중급상담자의 ‘정서전염’에 대한 현상학적 연구

Abstract

Objectives This study was conducted to clarify the meaning and essence of how counselors experienced emotional contagion in counseling relationships for intermediate counselors and how they understood and dealt with it.
 Methods Applying Giorgi's phenomenological research method as a research method, In-depth interviews and data analysis were conducted with 8 counselors who have a counseling major, have a master's degree or higher, are currently conducting counseling in the counseling field, have between 4 and 9 years of counseling experience, and have an above-average level of emotional contagion from October to December 2021.
 Results As a result, 62 semantic units, 17 sub-themes, and 5 upper-level topics were derived. The top 5 topics are as follows. With “feeling like one with a client,” “broken counseling,” “exploitation of emotions that began by looking back on oneself,” “counseling that meets enough with emotions,” and “newly approaching emotional contagion,” at first, the counselors experienced emotional contagion clearly. but while recognizing what kind of attitude they had toward emotional contagion, they looked back on themselves and met deeply with their clients through emotions. with this they could accept emotional contagion anew and use it for counseling.
 Conclusions This study is meaningful in that suggesting the nature of experience by specifically exploring how intermediate counselors vividly experience emotions and how it resonates in them and how they understand it and cope with it in addition, it was found that emotional contagion is inevitable in the counseling scene and can affect counseling performance depending on how the counselor recognizes and uses it. In the future, this study can be used by counselors as basic data to understand, utilize, and cope with emotional contagion in growing into experts.