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.