The profession of counseling has its ups and downs. It requires an iron mind to be a good peer counselor, youth counselor or even a marriage counselor. One major challenge in counseling is, understanding the problems that your patients or clients undergo in order to develop appropriate counseling strategies.
The counselor in any forum has to get into the mind of the patient; understand what exactly the patient is suffering from or is affected by. In the drug and substance abuse cases, there are various challenges that a counselor undergo in the process of trying to end the social epidemic.
Most drug users end up abusing drugs because of several reasons; while some are force into the practice due to peer pressure where they follow what they see their peers doing, some are driven by poverty or financial constraints. The need to belong to a given group of people often tends to act negatively on the people who desire to be like their counterparts.
A counselor therefore has to be aware of such facts; and to avoid judgment formation best on what they observe. The counselor therefore gets into the actual source of the decadence before offering solutions to the patient. In order to talk about the effects a social decadence, some counselors are often forced to take part in the deviance.
This becomes a challenge in that most of them for instance, end up as drug addicts because of the trying to feel the pain of the addict and to try to develop effective solutions.
Another challenge that counselors face is the attitude of the adolescents. Dealing with adolescents sometimes proves to be very difficult especially due to the rebelliousness of this age group.