ABSTRACT
As a faculty member with experience teaching counselors and providing therapy in college counseling centers, I had an experience recently that stimulated my thinking about how work and love are linked and how addressing relationship agendas can produce gains across work, relationship, family, and individual functioning. In my Introduction to Mental Health Counseling class, a masters student asked, for the entire class, “Why are career classes included in mental health counseling curriculums?” After brief thought I heard myself telling the class that (a) I have rarely seen a client where work or career issues were not, at some point in the therapy, an important focus of therapeutic change, and (b) while in professional training learners develop their core knowledge from separate courses (e.g., career, human development, theories of counseling), but in working with clients, those artificially discrete knowledge bases become integrated. Professionals can and do make distinctions between career and personal counseling, and people do sometimes talk about their work and their personal life as if they were separated from one another. There is, however, an “interdependent relationship … between career and personal counseling” (Dorn, 1993, p. 419), because people are comprised of a personality organization within which love and work reflect related aspects of the person.
