Within the Counseling and Helping Relationships core area, counselors are expected to understand and apply a range of evidence-based counseling strategies and interventions, including behavioral and cognitive-behavioral techniques for specific problems such as insomnia.

Paradoxical intention is a technique in which the counselor instructs the client to intentionally engage in, or exaggerate, the very symptom they fear or are trying to avoid (in this case, trying to stay awake instead of trying to fall asleep). This counters performance anxiety and reduces the pressure around the symptom.

Not A (Sleep education): Sleep education focuses on teaching about sleep cycles, sleep hygiene, and lifestyle factors, not instructing clients to do the opposite of their goal.

Not B (Mirroring): Mirroring is reflecting the client’s emotional or verbal content, not giving paradoxical directives.

Not D (Stimulus control): Stimulus control involves modifying environmental and behavioral cues that signal sleep (e.g., using the bed only for sleep), not asking the client to try to stay awake.

Therefore, the intervention described is best understood as paradoxical intention (C).

The Group Counseling and Group Work core area requires counselors to know the advantages and limitations of using groups in various settings, including career counseling.

One commonly noted limitation is that:

Group members often have a wide range of individual needs, interests, and career concerns.

A group format can make it challenging for the leader to tailor content, activities, and feedback to each person’s unique interests and decision-making stage.

This is exactly what option D describes: the leader may struggle to address the full variety of individual interests in a group setting.

Why the others are not best:

A: It is possible (and common) to assess members’ occupational functioning through intakes, assessments, and individual check-ins, even in group programs.

B: Psychological functioning can be assessed in a group setting; group counselors are trained to observe behavior, collect histories, and use assessment tools.

C: All formats (individual, group, family) have limitations; stating there are none is inconsistent with CACREP’s emphasis on critical evaluation of methods.

Thus, a major limitation in career groups is that the leader can find it difficult to meet the wide range of individual interests, making D the correct answer.

Within the Group Counseling and Group Work core area, counselor training emphasizes that the group leader has primary responsibility for establishing and facilitating the group process, particularly in the early stages. In existentially oriented groups, the leader:

Actively models authentic, present-centered interaction.

Invites and structures here-and-now dialogue between members.

Encourages members to move from speaking to the leader to speaking to one another.

Although an eventual goal is for members to assume more ownership of the interaction, the initial responsibility for fostering intermember interactions rests with the leader, who intentionally shapes a climate that supports genuine encounter, openness, and exploration of meaning.

Option A (group members alone) minimizes the leader’s intentional facilitating role.

Option C (group members and leader) is partially true in practice, but exam content and theory place primary responsibility on the leader to initiate and sustain interaction patterns.

Option D (leader and strongest group members) is inconsistent with group counseling principles, which avoid privileging “strongest” members and instead promote shared participation.

Therefore, based on group leadership roles taught under the CACREP core area, the best answer is B. The group leader.

Within the Assessment and Testing core area, counselors are expected to distinguish between screening instruments and diagnostic assessments.

The SASSI-4 (Substance Abuse Subtle Screening Inventory) is a screening tool, not a diagnostic instrument. It:

Uses both face-valid (obvious) and subtle items.

Classifies individuals into categories indicating the likelihood (probability) of having a substance use disorder.

Ethically and professionally, screening tools such as the SASSI-4 are used to:

Identify those with a high probability of SUD,

Guide decisions about further assessment or referral,

But not to independently confirm a diagnosis.

Therefore, the results indicate the probability that a person has a substance use disorder, making D correct.

The Social and Cultural Diversity core area emphasizes that counselors must develop culturally responsive interventions and treatment plans that consider clients’ cultural identities, including religion and spirituality. CACREP-aligned training highlights:

The importance of integrating clients’ cultural values, beliefs, and practices into treatment,

Respecting clients’ spiritual and religious traditions as meaningful components of identity, and

Using culturally congruent resources and supports in counseling goals and interventions.

Looking at the options:

A. Continuous monitoring to maintain rapport – Good general counseling practice, but not specifically an example of addressing diversity in treatment objectives.

B. Assessing individual and family dynamics – Important for case conceptualization, but still not explicitly diversity-focused unless clearly tied to culture.

D. Measuring the client's beliefs of societal systems – This may be part of multicultural assessment, but it is more evaluative than clearly a treatment objective that incorporates diverse resources.

C. Including spiritual and religious resources – Directly exemplifies integrating cultural, spiritual, and religious dimensions into treatment objectives, which is exactly what multicultural counseling competency requires.

Therefore, C (including spiritual and religious resources) is the best example of explicitly addressing diversity in treatment objectives.

The Social and Cultural Diversity core area requires counselors to understand oppression, privilege, and internalized oppression, including internalized racism, sexism, and other forms of bias.

Internalized sexism occurs when individuals from a marginalized gender group adopt and believe sexist stereotypes about their own group.

In this example, the adolescent states, “Most girls are not good at math,” which reflects a negative stereotype about girls’ abilities, and then claims to be the exception (“but I am”). This is a classic presentation of internalized sexism: accepting a harmful cultural stereotype about one’s own gender group.

Gender role conflict refers to distress that arises from rigid gender-role expectations and how they conflict with a person’s behavior or self-concept; it does not necessarily involve endorsing a demeaning stereotype about one’s group. Gender identity is simply one’s internal sense of gender. Internalized privilege would refer to members of a dominant group accepting and benefiting from their unearned advantages; she is not in the privileged group in this stereotype.

Therefore, the term that best matches CACREP’s description of internalized oppression in this scenario is A. Internalized sexism.

Within Human Growth and Development, counselors are trained to understand how individuals adapt and sometimes grow in response to trauma. Post-traumatic growth is conceptualized not merely as “positive thinking,” but as a process and outcome in which people:

Engage in adaptive coping after trauma,

Do meaning making about what happened,

Experience personal growth (e.g., deeper relationships, new life priorities, greater appreciation of life).

Option B captures this standard definition: it emphasizes both process (coping and meaning making) and outcome (personal growth) following traumatic experiences.

Options A, C, and D are incomplete or overly simplistic—focusing on theory labels or “positivity” rather than the well-established process/outcome framework used in counseling literature and CACREP-aligned training.