Date of Conferral

8-13-2026

Date of Award

August 2026

Degree

Ph.D.

School

Counselor Education and Supervision

Advisor

Jill Bryant

Abstract

According to the American Counseling Association (ACA, 2014) Code of Ethics, professional counselors are responsible to monitor their own impairment. Specific interventions to prevent impairment and foster counselor professional well-being (PWB) and resiliency are imperative in a profession in which it is ethically required to continuously provide competent counseling. The purpose of this study was to explore the narratives of licensed counselors’ PWB during the onset of and successively during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The theoretical orientation for this study was Dewey’s theory of experience. Nine counselor participants who were licensed by May 2018 shared detailed accounts of instances and circumstances through semistructured interviews to answer the research question: How do licensed counselors narrate their sense of PWB during the onset of and successively during the COVID-19 pandemic? Grounded in Polkinghorne’s analysis of narratives, this study examined counselors’ PWB by integrating prior learning and experiences via hand coding to identify commonalities among participants. The shared narratives helped designate five overarching themes that included experiences of burnout, isolating outcomes, unmet needs, secondary traumatic stress, and ethical distress. The most prominent recommendation is for leaders to promote sustainable change through collaboration with licensed counselors to uphold continuous PWB. The implications for social change include the knowledge of insufficient workplace support and well-being for licensed counselors based on human needs that foster protection from harm, connection and community, work-life harmony, mattering at work, and opportunity for growth.

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