The Professional Counselor | Volume 13, Issue 4 399 such modalities but also to conceptualize any treatment modality through a trauma-focused lens that considers how sex trafficking impacts all aspects of a client’s life and how they will interact in session. Participant narratives indicated that clients could present with defiant behaviors, distrust, angry or irritable mood, and refusal to comply with treatment. These themes underscore the importance of a counselor’s ability to create safe, trusting, and empathic relationships that allow the client to disclose risk and eventually process trauma. Counselors should also integrate a strong rapport with sex trafficking clients by demonstrating unconditional positive regard, authenticity, and empathy with any treatment modality chosen. Although counselors establish a strong therapeutic relationship, they can integrate other counseling goals, including psychoeducation, assessing for risk, supporting clients through the stages of personal change, and helping the client rebuild and reintegrate into society. Based on the nature of their work, managing countertransference and self-care represents an essential instrument to maintain balance while engaging in emotionally draining clinical work. We encourage counselors to seek supervision, connect with colleagues, and practice regular self-care routines to avoid experiencing burnout, secondary trauma, and countertransference. Additionally, counselors should connect clients to services that provide basic needs (e.g., safe and stable housing, food). When clients lack basic physiological needs, they may struggle to focus on higher-order needs such as developing a safety plan or emotion regulation. Counselors can engage in legislative advocacy by writing letters to judges, sharing clinical experiences with senators, and providing training on sex trafficking victim identification and treatment. It is important for counselors to build constituency groups with education, governmental task forces, and legislators to lobby for bills that benefit clients, as sex trafficking exists in an ecosystem of community and social contexts (Farrell & Barrio Minton, 2019). Our findings also underscore the limitations of intake interviews when assessing for sex trafficking risk. Although identification and screening tools exist (Interiano-Shiverdecker et al., 2022; Romero et al., 2021), counselors are not always in a setting where a formal assessment is appropriate or accessible. We encourage educators and supervisors to emphasize the value of informal assessment methods with counselors-in-training. Counselor knowledge of signs, symptoms, and questions to ask during an intake can improve identification efforts. Our findings also hold some implications for training beyond counselor education. Because of the complexities of working with trauma and sex trafficking, counselors intending to work with this population should seek out specialized training. For instance, they may review conference programs for trauma or sex trafficking–specific education sessions. At the same time, counseling programs should evaluate their preparation for counselors to work with sex trafficking. Requiring a trauma course, including content on sex trafficking and complex trauma throughout the curriculum (e.g., trauma, grief, addiction counseling courses), inviting guest speakers, and providing training opportunities and workshops for students and community counselors are all suggestions to ensure that counselors obtain the necessary knowledge and skills to work with this population. We believe that more training opportunities can minimize any possible misunderstanding of sex trafficking, expectations on clients to disclose, and re-victimization of clients that leads to early termination of counseling. Limitations and Future Directions The nature of our sample holds some limitations for the interpretation and application of the themes from this study. We collected data from single data sources (i.e., individual interviews); additional interview sources (e.g., focus groups) may have contributed more information. Moreover, lack of racial and gender diversity was a limitation in this study because most participants identified as White and female. We noticed that participants did not discuss racial and gender differences in clients’ experiences of sex trafficking. This result could have originated from our interview protocol that sought to gain an overall understanding of sex trafficking experiences and therefore did not
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