ABSTRACT
The conference at which this paper was first presented highlighted the growth of the counseling profession in the South Pacific. The purpose of counseling in the Pacific is to capture the movement of life where we are and let it flow freely near our shores. When we first began training counselors in the 1960s, we taught listening skills and empathic understanding. Client-centered practice highlighted basic skills to draw out feelings and thoughts and link them together. Then, we introduced an overlay of psychological theory in order to focus on the internal world of the individual. The next phase in the development of our profession consisted of practice models that taught us to divide clients into separate facets: mind, body, spirit, and emotions. These have seemed to prevail despite the development of and advocacy for integrative and holistic approaches for the past 30 years. Modalities competed with each other to promote preferred ways of counseling clients. In recent times, we have added a cultural perspective, but that, too, is often referred to as a separate skill or modality.
