Narrative Summary
Counselling skills are essential during therapy sessions since they help understand a client. I am able to effectively listen to and observe the client during the therapy v. One of the ways that I achieve this is by physically being present for a client during the therapy process. During my therapy session with Xavier, I was able to show the client that I care about his situation by giving him my undivided attention and making some appropriate eye contacts every time he was talking about his situation and how he would like to change it. Through this, I was able to gain his trust and confidence in me, which made him feel the urge of confiding more about his condition, for example, when he talked about his mother’s condition during our therapy session showed that my listening skills were effectively working in building trust between Xavier and I. In addition, I am also able to ask the right questions at the right time to help me acquire valuable information that would prove helpful during the therapy process. Asking questions during the therapy process helps me as a counsellor to set the tone of the session and the whole counselling process. I was able to use open-ended questions to gather the necessary information from Xavier. For example, during our first therapy session, I used open-ended questions such as “how does you friends and family react to your situation?” this was meant to gather information about his social life with his friends, which he responded by saying he does not have many friends and does not share much with the ones he has. Through this, I was able to gather the information I needed to continue with the therapy process.
As a counsellor, I feel like I could do better in my attitude of unconditional positive regard. I have difficulties in accepting and having a non-possessive caring towards the client and his/her feelings and experiences. I am not able to value a client as a worthy person regardless of his/her past problems, choices, or issues and warmly accepting every aspect of the client’s experience as they continue to unfold during the therapeutic process. I could start working on not judging people based on their actions and start focusing on what led them to do those actions and focus on how to help them improve themselves by eliminating those thoughts and behaviours and replacing them with positive ones, through this, I will be able to help clients by understanding their experiences and feelings. I will give the clients the therapeutic context in which they are provided with a free environment to be themselves and experience their thoughts, beings, and feelings without any external demands or conditions. In addition, I feel like I could do better in how I effectively show empathy during a therapy session. Empathy is important since it enables the therapist to see inside the client’s subjective experience and to have a clear understanding of the client’s private world. I have a huge problem in sensing the client’s moment-to-moment feelings and understand his/her views and their interpretation of events. I could improve here by trying to reflect the client’s experiences with my own to help me understand the client’s emotions and what they are going through. Mastering this will help during therapy sessions in that the client will feel acknowledged, understood, and accepted in a way that will enhance the therapeutic process and allow for much deeper therapeutic insight.
I am aware that most clients are always in search of hope for things to get better when they step into a therapy environment, as a counsellor I am aware that the insight of providing hope will make clients feel the urge to want to attend therapy sessions to help them achieve their set goal. As a counselling student, I am aware that my skill of being able to ask the right open-ended questions will help me find “exceptions” or rather the periods when the client was not faced with the current symptoms or situation that they are trying to overcome. Being able to use these questions to identify those moments when the client was not experiencing his/her current problems will help in challenging the client’s belief of helplessness or hopelessness. In addition, I am also aware of using open-ended questions to centre on achievable objectives quickly. Achievable objectives are an insight that will help guide the client through their recovery process. For example, during Ruth’s therapy session, the counsellor asked her what she wanted to achieve from the therapy and in life, and she answered by saying “I would like to change the way I look and build a better relationship with my daughter.” The use of open-ended question during this therapy process was able to show help Ruth set achievable goals. As a student pursuing counselling as a career of choice, I am aware that some clients may be resistant towards such insights and may prove difficult to work with, but this should not cloud my vision of successfully assisting them with their problems. These insights will help me professionally when handling clients who do not want to open up more or rather share their experiences because of maybe their lack of trust in people, focusing on these insights and skills will help me in communicating with a client professionally while having a clear goal as to what kind of information I would like to extract from the client that would prove useful towards helping them achieve success in turning their lives around.
I believe that people go through painful situations, carrying with them the weight of fresh wounds wherever they go. Neglecting these wounds by not processing and understanding them, may lead to the individual struggling to reach his/her full potential. In my practical classes with fictional clients, I take some time to learn the things that my client longs for, love, and feel unworthy of in life. I will collaborate with the client in search of the roots of the counterproductive behaviours and thoughts with the hopes of shifting them and preventing them from burdening the client in real life.
My personal therapeutic style, I believe to be conversational, while my approach is a practical, experiential, and present-focused. I believe in focusing on the life experience, strengths and the courage of a client as we professionally move together on the process of personal growth and self-development. I believe in drawing from a number of methods of therapy, individualized to each person, family, or couple’s uniqueness. The methodologies I use is Cognitive Behavior Therapy; Cognitive therapy is a process therapy process that helps clients to reframe their false beliefs that lead to negative behaviour or moods. I believe that humans are affected mostly by their thoughts (whatever someone believes in will lead to their actions). Cognitive therapy will help me to learn what exactly the cause of the client’s mood is; this will contribute to me learning to substitute the client’s negative thoughts with healthy thoughts to improve their mood, behaviour, self-concept, and physical state. Cognitive-behavioural therapy can be used to treat a wide range of problems. CBT can enable me to quickly help a client to identify and cope with specific difficulties that they are experiencing. I prefer this approach because it requires fewer sessions compared to the other forms of therapy, and it is a well-structured process. The relationship between a client and I is paramount, and building trust is essential for any therapeutic process that I am involved in.