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.