Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Upon completion of the course students will be able to:

1. Apply targeted theories of counseling to the development of a professional disclosure statement.
2. Adapt various theories of counseling to the addictions counseling framework.
3. Evaluate various counseling approaches to determine if they qualify as an evidence-based practices.

The essential elements of each the following basic theories will be addressed:

1. Addiction Counseling, including disease etiology, twelve step and other self help approaches, and relapse prevention methods
2. Essential elements of each the following:

a.     Human growth and development, including life stages, childhood, adolescence, adulthood & older adults

b.    Humanistic, including person-centered, motivational interviewing/stages of change

c.     Psychoanalytic theories, including defense mechanisms, resistance & transference

d.    Behavior therapy, including learning, reinforcement & behavior modification, systematic desensitization & relaxation, and Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR)

e.     Cognitive Behavior therapies, including Rational Emotive Therapy, cognitive therapy & reality therapy

f.     Family Systems theory, including Adlerian, Human Validation Process Model and Satir’s conjoint family therapy

g.    Feminist and Postmodern approaches, including social construction, solution-focused brief therapy, narrative therapy

h.     Existential and other theories, including perceptual/phenomenological approaches, Transactional Analysis, Gestalt, transpersonal/spiritual

i.      Interpersonal biology, including attachment, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), and mindfulness 

This course has been approved for use in the Distance Education format.