Abstract:

There are a few studies about helplessness, hopelessness or despair as a professional problem of counseling psychologists. Professional helplessness can be considered as a combination of personal counselor’s characteristics and features of the psychological counseling situation. This study was conducted to understand the essence of counseling psychologist’s helplessness and the need to work with helplessness experience in novice consultants training. There were three studies in this research. The purpose of the first was to study the specific experiences associated with entering the professional activity of students participating in the tutorial group of the St. Petersburg State University Psychological Clinic. Next, we conducted two special studies to explore the phenomenology, describe the content and highlight markers of the helplessness experience by counseling psychologists. The research results allow us to draw the following conclusions. The state of helplessness is indeed one of the main experiences of novice consultant psychologists. At the emotional level, it is mainly associated with negative emotions, such as sadness, anger, despair, fear, doubt, shame. At the cognitive level, it is associated with the manifestation of psychological defences, which indicate a high level of tension and difficulties with directly experiencing situations of helplessness. At the behavioural level, it is associated with various somatic manifestations. In general, the results confirm the need to pay special attention to the formation of the counselor’s personality in his training, and, in particular, to work with the acceptance of a sense of helplessness and tolerance for its appearance. This is possible through the creation of special training technologies that allow to develop the skills of emotional states differentiation, recognition of psychological defenses, awareness of the experience of helplessness and acceptance of this experience. This will help to train resistance to situations of helplessness and will serve as a prevention of burnout.

Keywords:

Helplessness, counseling psychologists, personal development, phenomenology of helplessness.