book is dedicated. The encouragement and constructive comments of the American Counseling Association’s Carolyn C. Baker (associate publisher), Nancy Driver (digital and print development editor), and Bonny E. Gaston (senior production manager), have been extremely helpful. My gratitude is also extended to the members of the Association’s Publications Committee who reviewed and favorably recommended this work. Finally, I am indebted to my wife, Claire, and our children, Ben, Nate, and Tim, for the rich memories they have provided me regarding counseling and life. Becoming a counselor is a continuous and challenging process.
About the Authors
Samuel T. Gladding, PhD, is a professor and past chair of the Department of Counseling at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He has been a practicing counselor in both public and private agencies since 1971. His leadership in the field of counseling includes service as
president of the American Counseling Association (ACA),
president of the Association for Counselor Education and Supervision (ACES),
president of the Association for Specialists in Group Work (ASGW),
president of the International Association of Marriage and Family Counselors (IAMFC),
president of Chi Sigma Iota (counseling academic and professional honor society international),
president of the American Association of State Counseling Boards (AASCB), and
vice president of the Association for Humanistic Counseling (AHC).
Gladding is the former editor of the Journal for Specialists in Group Work and the ASGW newsletter. He is also the past chair of the American Counseling Association Foundation. A prolific author of refereed journal articles, books, book chapters, and poetry, Gladding was cited as being in the top 1% of contributors to ACA’s flagship journal, the Journal of Counseling & Development, for the 15-year period from 1978 to 1993. Some of Gladding’s most recent books are The Creative Arts in Counseling (6th ed.; 2021), A Concise Guide to Opioid Addiction for Counselors (with Kevin Alderson, 2021), Group Work: A Counseling Specialty (8th ed.; 2020), Family Therapy: History, Theory and Process (7th ed.; 2019), Choosing the Right Counselor for You (with Kevin Alderson, 2019), The Counseling Dictionary (4th ed.; 2018), and Counseling: A Comprehensive Profession (8th ed.; 2018). In addition, Gladding has produced a dozen films on counseling, his most recent being Adventures in Mental Health, a humorous animated production.
Gladding’s previous academic appointments have been at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Fairfield University (Connecticut), and Rockingham Community College (Wentworth, North Carolina). He was also Director of Children’s Services at the Rockingham County (North Carolina) Mental Health Center at the beginning of his career. Gladding received his degrees from Wake Forest University (BA, MAEd), Yale University (MAR), and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (PhD). He is a national certified counselor, a certified clinical mental health counselor, and a licensed clinical mental health counselor (North Carolina). He has served as a member of the North Carolina Board of Examiners in Counseling and the Alabama Board of Examiners in Counseling.
Gladding is a Fellow of ACA and the recipient of numerous other honors, including
ACA’s Gilbert and Kathleen Wrenn Award for a Humanitarian and Caring Person,
ACA’s Arthur A. Hitchcock Distinguished Professional Service Award,
ACA’s David K. Brooks, Jr. Distinguished Mentor Award,
the American Counseling Association Foundation’s Bridgebuilder Award,
ACA’s President’s Award,
the Association for Creativity in Counseling Lifetime Achievement Award,
the Association for Spirituality, Ethics, and Religious Issues in Counseling Humanitarian Award,
Chi Sigma Iota’s Thomas J. Sweeney Professional Leadership Award,
AHC’s Joseph W. and Lucille U. Hollis Outstanding Publication Award,
ACES’s Professional Leadership Award,
ASGW’s Eminent Career Award,
the North Carolina Counseling Association’s Ella Stephens Barrett Award for leadership and service to the counseling profession, and
the American Counseling Association Foundation’s 2021 Thomas Hohenshil National Publication Award.
Dr. Gladding is married to Claire Tillson Gladding and is the father of three grown children: Ben, Nate, and Tim. Outside of counseling, he enjoys walking, swimming, pop music, and humor.
The World Into Which I Was Born
Few people enter the world at an ideal time, and my birth was no exception. I was born on the morning of October 5, 1945. World War II had been officially over for about month, and American military personnel were returning home. Although the end of the war might seem like an ideal time to arrive on earth, especially in a nation that was on the winning side, other circumstances were afoot.
My parents, Russell Burton and Gertrude Barnes Templeman Gladding, were 35 and 34, respectively. They already had two children: Margaret Northam (Peggy), who was 3 (May 21, 1942); and Russell Burton, Jr. (Russell, Jr.), who was 13 months (August 17, 1944). Although my parents had talked about a third child, family history has it I was unexpected. To make matters more complicated, I was born with dislocated hips. I spent much of my first 2 years in Scottish Rite Hospital, where I had three operations to wire my hips back in place. My parents visited on Sundays and brought me a Hershey’s chocolate bar when I was old enough to eat one. My brother also had dislocated hips, and both of us had plaster of paris body casts from the waist down at times. We were later informally described as “heavy Chevys.” Because my mother, Grandmother Templeman (whom we called “Pal”), and sister, Peggy, could barely lift let alone carry us, they pulled us around the living and dining rooms of our house in a Radio Flyer red wagon modified with a platform and a hole for the bedpan underneath.
My mother was the oldest daughter of four children of Samuel and Inez Templeman. Her two younger sisters were Inez and Ruth, and her younger brother was Samuel II. She was petite, about 5 feet tall, and probably never weighed more than 100 pounds. She was attractive, with a good figure, a sharp mind, and a religious focus as the oldest child of a Baptist minister. What she lacked in size she made up for in spirit—determination, perseverance, and even a bit of feistiness.
She met my father in 1931 at a boarding house owned by her maternal grandfather, Robert Leonard Barnes, in Richmond, Virginia. She had gone to Richmond after graduating from Salem College to study for a master of arts at Westhampton College—the female campus of then Richmond College—because she could not get a teaching job during the Great Depression. Unbeknownst to her, my father and his brother, Randolph, had rented a room at the house at 3300 Monument
