The Lay Counselor Academy — Self-Paced
Español Enroll

The full curriculum

Seven modules. Fourteen sessions. Seventy hours.

The whole shape of the program, paced for evenings and weekends. Each module has two sessions. Each session has an overview and a set of learning objectives you can measure yourself against.

Read the sample lesson See pricing

Module 1

Foundations of Lay Counseling

What lay counseling is, why it matters, and how to grow into it. The first module sets the philosophy: person-centered, strength-based, equity-aware, and honest about how our own biases enter the room.

Session 1

Introduction to The Lay Counselor Academy

We learn what lay counseling is and why this non-academic pathway is necessary in our country. We discuss the foundations of all mental health counseling, the characteristics of the most effective counselors (with degrees or without), and the connection between personal growth and providing high-quality care.

Learning objectives

  • Understand LCA foundations for safety, goodwill, support, equity, and empathy.
  • Understand why lay counseling is an important movement at this time in our country.
  • Enhance knowledge of the person-centered, strength-based philosophy of lay counseling.
  • Increase understanding of the connection between our personal growth and being an effective counselor.

Session 2

Equity Foundations: Identifying and Mitigating Negative Biases

Bias, stigma, and judgment cause real and measurable harm. We affirm our professional responsibility to identify our own, and we learn practices to extinguish, mitigate, and counter them so we do not pass that harm on to the people we sit with.

Learning objectives

  • Understand the harm caused by negative bias, stigma, and judgments.
  • Gain knowledge of the science and research on stigma and bias.
  • Increase ability to identify our own biases and judgments.
  • Learn practices to extinguish, mitigate, and counter bias to avoid harming others.

Module 2

Core Counseling Approaches

The home stance you return to every session, the orientations that make counseling actually helpful, and the strength-based perspective that makes growth possible.

Session 1

Core Counseling Approaches

We cover the Home Stance strategies: warm body language, compassionate tone, open-ended questions, empathic reflection, affirming strengths, countering shame, and acknowledging feelings. We also explore Ways of Being, the internal attitudes we cultivate to be maximally helpful.

Learning objectives

  • Increase knowledge of the research base for common factors, empathy, and the therapeutic alliance in mental healthcare.
  • Enhance understanding of core empathic counseling strategies (Home Stance) and orientations (Ways of Being).
  • Increase comfort and confidence in using these strategies.

Session 2

Strength-Based, Values-Based Counseling

We discuss why strength-based counseling is so effective, review the research base, and learn practical strategies to listen for, amplify, and enhance the strengths the people we sit with already have.

Learning objectives

  • Increase knowledge of the research base of strength-based approaches.
  • Learn practical strategies to strength-find with clients.
  • Enhance comfort and confidence in identifying and amplifying client strengths.

Module 3

Working with Thoughts, Helping with Depression and Anxiety

How to work with someone's thinking patterns without trying to argue them out of pain. How to recognize and help with the two conditions you will encounter most often: depression and anxiety.

Session 1

Working with Thoughts

We dive into thoughts, thinking patterns, and how to be helpful. CBT-informed approaches we call Working with Thoughts, practical strategies for eliciting and enhancing meta-cognition, and a Parts-of-Self framework for thoughts that cause suffering.

Learning objectives

  • Enhance understanding of CBT-informed approaches to help clients.
  • Understand how working-with-thoughts strategies can be a tool of oppression when misused, and ensure the ability to avoid this.
  • Increase knowledge of common thoughts that cause suffering and how to elicit meta-cognition.
  • Increase understanding of parts-of-self approaches to address thoughts that cause suffering.

Session 2

Helping with Depression and Anxiety

Mental health conditions with the highest prevalence. We discuss the problems with traditional diagnosis frameworks and why diagnosis is not necessary to provide help. We review signs and symptoms and learn how to decide which helping strategies will work best for each client.

Learning objectives

  • Understand the problems, drawbacks, and largely unnecessary nature of diagnosis.
  • Identify signs and symptoms of anxiety and depression.
  • Learn the importance of following a client's preferences, experiences, and strengths.
  • Increase ability to recognize second-arrow suffering and utilize strategies to help.
  • Learn evidence-based strategies to help clients address depressive and anxious symptoms.

Module 4

Positive Psychology, Happiness Practices, and Staying on Fertile Ground

Evidence-based happiness practices, the limits of problem-focused work, and how to recognize and stay on the ground where growth is actually possible.

Session 1

Positive Psychology and Happiness Practices

The philosophy and principles of positive psychology, the research on positive emotions, evidence-based happiness practices, and how to avoid toxic positivity and other missteps.

Learning objectives

  • Increase knowledge of the research base of positive psychology.
  • Understand the limitations of problem-focused and symptom-reduction-only approaches.
  • Gain knowledge of effective positive psychology techniques to foster resilience and happiness.
  • Increase ability to avoid toxic positivity or minimizing clients' challenges.

Session 2

Staying on Fertile Ground and Avoiding Anti-Growth Practices

When counseling is effective, it feels different from typical interpersonal interaction. The quality is deeper, more emotional, more self-reflective. We call it Fertile Ground. We learn to recognize when clients are on it, how to guide them to it, and how to help them stay there.

Learning objectives

  • Increase ability to identify when clients are on Fertile Ground.
  • Enhance confidence in strategies that help people stay on Fertile Ground.
  • Understand the importance of avoiding advice and other anti-growth practices.
  • Increase comfort and confidence in avoiding missteps and engaging in repair when they happen.

Module 5

Motivational Interviewing, Helping with Addictive Disorders, and Difficult Childhoods

Sitting with addiction and adverse childhood experience without judgment, the classical techniques of motivational interviewing, and how to protect yourself from vicarious trauma.

Session 1

Addictive Disorders and Motivational Interviewing

A deep dive into substance use and other addictive disorders: the historical divide of addiction treatment from mental health, the impact of stigma, identifying and countering our own addiction-related judgments, and the core philosophy and practices of Motivational Interviewing.

Learning objectives

  • Identify our own judgments, conditioning, and experiences around addictive disorders.
  • Learn the symptoms of addictive disorders and debunk common myths.
  • Understand the core philosophy and practices of Motivational Interviewing.

Session 2

Helping People with Adverse Childhood Experiences, Managing Distress Empathy, and Preventing Vicarious Trauma

A thorough knowledge of adverse childhood experiences, the impact these experiences have in adulthood, and how to be helpful when people share difficult childhoods. We learn about distress empathy, its risks, and strategies for recognizing and mitigating it in ourselves.

Learning objectives

  • Gain knowledge about adverse childhood experiences, trauma, and toxic stress.
  • Understand the foundations of Home Stance and Ways of Being in trauma-informed counseling.
  • Recognize distress empathy and enhance our ability to prevent vicarious trauma.

Module 6

Suicidal Ideation, Mandated Reporting, and Personal Identities in Counseling

How to hold the hardest conversations safely. How identities, yours and your counselee's, show up in the room together.

Session 1

Suicidal Thoughts and How to Help

Suicide has been addressed in the mental health field historically in ways that cause rupture and harm. We cover these harms, how to avoid them, and strategies that preserve or strengthen the therapeutic alliance. Thoughts of suicide are common and often rich areas of exploration if we can hold them with non-judgment and curiosity.

Learning objectives

  • Enhance understanding of risk and protective factors in suicidal thoughts and actions.
  • Increase knowledge and skill in evidence-based strategies to help.
  • Increase comfort and confidence in helping clients who have suicidal thoughts.

Session 2

Personal Identities in Counseling

How to remain open to hearing about people's experiences related to their identities: discrimination, marginalization, systemic oppression, bias, and the difficulties and strengths that come with belonging.

Learning objectives

  • Increase awareness and understanding of the counselor's historical and sociocultural literacy.
  • Expand capacity to empathize and normalize patients' experiences of positive cultural identity as well as racism and other discrimination.
  • Enhance confidence and skill in talking about identities in the counseling relationship.

Module 7

Boundaries, Continual Learning, and Endings

What you owe the people you sit with, what you owe yourself, the ethics of self-disclosure, and how to end a counseling relationship with care.

Session 1

Boundaries, Humility, Continued Learning and Growth

How history and personality shape our boundary tendencies, ethical considerations in boundaries with clients, how to make decisions about self-disclosure, how to repair when we have misstepped, and the profound importance of humility.

Learning objectives

  • Enhance understanding of the complexity of boundaries in the counseling relationship.
  • Deepen knowledge of how to make decisions about self-disclosures.
  • Ensure commitment to regular clinical support when engaged in counseling.
  • Increase knowledge of a growth mindset and humility and their relationship to effective helping.

Session 2

Ending Counseling Relationships

Endings happen all the time: seasons change, kids grow, we leave jobs, friendships end, we experience death. Counseling relationships end too. By enhancing awareness of our own tendencies and histories with endings, we become more comfortable and confident in approaching them with the people we sit with.

Ready to read the first lesson?

Lesson 1 of Foundations is Listening without fixing. We will send it to your inbox.

Read the sample lesson Enroll now