Recent research in counselor training has focused on the difficulties and challenges facing counseling practitioners that result in high stress, burnout, compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, and counselor impairment. The American Counseling Association's (ACA) Code of Ethics has addressed the ethical issues inherent in counselor impairment. Further, the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) has focused on the development of counselors that will assist them in being resilient to workplace stressors. Wellness is a theoretically based construct that holds much promise for bolstering the resilience of pre-service counselors. In addition, counselor self-efficacy has been linked to greater advocacy for self and others, the use of higher order counseling skills, greater problem solving practice, and more self-regulated, ethical decision making. This study was designed to investigate the relationship between counselor self-efficacy and counselor wellness. A total of 88 participants completed both the Five Factor Wellness Evaluation of Lifestyle Inventory and the Counseling Self-Efficacy Scale. Demographic and descriptive statistics were included along with a Multiple Regression Analysis. Results did not indicate a statistically significant relationship. Potential limitations, implications for counselor educators, and future research directions were elucidated.

The purpose of this manuscript style dissertation was to increase understanding of the experiences of counselor's with compassion fatigue as they participated in a yoga intervention. Compassion fatigue is a condition that creates both physical and psychological impairment as a result of working in the helping role. Yoga is an ancient body and mind practice that is thought to reduce various negative physical and psychological effects. In order to address how and why counselors with compassion fatigue were affected by a yoga intervention, research using an exploratory case study method was conducted. Four counselors were first interviewed for 45 minutes; next they participated in four 60 minute yoga classes, kept journals on their experience before and after each class, and finally participated in 60 minute focus groups. Five major themes emerged from the analysis of the qualitative data in response to the research question of how and why yoga impacted counselors with compassion fatigue: participating in both the intervention and the study, experiencing a change in how the counselors internally processed compassion fatigue, experiencing a reduction in compassion fatigue, experiencing a change in the counseling relationship, and experiencing a change in how they practice yoga. Counselor post-intervention scoring on the Professional Quality of Life Scale (ProQOL) suggests lower secondary traumatic stress and burnout, and increased compassion satisfaction. In-depth qualitative interviews with participants further substantiated these findings. Both the literature review and case study provide implications for future research in the areas of compassion fatigue, counselor wellness, yoga interventions, and self-care. / Graduation date: 2013