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The idea that graduate students must already be able to provide clients with core conditions in a helping relationship for supervision, instruction, and mentoring to enhance or expand this ability raises some interesting questions about the role of the counselor educator in the process of working with a graduate student enrolled in a counselor education program. Is the role of the counselor educator to help raise awareness on the part of a beginning counselor with respect to inherent traits and ways of relating to others that automatically contribute to the provision of therapeutic core conditions that can be enhanced and strengthened, or is it possible for the counselor educator to help a student develop such traits if they are not already present? What is the responsibility of the counselor educator if a student who wants to be a licensed professional counselor cannot seem to provide the core conditions needed to establish a safe working alliance with clients?

The ability to provide clients with core conditions in the context of a helping relationship must already be present to some degree in the personhood of graduate students for supervision, instruction, and mentoring to enhance or expand the ability to cocreate core conditions. Building from this base, counselors must study, train, and be committed despite long hours and inevitable discomfort of personal growth that allows them to create conditions mutually with clients that will affirm, support, and empower. The concept of basic or core conditions suggests that, when present, they enhance the effectiveness of the helping relationship at various stages. The terminology for these conditions varies from author to author but generally includes the following: empathic understanding, respect and positive regard, genuineness and congruence, concreteness, warmth, and immediacy (see Sidebar 1.4).

The remainder of this section deals with the core conditions and relates these directly to personal characteristics or behaviors of counselors or therapists that should enhance their ability to effectively use these conditions in the process of helping. Although definitions, emphases, and applications of these conditions differ across theoretical systems, there seems to be agreement about their effectiveness in facilitating change in the overall helping relationships (Brammer et al., 1993; Brems, 2000; Clark, 2010; Freedberg, 2007; Gatongi, 2008; Gladding, 2018; Prochaska & Norcross, 2013).