Integrating life design counseling and psychotherapy: Possibilities and practices.

The debate on the relation between career counseling and psychotherapy revealed the close relation between psychosocial and career issues. The connection between these two approaches paves the way for the integration of career counseling into psychotherapy. One of the key challenges of integrating career counseling into psychotherapy is to avoid discontinuities and inconsistencies in the psychotherapeutic intervention. The aim of this article is, therefore, to present the Systematic Treatment Selection perspective as a framework for an effective integration of psychotherapy and career counseling. Then, Life Design Counseling is described, highlighting its possibilities to fit the psychotherapeutic approach. Finally, an illustrative case is presented and discussed.

Life Design Counseling process and outcome: A case study with an adolescent

This article aims to explore the relationship between clients´ narrative transformation and the promotion of vocational decidedness and career maturity in a mid-adolescent case of Life Design Counseling (LDC). To assess LDC outcomes the Vocational Certainty Scale and the Career Maturity Inventory – Form C were used before and after the intervention. To intensively analyze the process of LDC change two measures of narrative change were used: the Innovative Moments Coding System (IMCS), as a measure of innovation emergence, and the Return to the Problem Coding System (RPCS), as a measure of ambivalence towards change. The results show that the three LDC sessions produced a significant change in vocational certainty but not in career maturity. Findings confirm that the process of change, according to the IMCS, is similar to the one observed in previous studies with adults. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

Integrating Life-Design Counseling and Psychotherapy: Possibilities and Practices

The relationship between career counseling and psychotherapy is not a new subject. The debate allows the affirmation of career counseling as a dimension of personal counseling and recognizes the close relationship between psychosocial and career issues (Blustein & Spengler, 1995). The connection between these two approaches paves the way for the integration of career counseling with psychotherapy. Indeed, the inseparability of mental health and career issues frequently leads psychotherapists to help their clients to deal with work satisfaction, underemployment or unemployment through psychotherapy. Moreover, when working with specific populations (e.g., people with intellectual disabilities and people with addiction or mental health problems), psychotherapy calls for occupational integration to consolidate and enhance therapeutic gains (Blustein, 1987; Jordan & Kahnweiler, 1995; Leff & Warner, 2006).

Life Design Counseling: A study on client's operations for meaning construction

This study evaluates the adequacy of the micro-theory of client operations to explain meaning construction in Life Design Counseling. Four adolescents were interviewed on their second counseling session. Their recollections were stimulated through the replay of counseling videotapes and the resulting transcribed interviews were qualitatively analyzed. Results confirmed a sequence of client operations evolving from the symbolic representation of experience and reflexive self-examination towards making new realizations and revisioning self. Moreover, clients reported negative and positive session moments evidencing that clients’ attention and activity during the session was not restricted to meaning construction operations. Practical implications for life design counseling are derived from the results and discussed.

Effect of trees in the soil nutrient concentration and pasture produtivity in Mediterranean silvo-pastoral systems

Silvo-pastoral are mixed systems of trees and grass, which have been proposed as a means to extend the benefits of forest to farmed land. Agro-forestry systems under semi-arid Mediterranean conditions, called montados in Portugal and dehesas in Spain, cover substantial areas in the world. These silvo-pastoral systems are the most extensive European agro-forestry system, as they cover 3.5–4.0 Mha in Spain and Portugal. Long-term studies are essential to assess the magnitude of the temporal nutrient flow dynamics in terrestrial ecosystems and to understand the response of these systems to fertilizer management. In order to implement the conservation task and recovery of resources through silvo-pastoral systems it is necessary to know and correct potential limiting factors, especially the soil factor, and this requires agronomic knowledge as well as the implmentation of the available new technologies. In this context, this task aims at a better understanding of the contribution of the two components of montado ecosystem (trees and herbaceous vegetation) on the soil nutrient and water dynamics, that allow for the interpretation of the variability of pasture dry matter yield and help the farmer in the management of tree density. Collaterally the task will evaluate and calibrate new technologies that simplify the monitoring of soil, grassland, trees and grazing animals.

Life Design Counseling Group Intervention With Portuguese Adolescents

This article examines the process and outcome of a life design counseling group intervention with students in Grades 9 and 12. First, we applied a quasi-experimental methodology to analyze the intervention’s effectiveness in promoting career certainty, career decision-making, self-efficacy, and career adaptability in a sample of 236 students. Second, focus groups comprising 33 participants were conducted, examining participants’ perceptions of the intervention process and outcome. Our findings showed that the intervention had a significant effect on both career certainty and career self-efficacy, but it had no effect on career adaptability. Our results also showed that My Career Story (MCS) had a stronger effect on Grade 12 students. Focus group participants reported on the usefulness of MCS, as well as on its benefits, which include increased information as well as a sense of direction, self-discovery, connection, and increased self-awareness. Grade 9 participants expressed more difficulties in narrating self-experience than Grade 12 participants did. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

Emergy analysis of a silvo-pastoral system, a case study in southern Portugal

The Mediterranean silvo-pastoral system known as Montado, in Portugal, is a complex land use system composed of an open tree stratum in various densities and an herbaceous layer, used for livestock grazing. Livestock also profit from the acorns, and the grazing contributes to avoid shrub encroachment. In the last 20 years, subsidies from the European Union have greatly promoted cattle rearing in this system and the introduction of heavy breeds, at the expense of sheep, goats or the native cattle breeds. The balance of the traditional system is thus threatened, and a precise assessment of the balance between the different components of the system, therefore is highly needed. The goal of this study was to gain a better under- standing of a Montado farm system with cattle rearing as the major economic activity by applying the emergy evaluation method to calculate indices of yield, investment, environmental loading and sustainability. By integrating different ecosystem components, the emergy evaluation method allows a comprehensive evaluation of this complex and multifunctional system at the scale of an individual farm. This method provides a set of indices that can help us understand the system and design management strategies that maximize emergy flow in the farm. In this paper, we apply the emergy evaluation method to a Montado farm with cattle rearing, as a way to gain a better understanding of this system at the farm scale. The value for the transformity of veal (2.66E?06 sej J-1) is slightly higher, when compared to other systems producing protein. That means that the investment of nature and man in this product was higher and it requires a premium price on the market. The renewa- bility for Holm Oaks Farm (49 %), lower than for other similar systems, supports the assumption that this is a farm in which, comparing with others, the number of purchased inputs in relation to renewable inputs provided by nature, is higher. The Emergy Investment Ratio is 0.91 for cattle rearing compared to a value of 0.49 for cork and 0.43 for firewood harvesting, making it clear that cattle rearing is a more labor demanding activity comparing with extractive activities as cork and firewood harvesting.