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Beeson Corner: The Van Tatenhove Center for Counseling

Published Date: May 3, 2022

The Van Tatenhove Center for Counseling (VCfC) has been open on the bottom floor of the newly dedicated Cowen Building since Fall of 2021. In this new location, counselors-in-training continue to provide career and personal counseling services to currently enrolled students and their family members. Although the VCfC has actually been serving the Asbury Wilmore campus for the past three years, the benefits of the new Cowen facilities are obvious for counselor training and client care. Student-counselors are provided with confidential and technologically updated space in which to learn how to counsel.

Here’s the way one advanced counselor-in-training described her training experience in this new space.

“As a professional counseling trainee, I experienced lots of anxiety over self-doubt when starting my field placement. I can imagine this is pretty common for most beginning counseling students. Other agencies allow interns to tag along and learn, but the Van Tatenhove counseling center is a training clinic that helps students to provide supervised services. I think because the priority is different, I became different, and clients benefitted from that difference as well.

“Professionally, many practical tools were given to us to serve clients, and that decreased my anxiety. I now have a structure and know what to expect, which further releases my ‘brain space’ so I can relate more effectively with my clients. With the guidance of supervisors and the clinic manager, I feel safe, encouraged, and confident to apply what I have learned to actual practice.

“Spiritually, a counseling center that helps student counselors integrate Christian faith and practice is rare to find. For that, I am so grateful to God and to everyone who has supported the Van Tatenhove counseling center. From the beginning of the counseling training, all students are encouraged to be intentional in integration. It is a journey of forming a new identity. Therefore, from the spiritual formation aspect, I view both the supervisors and the manager pouring out their knowledge and love to me like what Jesus did for the apostles. They became more than teachers or supervisors. I get to see and experience how they hold their Christian identity and professional identity together, which has been so helpful for me to form my own.”

As you can hopefully see in the experience of this student, the Van Tatenhove Center for Counseling at Asbury is dedicated to helping trainees seamlessly integrate their faith, practice, and research in a way that promotes effective care for persons who come with career and personal concerns. We remain grateful for those who have donated toward the development of this training and counseling service center.

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