 43% (n = 60) of MHCs scored four or more ACEs, which placed them at high risk for mental and physical health problems (Boullier & Blair, 2018; Campbell et al., 2016; Merrick et al., 2017). As may be surmised from other studies on the deleterious effects of ACEs on emotional well-being, having higher numbers of ACEs was a significant predictor of burnout. Lower ACEs scores also significantly predicted CS with a high effect size (.55). Similarly, higher PCEs were linked to lower burnout. However, PCEs were not found to significantly predict CS. We examined the average rates of and relationships between ACEs, PCEs, CS, burnout, and STS in a sample of MHCs. McKim and Smith-Adcock (2014) examined the burnout rates of trauma counselors, finding that counselors with more personal trauma had an increase in CS, perhaps due to personal growth. In contrast, this study found that counselors with more ACEs were more likely to experience less CS. This difference may be a result of this study utilizing the ACE Study Questionnaire (Felitti et al., 1998) whereas McKim and Smith-Adcock (2014) used Stamm’s (2008) Stressful Life Experiences - Short Form to assess for experiences that may have happened in adulthood or to someone outside of the family. Developmentally, painful childhood experiences may be harder to process, which may in turn produce further-reaching negative outcomes. McKim and Smith-Adcock also found that having a sense of control in the workplace and the number of years of experience as a counselor also positively correlated with CS. The results from our analysis indicated that greater attention needs to be given to the traumatic experiences of counselors and how these events may impact professional resilience. This study may also be the first to examine the demographic factors of counselors, including gender, racial identity, and childhood SES, as potential predictive factors of burnout, STS, and CS. All three demographic variables were found to be predictive of CS, but none were predictive of burnout. The results from our analysis indicated that greater attention needs to be given to the traumatic experiences of counselors and how these events may impact CS, burnout, and STS. It should be noted that ethnically minoritized counselors had higher rates of CS than their White peers. Given that higher ACEs scores had a negative relationship with CS with a high effect size, and that minoritized counselors had higher average rates of ACEs and lower average rates of PCEs when
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