Certified Individual Counseling Specialist™

Certified Individual Counseling Specialist™

Built upon the Holmes Human Functioning Model™, Holmes Training Academy's proprietary framework for understanding, assessing, and improving human functioning.

Certified Individual Counseling Specialist™ is a sixteen-week interdisciplinary professional certification built upon the H.U.M.A.N. Functioning Model™, an integrative framework developed by Dr. Cheryll Holmes for understanding how human beings function across changing states, demands, relationships, environments, histories, and systems.

Many professional approaches begin by asking what is wrong with a person, why the person is behaving badly, or which label best explains the presenting concern. This program trains students to ask a more disciplined question:

How is this person functioning, under what conditions, at what cost, with access to which capacities, and what is currently limiting responsible and sustainable participation?

Students learn to distinguish visible performance from actual functioning. A person may appear productive while accumulating physiological, emotional, relational, moral, or functional debt. Another may possess a capacity but lose reliable access to it under conflict, fatigue, threat, shame, uncertainty, relational pressure, or excessive demand. Someone who appears resistant may instead be overloaded, contextually suppressed, underdeveloped in a required capacity, disconnected from execution, dependent upon borrowed functioning, or responding to an intervention that does not match the actual functional problem.

The course introduces the Seven Functional Capacities™:

• Physiological Regulation
• Perceptual and Interpretive Accuracy
• Emotional Processing
• Executive Agency
• Relational Participation
• Adaptive Reorganization
• Meaning and Identity Integration

Students learn to examine how these capacities develop, interact, compensate for one another, become inaccessible under load, recover at different rates, and influence functioning across individual, relational, educational, ministry, leadership, organizational, and community settings.

The program develops the student’s ability to move from observation to formulation, from formulation to intervention, and from apparent progress to meaningful evaluation. Students learn to distinguish among foundational incapacity, developmental undercapacity, state-based inaccessibility, contextual suppression, overload, skill-execution disconnection, ambivalence, unwillingness, integration failure, recovery failure, sustainability failure, and systemic distortion.

Through applied cases, structured formulation, functional differentials, intervention mapping, recovery planning, system analysis, ethical decision-making, and competency demonstration, students learn to identify the controlling functional bottleneck rather than responding only to the most visible behavior.

The course does not train students to diagnose every difficulty, excuse harmful conduct, reduce accountability, or impose one explanation upon complex human experience. Students are trained to integrate evidence, culture, development, biology, trauma, relationships, spirituality, environment, resources, opportunity, power, responsibility, and professional scope into a coherent and revisable strategy.

The goal is not merely to help students sound more sophisticated. The goal is to develop professionals who can observe more accurately, formulate more responsibly, intervene more strategically, evaluate change more honestly, and recognize when they should act, revise, consult, refer, or ethically refrain from acting.

Certified Individual Counseling Specialist™ is delivered through Holmes Digital Campus with live online faculty instruction.

The sixteen-week professional certification includes:

• One two-hour live class each week
• Required orientation
• Assigned textbook reading
• Faculty instruction
• Applied professional cases
• Guided functional observation
• Seven-capacity assessment
• Functional Access Under Load™ analysis
• Functional formulation
• Functional differential analysis
• Intervention matching and sequencing
• Capacity-development planning
• Functional integration analysis
• Recovery and return-to-demand planning
• Sustainability and relapse-prevention planning
• Ethical outcome evaluation
• Individual, relational, educational, ministry, organizational, and system-level application
• Functional System Audit™ activities
• Practitioner competency and reflective-practice review
• Weekly written assignments
• Assigned professional discussion
• Faculty feedback
• Revision and remediation when required
• Final Written Strategy Plan™
• Oral Case Defense
• Competency-based certification assessment
• Digital access to approved course materials

Before each live class, students complete the assigned reading, review the featured figure, table, or Holmes framework, complete the readiness reflection or preclass prompt, and identify one question, uncertainty, or professional application.

During the live class, students participate in a professional problem or case presentation, faculty explanation, framework demonstration, guided formulation, ethical or contextual complication, application exercise, and faculty debrief.

After class, students complete the weekly application assignment, participate in the assigned discussion or case response, revise work when corrective feedback is provided, and submit all homework and classwork by 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on the Wednesday following class.

Students select one live section and remain in that section throughout the course. All class times are scheduled in Eastern Time under the America/New_York time zone.

Live classes are not recorded unless expressly authorized in writing.

Students should plan for approximately six to eight hours of weekly participation, including one two-hour live class, textbook reading, case analysis, written assignments, professional discussion, application exercises, and review of faculty feedback. Some assignments and final competency requirements may require additional preparation time.

Admission to the Certified Individual Counseling Specialist™ program is designed for professionals and advanced practitioners whose work requires disciplined understanding of human behavior, functioning, change, recovery, relationships, leadership, or systems.

Appropriate applicants may include counselors, therapists, psychologists, coaches, educators, professors, ministry leaders, pastoral counselors, healthcare professionals, organizational leaders, consultants, human-services professionals, conflict-resolution professionals, and other qualified practitioners.

Applicants should possess one or more of the following:

• Relevant professional experience
• Formal professional training
• Graduate study
• Supervised practice
• Substantial leadership responsibility

Applicants must be able to:

• Read, analyze, and discuss graduate-level material
• Apply complex concepts to cases and professional settings
• Protect confidential and identifying information
• Receive and respond to corrective feedback
• Distinguish educational formulation from diagnosis
• Recognize the limits of their professional role
• Seek consultation or referral when complexity exceeds their competence
• Participate respectfully in interdisciplinary learning

Admission may be subject to application review and faculty approval.

The course trains students to use the H.U.M.A.N. Functioning Model™ within their existing lawful professional role. It does not authorize students to perform services, use protected titles, make diagnoses, provide medical or psychiatric treatment, conduct psychotherapy, complete forensic evaluations, or undertake emergency or safeguarding work beyond their existing credentials, training, jurisdiction, competence, and authority.

Certification does not expand a student’s license, legal authority, clinical scope, ministry authority, organizational authority, or professional privileges.

The H.U.M.A.N. Functioning Model™ is an integrative conceptual and applied framework. It must not be represented as a universally validated diagnostic system, a medical model, a replacement for established assessment, or a scientifically proven explanation of all human behavior.

The course distinguishes functional formulation from diagnosis. Students must not present conceptual tools, profiles, diagrams, or educational exercises as standardized or psychometrically validated instruments unless formal validation has been completed and such use has been expressly authorized.

The model does not remove accountability. Functional explanation must not be used to excuse coercion, exploitation, abuse, deception, discrimination, violence, serious misconduct, or avoidable harm.

Students must distinguish:

• Compassion from exoneration
• Accountability from humiliation
• Support from substitution
• Capacity from willingness
• Inaccessibility from incapacity
• Performance from sustainable functioning
• Confidence from competence
• Spiritual meaning from imposed theology
• Professional insight from professional authority

Students may use digital and artificial-intelligence tools only in accordance with course policy. Confidential, proprietary, protected, or identifying information may not be entered into unapproved systems.

All assignments and case discussions must use fictional, composite, public, or thoroughly de-identified information unless written authorization establishes another lawful and ethical basis for use.

The credential must be represented together with the graduate’s actual professional role and may not be used to imply licensure or authority the graduate does not possess.

Approved examples include:

Jane Doe, LMFT, Certified Individual Counseling Specialist™

John Doe, Pastor and Certified Individual Counseling Specialist™

The title Human Functioning Psychologist may not be used unless the individual independently holds the lawful professional title and any required licensure.

Faculty may provide corrective feedback, require revision, establish a remediation plan, restrict particular applications, delay certification, deny certification, or remove a student when necessary to protect program integrity, the public, the profession, or the lawful use of the model.

Holmes Training Academy LLC may make reasonable adjustments to sequencing, cases, supplemental readings, or instructional activities when necessary to protect learning, ethics, accessibility, or program quality. Any material change to grading, certification requirements, or student obligations will be communicated in writing.

Live classes are not recorded unless Holmes Training Academy LLC expressly authorizes recording in writing.

Students must attend the section in which they are enrolled and may not routinely move between sections without administrative approval.

Additional faculty, evaluators, supervisors, or guest instructors may be assigned when appropriate.