Mandatory Personal Therapy as a Requirement for Counselors’ Training and the Continuity after Graduation

Abstract

Mandatory personal therapy has become a practice in many counseling programs across the world. It is aimed, among other rationales, for the trainees’ personal development, professional development, and for the trainees to be in clients’ seat. How do the counseling students view mandatory personal therapy? Will they voluntarily continue personal therapy after the mandatory experience? This study therefore attempted to answer these questions by investigating the perception of postgraduate counseling students about mandatory personal therapy and its continuity after mandatory experience or graduation. The target population was all the 635 postgraduate counseling students at the Nairobi University, Catholic University of Eastern Africa, Daystar University, and Tangaza University College. These universities were selected from the universities training clinical and counseling psychologists using stratified random sampling techniques. The sample size was 255 comprising of 245 counseling students, five professional counselors, and five counselor educators. The response rate to the online questionnaire was 66.6% while the response rate of the interviews was 100%. The Quantitative data was descriptively analyzed by frequencies and percentages while content, and thematic analysis were used to analyze the interviews. The findings showed that majority of the counseling students have positive perception of mandatory personal therapy as a requirement in their training and that they will continue to make use of personal therapy after the mandatory experience or graduation.