rcome the psychoemotional and psychosocial disadvantages associated with problematic mental health resulting from the experienced emotional trauma. Similar reasoning would be applied to most clients who are at some type of psychosocial or psychoemotional disadvantage owing to innate factors such as schizophrenia or some other mental disorder associated with physiochemical and/or neural processes.
Importance of the "Empowerment" Construct To
The examples of clients in need of empowerment provided in the foregoing section illustrate one of the primary reasons that the construct of empowerment is of major significance to the field of counseling. This is the fact that empowerment is a term that is highly applicable to a wide diversity of clients. Few people enter the doors of a counselor's office who do not need assistance to overcome certain psychoemotional and/or psychosocial disadvantages---disadvantages which make it difficult for them to fully obtain and/or enjoy the rewards and privileges available to society in general.
Whether the disadvantages confronting clients arise from external or internal factors or both is important only in terms of selecting the appropriate strategies for use in effecting empowerment. What needs to be recognized here is that the significance of the construct for counseling is the fact that the counselor's general goals must, of necessity, almost always include assisting the individual client or a client group to overcome the disadvantages associated with these factors.
A second reason that the term "empowerment" has strong significance for the field of counseling has been discussed by Lyddon and Weill (1997) who report that empowerment is a construct that is increasingly being incorporated into the general models of both individual and group counseling and psychotherapy. Indeed, the authors note that in recent years, empowerment components have even been incorporated and/or integrated int...