My personal history and relationship patterns

After talking skills learnt to demonstrate empathy, I’d like to talk about my reflection about my personal history and how I relate to others in the next two paragraphs. When I look back my childhood, I’m feeling blessed. I was grown up in an environment that I can express my feeling and I always can seek emotional companionship from various sources, such as family, church, and friends. As a result, I learned the importance of emotion and how I should express when dealing with difficult situations. On the other hand, the environment that I grow up also encourage the culture of preventing conflicts. People around me treated conflicts as something bad and they often disregard it but not solve it. When I reflect on this part, I realised that why I always prefer to prevent conflict but to face it properly. And I think that’s something I need to work on in my interpersonal relationship. From a helper perspective, I think I need to review the relationship between the helpee and myself regularly. In case we have different opinion about how to keep on the helping session, I have to bare in mind that I will actively deal with the conflict but not try to escape from it.

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I was inspired by a slide about how our relationship patterns dictate several basic things when tutor mentioned this concept. The two elements of who we pick and how we interact with are not something new and I knew that since I was a teenager. The most inspiring part is about how I allow other individuals to treat me in terms of speech and conduct while in the relationship. I think that’s something that I should review further. Since I was a kid, I was taught to be a nice person to everybody, and that’s the best way to treat the others and build up relationships. However, some issues happened because of this mindset. I met more and more people when I grown up, and I noticed some people took advantage of my kindness to accomplish their goal, for example, lower commitment in group assignment but get the same grade as me. I was not happy about that but I did not tell my friend because I thought I should be kind to all my friends. When I look back, I found that I deal with that relationship incorrectly. It's great to treat people nicely, but that doesn’t mean that I should accept unfair treatment unconditionally. Since I am the only person to decide how my friends treat me, I should let them know my real feeling if I don’t agree with their act. Now I know the importance of this element and I think I will treat relationships better when somebody try to take advantage in the future.


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In the next paragraph, I’d like to do some retrospect and prospect. In retrospect, my long termgoals that I made at the beginning of the course is to understand my strength and limitations, so that I can make better career planning for my future. When I apply this course, I treat this as a test because I’m not sure if it’s a good idea or not to consider counsellor as my future goal. When I review feedback from my classmates, I noticed many positive feedback regarding the skills that I applied during the triad, such as proper paraphrasing and active listening. I’m delighted to have these feedback because it’s a recognition to my abilities and skills, proving I can be a good helper. And it’s worthy to learn these skills because they are useful in workplace, family and other places. Moreover, it’s also great motivation for me to continue the journey of studying in counselling. Now I’m more interested to this field and I wish to learn more theories and skills. In prospect, I think I will spend some time on learning terms and adjectives about emotions. I noticed that the vocabulary in my mind is very limited, and I wish to make some improvement in this area. I think that would be helpful when I talk to helpee and I can then use those terms to describe their emotion or what they’re facing more precisely.

In relation to others

During the previous journal, I mentioned a bit about my motivations to study the course. In this paragraph, I’d like to talk about the difference that myself and other person and what does that mean to me. During the lessons, a lot of time was given to every classmates to share their recent status and personal experience that related to counselling topic. I noticed that I’m always the last person to share during the first few weeks. I noticed that I am quite reserved and inhibited at unfamiliar environment and it takes time for me to feel comfortable to share after I get used to other people. Because of my personalities, I noticed that I rarely talk to other classmates actively at the first few weeks, until I heard more about every person and felt safe. This is a re-discovery about my personalities, especially when I am now living at a new country that different from my hometown. Although I’m reserved, that doesn’t mean that I don’t like to social. I’m not too worry that my personalities will affect how I help the others during the helping session, but that’s something that I need to acknowledge and be aware of during daily life. By identifying this, I have more understanding about myself and thus accept people have different response to the same event because of their personal difference.

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During the triad work, I’ve many opportunities to apply skills learnt from the lesson. I’d like to share some of my reflections about non-verbal communication and how I use them to demonstrate empathy. Although verbal communication is the essential element of helping session, the importance of the non-verbal skills cannot be neglected. The interesting point of non-verbal action is that communication is happening between helper and helpee, and both side shares emotions of the other party without saying anything. In my experience, I noticed that helpee tends to observe how I react at the beginning of the helping session, if helpee can feel my good will, they would have greater intention to share more and deeper with me, vice versa. When helpee mentioned some sad experience, I always use eye contact and other facial expression to let helpee know my emotion about his/her experience and I’m willing to listen further. I found that a proper facial expressions is worth a thousand words. I can see that helpee felt that they are empathically understood when I display proper facial expressions and eye contact. Another good thing about using non-verbal communication properly is that it minimised the possibility of myself as a helper to give too many advice. The key of a successful session is not about giving advice, but showing empathy and understanding to the helpee. When I put more effort on listening and non-verbal communication, that helps me not to talking too much and allowing helpee have sufficient time to share their feeling. Since I had some good feedback from my schoolmates, I think I will put more effort to do that better in future triads.

Developed relationships with other people

During the lesson, I had chances to understand the five archetypes via the role play. And the most unforgettable type is ‘the parent’. I was working in a company that many of the coworkers are mothers and most of the are older than me. When I look back to that working experience, I noticed that a few female colleagues seem apply the ways that they communicate with their children to the workplace. Firstly, they frequently use the tone and wording that they teach their children when talking to me. This happened a lot when I joined the company right after I graduated from university. Secondly, it’s quite hard for me to propose my ideas when we were having discussion about how to execute instruction from the headquarter. I can feel that my opinion was neglected but not rejected because of its feasibility. At that time, I’m not aware that the pros and cons of the parent archetypes until I look back the past a few years later.  In some sense, they gave me great support when I was struggling how to get used to the work-related tasks at the very beginning. And I’m very grateful about their help. However, there’s also drawbacks due to this relationship pattern. It’s quite clear that they brought what they gained from their family to the workplace and applied to younger colleagues. As a result, they often treated me as their kids but not a coworker. Although my working experience was less than my colleague, that doesn’t mean that my judgement is always wrong. Technically this hindered the possibilities that we can build a healthy working relationship. 

After talking about difficulties that I’ve experienced in developing and maintaining relationships with others, I’d like to do some reflection about self-disclosure during the helping interaction. When helpee shared something that helper had similar experience before, it might be a good chance for me as a helper to talk about part of my own story to echo helpee. The benefit of self- disclosure is quite obvious , it’s a good skill for helpee to know that I’m really listening and I understand their situation. If helpee knew that someone have had similar experience as theirs and that can facilitate the helping session if I can make good use of the self-disclosure and then assist helpee to face their emotions and struggles. However, there’s also potential dangers about using this skill during the helping interaction. I might have a temptation of talking too much about my own experience and thus deprive the moment that helpee should have to talk about their own story. And I may trigger my hidden emotions by accident because of those self-disclosure and thus fall into the role of victim, referring to the Karpman Drama Triangle. If that happen, it’s hard for me to help the helpee because I’m trapper in a helpess scenario. Since self- disclosure is a double edged sword, I think I should take extra awareness when using this skill during the helping session. In my opinion, the key to success is not using which skill, but to use the most appropriate skill at the right timing when helping the helpee. 

Open and closed questions

When helper is having session with helpee, sometimes helpee have a lot of things in their mind and it’s hard for them to verbalise about those issues systemically. Moreover, helpee might wish to go through all of them in that session. However, this is not the best option for both helper and helpee. Given that the time of each session is limited, it’s not possible to talk about too much topic. It’s better to pick partial of them and focus on them first. As a result, it’s important for helper to use the focusing skill to assist helpee to prioritise what is the main theme that helpee wish to talk about during the session. For the rest, helper can discuss with helpee and see if they wish to talk about them in future session. During the practising session, I tried to use the focusing skill when helpee listed out a lot of things they wish to mention. Firstly, I listened to what helpee wish to talk about. Secondly, I listed out the issues that the helpee mentioned and asked that he wish to discuss in this session. During the process, autonomy is given to helpee, so that they have full control about what they wish to focus on this time. Even though I’m interested to other topic, it’s important to keep focusing on what the helpee wish to talk but not override his feelings and wants. Finally, helpee identified the isssues that he wish to talk at that moment and we had some time to talk about them. I found that focusing is very important because it allows me to utilize the session and find out what’s the most important thing that is in helpee’s mind, considering we only have limited time to talk about a few. I believe the focusing skill will be one of the skills that I use frequently when talking with helpee that worried and upset about many things. 

The difference between open and closed questions are whether they are facilitating the helpee to share more about their experience. For example, yes–no question is a typical closed question because it can be answered with a few words. In contrast, open questions are broad and can be answered by helpee in detail. In most of the case, it’s always preferred to use open questions when having a helping session with helpee, so that helpee is encouraged to share more about their feeling or ideas. And helper can then understand the helpee’s situation and provide suitable feedback afterwards. In some cases, closed questions might be useful and thus helper should still consider to use if it’s an appropriate scenario. Closed question can be used as a question to initiate further conversation. For example, asking if helpee agree or disagree with what the helper summarized, and continue with another follow up question after the helpee replied ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’. 

Apart from choosing open and closed questions, there’s another core question that helper need to bare in mind. When I’m thinking of what kind of questions that I wish to ask the helpee during the session, there’s always a temptation to ask questions that satisfy my own curiosity but not for the benefit of the helpee. It’s critical for me to ask questions that are corresponding to the helpee’s situation and is helpful to assist helpee to deal with their own situation. If helper is aware of this temptation and understand the importance to keep focus on helpee’s agenda, that can help to minimize the tendency that helper asking irrelevant questions.