Group Counseling with LGBTQI Persons

As a Ph.D. student specializing in LGBTQI+ issues in counseling, Kris Goodrich took a special interest in supporting culturally marginalized communities. He noticed a disparity in counseling resources for the LGBTQI+ community.

With the support of his colleague Melissa Luke, Goodrich—now an associate professor in Counselor Education at UNM’s College of Education—coauthored a book that has earned him national accolades.

As a testament to his contributions and his impact on the field of counselor education, Goodrich was recently honored by the Association for Counselor Education and Supervision (ACES).

The organization, dedicated to quality education and supervision of counselors in all work settings, recently awarded Goodrich the Publication in Counselor Education and Supervision Award for his coauthored book “Group Counseling with LGBTQI Persons.”

‘Melissa and I both have extensive experience in providing group counseling to clients,” said Goodrich. “We were shocked to see the lack of attention to LGBTQI clients in the group counseling or group work literature. As such, we wanted to provide practitioners and the field a resource to ensure that intentional and culturally responsive care could be provided to clients from this community. That is ultimately what inspired this work.”

Goodrich plans to continue this work at UNM. In each of the courses he teaches, he focuses on different marginalized communities that his students might come across in their future work, and discusses how culturally appropriate interventions can be ethically used in their clinical or school counseling practice.

“The counseling program at UNM requires students to take coursework in group work, multicultural counseling, and sexuality in counseling, and I use information garnered through the research in the book to ensure that students have a comprehensive grasp on the different clinical issues that diverse clients may face,” says Goodrich.

Soon Goodrich and his colleagues, plan on publishing two sets of standards of care that address assessment and research of LGBTQI+ persons in counseling. This will be published in the Journal of LGBT Issues in Counseling in the last issue of this year, as part of a special issue Goodrich is co-editing as an initiative of his recent presidency of the Association for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues in Counseling.