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By Samantha Cooper

May 2026

Exceptional, transformative, visionary — colleagues have used these words to describe J. Scott Young, MEd, LCMHC, NCC, his research in spirituality and his work in developing new educational programs at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNC-G).

Young, a professor in the Department of Counseling and Educational Development at UNC-G, received ACA’s 2025 Garry R. Walz Trailblazer Award, which is awarded to a counselor whose passion and leadership skills have advanced the profession and inspired others.

“I am grateful that I was put in a position to help with innovation when it needed to happen,” he says. “It is an honor to be awarded at a national level for doing something innovative and novel for the field. It is something I really enjoy.”

The Start of Something New

Young grew up in a hard-working, religious, blue-collar family. Neither of his parents had a college degree, and he wanted the economic stability that came with higher education. That led him to major in business administration. But soon after graduating, he realized he found the career unfulfilling.

A chance encounter with a theology professor started him on a new career path. The professor described his career in pastoral counseling, which led Young to apply to UNC-G for a graduate degree in counselor education. It was a perfect fit.

“I had always been interested in different cultures and worldviews. I was always the person people would talk to about things in their lives. And I enjoyed listening to them,” he says. “The moment I was in graduate school and started taking these courses everything started to make sense. It was all intuitive to me, and I loved it.”

Young soon realized he wanted to combine his new passion for counseling with a lifetime interest in world religions. At the time, spirituality was not seen as a large part of the counseling field, but his work has helped change that perception.

When people are struggling or in crisis, they tend to ask those bigger existential questions like ‘What does this mean?’ and ‘Why is this happening to me?’ It used to be that these were questions for clergy, but I thought we should be able to support people regarding it,” he says.

His book, Integrating Spirituality and Religion into Counseling: A Guide to Competent Practice, co-edited with Craig S. Cashwell, PhD, discusses how to integrate culturally competent spiritual care into counseling. Since the book’s publication, Young has made spirituality a more substantial focus in the counseling field — and he has expanded the definition of spirituality to include other ideas, such as dreams.

Making the Dream Work

When Young first started studying dreams, he realized the body of research was underused in the field of psychology. Unlike spirituality, dream interpretation varies heavily depending on someone’s lived experience. For example, a dream about a dog may signal a desire to go back to a stable childhood for one person while signaling danger and anxiety for another.

“People will come in with their own orientations, beliefs and things they’ve been taught about dreams. A lot of counselors will say they don’t know what to do when a client comes in wanting to talk about dreams,” he says.

Young and his collaborator, Alwin Wagener, PhD, LPC, NCC, are working to help counselors “understand they already possess the necessary skills, like deep listening, to help people start making sense of their dreams. Often, good, powerful questioning is enough of a start,” he says.

Once a client and counselor are aware of the meaning of different symbols in a dream, they can work on understanding where the dream is pointing.

Young and Wagener, a former doctoral student, have promoted a technique called “image rehearsal therapy,” for addressing nightmares, a common symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. During this therapy, a counselor helps the client break down the different components of the recurring nightmare so they can rescript the scariest component to make the dream less frightening.

“It’s like rewriting a story you wrote,” Young says. “The client practices rewriting the story with the counselor and at home. When they go through the new version of the dream, it helps mitigate the intensity of the nightmares.”

Impact Through Innovation

Young’s simple yet effective style of innovation can be seen in the way he has transformed education at UNC-G. In the mid-2000s, as chair of UNC-G’s Department of Counseling and Educational Development, Young realized the department needed to be more self-sustaining — bringing in its own funds after the state started cutting back spending.

“I wondered, what can we do as a department that would help people out in the world while also bringing some resources back to us?” he says.

The clinical supervision credential program he and colleagues created attracted hundreds of students and produced enough resources that he was able to develop the Impact Through Innovation (ITI) initiative. To this day, ITI helps faculty and students in the School of Education reach the people they’re trying to help with their research and service efforts.

“You can publish your article and present at a conference, but the people who will see it are those already in your field — not the people in the streets. So, ITI helps reframe the impact you make by asking, ‘Whose lives do you want to touch?’ and helping you reach them,” he explains.

Since ITI’s inception, it has become a hub for engagement in the fields of education, health and wellness at UNC-G. It also led to the creation of the Clinical Supervision Research Collaborative (CSRC), a consortium of researchers from different disciplines and countries who assist each other by sharing data or co-analyzing their subjects.

L. DiAnne Borders, PhD, LCMHC, NCC, another counseling professor at UNC-G, came to Young with an idea. “She had a vision of what CSRC could be,” Young says. “She saw a need for something like it. But she hadn’t done this sort of big-picture thinking before.”

Because of Young’s previous experience in building educational programs, Borders believed Young could teach her exactly what she needed to know.

Young gave her his Innovation Toolkit to develop the project. Over several months, she refined the concept, and he helped bring it to fruition. With Young’s assistance and knowledge, CSRC recently gained nonprofit status.

Young credits a lot of this knowledge to his undergraduate degree because it taught him how to solve problems. “It is easy to recognize that something isn’t working. But problems are complicated. You need to research and understand the problem deeply before producing multiple solutions. You need a model for the problem-solving process,” Young explains.

Solving a Problem

Young developed a set of steps to solve issues that he hopes to eventually publish for others to use. They look like this:

• Identify the problem.
• Research the impact of the problem by talking with people it has affected and others who have tried solving it before.
• Look at research in other disciplines to see if they’ve come up with a solution for similar issues.
• Generate multiple ideas and possible solutions.
• Revisit the affected people, talk with them about potential solutions, receive feedback and make changes.
• Put the solution into place and see how it is received.

“Once you get to the point where people start saying that an idea could be helpful, that’s where you start building your solution,” Young says. “If you think somebody needs to change a process when you see a problem, you’re the somebody who can fix it.”

He believes counselors are well-suited to finding solutions for issues if they want to.

“That is usually how change happens,” he says. “The people who are trailblazers are really helpful to the field. Later, the solutions will seem obvious, and people will say it makes sense. But it isn’t like that early on. There isn’t always a path until somebody cares and they create it.”