Freedom: Toward an Integration of the Counseling Profession

Freedom is presented as an overarching paradigm that may align and bring together the counseling profession's diverse counseling theories and open a doorway to a new generation of counseling techniques. Freedom is defined and discussed in terms of its 4 modalities: freedom from, freedom to, freedom with, and freedom for. The long‐standing problem of theoretical integration of counseling and psychotherapy is explored in combination with the phenomenon of therapeutic change in the context of freedom. The new paradigm generates new and possibly more effective counseling techniques by aligning and incorporating freedom with such ideas as agency, self‐determination, metacognition, mindfulness, and often unexamined Asian therapeutic techniques from yoga and Buddhism.