The ABC Model of Resilience

Abstract

Counselor educators of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) descent remain underrepresented in counselor education in the United States. Consequently, there is limited scholarship addressing how these educators maintain their professional identities and wellness and foster resilience amid volatile politics and institutional invisibility. In this collaborative autoethnography, four MENA counselor educators undertook rotating peer interviews, kept reflective journals, and collected identity artifacts, which they then analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis. Findings revealed that resilience occurred as a relational, contextual, and politicized process comprised of (1) adaptive resilience, (2) belonging and community, and (3) cultural accountability and professional responsibility, which countered systemic erasure and silencing and supported persistence. Across the themes that emerged, the results illustrate the MENA counselor educators’ journey of navigating between invisibility and hypervisibility, managing wellness labor, and transforming surveillance and scrutiny into academic clarity, mentorship intentionality, and coalition-building. Implications are presented for resilience-informed supervision, mentorship, and institutional policy to advance equity, identity, and multicultural and social justice counseling competency-aligned training. Suggestions to reinforce cultural responsiveness, broaching and advocacy within the counselor education programs accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Education Programs are also offered.