Progress - reflection about the level 3 study

Compare with last year, I feel like I’m more confident to apply counselling skills that I learned from the lessons to the skills practice sessions. Now I’m able to create a friendly environment that helpee is comfortable to share their feeling. Regarding the limits of proficiency, I think it’s related to how to deal with a series of conversation with the same helpee. The current triads that we did during lessons mainly work on a one-off session, which means the dialogue is within a short period of time and helpers do not have opportunities to discover the underneath feeling or thoughts via several rounds of dialogue. In real life, it's not realistic to expect all helpee to disclose themselves within such short time. It takes a few sessions for helpee to build a secure relationship with helper or counsellor before they feel it’s okay to share something that rarely share with the others. As a result, I only have limited experience of handling a continuous therapeutic relationship with a client. On the other hand, I think I need more experience of dealing with different types of people. I’m aware that people interaction is complicated and the chemistry reaction of people with different personalities are different. It’s not possible to learn from books solely but need to learn via more triads and real helping session. I wish to have more triad with different classmates and understand characteristics of different personalities via those extra triads. To enhance the learning, I think I can try to record the sessions and do some analysis afterwards. I can then listen the whole conversation again and see if there’s any key elements that I missed during the triad. I can also rethink if it’s workable to use other approach to run the session. I believe that is a good way to understand what’s doing well and what can be done better in the future.

I was struggling whether good spoken language is the most important thing to develop effective working relationship, or it’s only one of the key qualities of being a helper. After a few months debate with different people, I come up with some new insights. I think verbal communication play an essential role throughout the whole process, but there’re other elements that are more critical. Firstly, I found that helpee are looking for a person that can create a safe and non-judgemental environment that allow them to express their feelings and thoughts. It’s hard to achieve at general social setting, that means helper need to show and maintain kindness and attention using non-verbal communication skills. Secondly, many helpee wish to share everything in their mind in limited time when they meet a nice counsellor. Since the nature of sharing is less well organised than writing, it requires helper to analysis and understand the underneath meaning and feeling of the whole sharing, and guide helpee to consolidate what they think and what kind of daily struggles or mental health issues that the helpee is facing. Some people may think helper is doing nothing but actually a lot of work was processed during the silent moment. Thirdly, I think it’s crucial for helper to develop their personal qualities. Apart from the counselling skills, helpers are helping the helpee using their empathy, patience, focus and other qualities throughout the whole therapeutic process. Some of the qualities are in-born, and some of them can be developed intentionally. I think helpers that aim to be a counsellor should spend sufficient time to cultivate these qualities. To conclude, good spoken language is important in the working relationship and this remains one of my goals to achieve, and there’re also other key elements that are recognized to be essential throughout the counselling process. I wish to establish these during the study journey. 

I was grown up in a monoethnic country and almost ninety percent of the population are the same ethnic group. As a result, I rarely have opportunities to speak with people that from other ethnic group. I found that I was affected by the above values and thus I never have intention to reach out people of other races. When I first came to London, I realised the variety of population of this big city and I came up an idea to learn at least a bit from different races and not to trap by the culture of my hometown. I had a lot of opportunities to speak with classmates that came from various nationality, beliefs and career background. I found that it’s great for me to understand everyone’s life journey via conversations within the classroom and triads. Although we grown up in different culture, we all face similar life challenges such as family relationships, work pressure and money worries, and we’re sharing similar emotions because of the above issue. I used to see how different we are before I have first hand communicatin with people from other ethnic group. The interaction within the classroom changed my mind and I started to find our similarities instead. I’m very thankful to have such experience because it helped me to face the hidden discrimination that I gained from my culture. Now I’m trying to unlearn it by maintaining interaction with other people and keep in mind that we’re all getting through similar life challenges and I can treat the others in a more friendly way. I believe the new mindset will help me to be a better counsellor when I work with people that’re different from me. I wish to carry on the positive experience and demonstrate unconditional positive regard when I work with them. 

For people that suffered from discriminatory responses, I’d suggest to use a combination of person centred approach and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). Firstly, it’s important to acknowledge the feeling of the client before doing any other things. I’d suggest spending some time to understand what he faced and what’s his feeling about those response from the others. A proper relationship when then establish gradually by active listening and the demonstration of respect. If the feeling is too strong, then probably longer time is needed for client to express. It’s not recommended to move on to next stage if client is still stuck with the emotions and is not ready to process the underneath thoughts and beliefs. Secondly, I will invite helpee to talk about his self-concept and try to find out why the others’ action or words bring such hard feeling to him. The step is critical because it’s worth to find out whether the feeling is mainly due to internal or external causes. There’re various possible reasons that causing client to feel discriminated and it’s not proper to assume it’s because of particular reason. The key is to believe client know himself the best and what he need is some open-end questions to guide him find out the answer. Once the cause is identified, I can then determine if it’s suitable to use CBT to deal with client’s dysfunctional thinking and assist him to adjust his thoughts and behaviors gradually. This can be done by assisting client to review his way of thinking towards other’s actions and direct him to adjust the way to a healthier way, so that he will not be irritated when facing the same situation. The above paragraph briefly explain how I’d suggest to deal with the case by using skills and theories from both person centred approach and CBT. The two approaches have their own strength and weaknesses, so it’d better to apply them in different stages. 

Characteristics of counsellor

In this journal, I’d like to talk to talk about what kind of characteristics that’s beneficial to build a good therapeutic relationship between helper and helpee. I think patience is one of the key characteristics. Nowadays people’s mind is manipulated by social media algorithms and people are chasing for excitement and instant gratification such as likes and short comments. Now the culture is promoting a culture of didn’t read something would require too much time to understand, people are used to obtain summary or conclusion. It’s understandable why such culture is popular, but I don’t think it’s good to interpersonal relationships. It’s becoming harder and harder for people to slow down and pay attention to listen the other’s life experience, and that’s why people are looking for helpers or counsellors to share their struggle and feelings. They know that these people are all eyes and are willing to concentrate to listen with patience. Another characteristic that’s always mentioned with patience is non-judgemental. The rise of social media and instant gratification culture not only encourage a norm of restlessness, it also lead to another phenomenon, which is making judgement quickly. Now more and more people are keen on expressing their opinion and making judgement, despite they only listen a brief summary about what’s happened. Since people are used to comment on everything online, this also impact how they interact with other people in their daily life, causing more quick judgement after a short conversation. The quick response did not bring any good to people, it harm the relationship because people are judged, not being listened. As a result, non-judgemental is becoming more and more important, especially to helpers. People that are looking for having counselling relationship wish to have a non-judgemental space for them to talk about their own life experience. Some of those experience maybe full of pain and tears, and they have a great need of being listened instead of being judged. 

In the next paragraph, I’d like to discuss the three stages in the counselling process. The use of three stages outline what’d be done throughout the counselling sessions, which is very important to new counsellors and layman that rarely have counselling experience, so that both sides have a clearer picture about what to be expected. In the first phase of exploration, helper will explain what kind of rules that he will follow and details of the session will also be explained. This step is an invitation to helpee to take accountability of the upcoming sessions and understand the possible outcome about what helpee is going to share. After contract is agreed, helper will then try to explore what the helpee is struggling with by using various skills such as attending and silence. The aim is to assist helpee to find out what they’d like to talk about or what they wish to work on during the sessions. After that, it’s time for helper to further understand the feeling and underneath thoughs of helpee. Since helper have already talk about the issue briefly at the previous stage, helper will then work on identifying what’s mentioned frequently and whether there’s any patterns that worth further elaboration. After the above phases, helper and helpee should have a very fruitful dialogue. Helpee should be able to relief part of the emotions and understand himself in terms of thinking pattern, emotions, etc in a better way. Helper can then summarise what’ve been discussed and highlight key findings before ending the session.

Mixed anxiety depressive disorder

In this journal, I’d like to talk to talk about mixed anxiety depressive disorder (MADD), one of the most common mental health problems in England. It’s a condition where a person experiences the symptoms of depression and anxiety. It’s described as a diagnosable illness when a person continually worry and feeling low in mood and is hard to enjoy life. It’s quite common to have this situation because of the stress of living in London, a highly competitive city of Europe. The pressure at work and living make people feels it’s hard to face daily challenges and hard to relief during the rest time or annual leave. People will gradually lost their interest in their interested activities and probably feel they’re hard to fall into sleep easily. If the situation continues, they may also tiredness all the time and feel other negative body symptoms such as muscle tension and quick heart rate. In fact, it’s very common in primary care system and it leads to numerous impact to the whole society. According to NHS England, it is estimated this health issue affecting approximately 16% of the population of England, and it leads to a decrease of England’s national income by around 4%, which is about £80 billion. This reduction is due to high turnover rate, temporary work and reduced productivity. Although the National Health Service and therapeutic organization are aware of the impact, not all of the public understand the impact of MADD and some patients were stigmatised since somatic disorders is easier to be accepted than psychiatric disorders. I think it’s essential that work should be done to educate the public regarding the details of MADD, how to deal with stress and anxiety in daily life and how to help friends and family members. I think that early interference will prevent an exacerbation to a more serious condition. 

In the next paragraph, I’d like to discuss how counselling can promote a positive mental health. For people that are living with high pressure, it’s hard for them to find a way out because they’ve already spent most of their time and effort to deal with the existing situation and thus they don’t have capacity to process their emotions and struggles, and those stress can’t be reduced in a proper way. I think counselling can contribute by assisting people to understand their situation and relief their stress via the talking therapy process. People can then find out possible ways to deal with their own situation with the assistance of the counsellor and start to plan their future. Counsellors are not acting as a person to teach clients what’s the best way. Instead, they’re guiding the people to understand their personality, what’s in their mind and how it can be achieved. In some cases, the situation may take a long period of time to improve. If people can find a way to deal with the stress in a proper way, then they can gradually realise their potential, find their own work-life balance and their own understanding of meaning of life. 

Self disclosure in a therapeutic relationship

In this journal, I’d like to talk about the case number five and discuss whether Michelle’s way of approaching is beneficial to the therapeutic relationship. Firstly, I agree that self disclosure is a good way to establish therapeutic relationship with the client. It’s useful when client experienced similar life moment. However, the disclosure must be within boundaries, so that both the counsellor and the client can have an appropriate relationship, like what’s mentioned in the BACK ethical framework. The case mentioned Michelle keep disclosing her own situation and turns out the focus of the session twisted to Michelle’s life story instead of dealing with client’s needs, I think that is a bad example of not putting client first. If possible, I think Michelle should consider how much she should disclosure at the beginning and make sure the purpose of disclosure is to demonstrate empathy to Paula’s situation instead of becoming a channel to express Michelle’s own feeling. Besides, it’s common that client is curious and wish to know more. When Michelle encounter that at first instance, she should deny the request and explain the reason gently, so that Paula understand it’s to protect interest of both sides. Michelle should also guide Paula to talk about her own experience that she wish to explore, so that she can apply the counselling skill and demonstrate good practise through the session.