Chapter 15 - Toward Closure: Advice for the Passionately Committed Counseling Student

Chapter 15

Toward Closure: Advice for the Passionately Committed Counseling

Student

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• Be Self-Directed• Read• Find A Mentor• Network• Volunteer To Do Research• Ask Questions• Challenge Your Teachers


• Experience Counseling• Personalize Things• Expand Your World• Become A Member of A Professional

Organization• Explore A Specialty


Employment Inquires

• Talk to counselors in the field about what they do and how they feel about their jobs.

• Talk to prospective employers to determine what they are looking for in candidates.


Employment Inquires

• Discover a few particular types of client populations (disabled, gifted), age groups (preschoolers, older adults), settings (hospitals, schools), and counseling skills (consultation, group interventions) in which you can gain specialized experience.

• Use elective courses, workshop experiences, and your practicum/internship sites to become expert in a few flexible specialties.


Employment Inquires

• Volunteer your time at local community agencies to accumulate additional professional experiences.


Things That Cause Burnout

• Work long hours, especially weekends and evenings. Tell yourself this doesn’t really interfere with the quality of your relationships with family.

• Think about your hardest cases even when you are not working. Worry about what you aren’t doing that you should be doing.


Things That Cause Burnout

• Blame your clients, their families, your colleagues, your boss, or the system for the reasons why things are not going as smoothly as you would prefer.

• Believe that you can help everyone you see, and that you can cure them within a very short time.


Confront Your Own Fears

• Find a support group of peers in which you can confide your doubts and fears, disclose your fantasies of being an imposter, and talk about your imperfections and misunderstandings.

• Although it is difficult to recruit confidants who are compatible in any walk of life, you are definitely not alone in your apprehensions.

• Even after several decades of practicing and teaching counseling, both of us still continue to confront our own fears of failure.


Use Supervision

• In order to get the most from supervision, you will need to work hard on the relationship.

• This means doing solid preparation. It means reflecting on your cases and professional struggles, defining where you are having the most difficulty, and articulating your concerns and needs.


Use Supervision

• More than anything, supervisors appreciate working with students who talk about what is working and what is not working.

• We don’t just mean with your own cases but also in your supervision relationship.

• Your supervisor cannot better meet your needs or address your major concerns if you don’t take responsibility for communicating what is most and least helpful.


Be Your Own Model

• Try to be a model of the person you would like your clients to be. If you think that people are happiest, most satisfied, and most productive when they are loving and caring—when they live in the present as much as possible—then strive to do the same in your own life.


Be Your Own Model

• Be who you want your clients to be by the way you live your life—with honesty and integrity, with compassion, with hunger to experience as much as you can in the brief time you will be residing on this planet.


Secrets of the Profession

• There are very personal reasons why you entered this profession. As we mentioned in the beginning of this book, newcomers to this field not only want to heal others but also heal themselves. Some of us have been victims of abuse, neglect, traumas, or just plain old self-doubt. We are voyeurs. We yearn for power or control. We enjoy the one-way intimacy that is part of therapeutic relationships. There is a dark side to our own narcissism.


Secrets of the Profession

• Life isn’t a multiple-choice exam. The problem you will face is not a scarcity of options but far too many from which to choose. This class, or others, may offer multiple-choice exams in which you are presented with four choices, one of which is obviously the wrong one, but counseling practice overwhelms you with so many options that it often feels whichever action you take there were a hundred others you could have chosen that might have been better.


More Secrets

• The answers you need most are not found in books. You don’t really learn counseling by reading about it, or listening to people talking about it. You’ve got to experience it yourself, from both ends. You have to immerse yourself more fully in life, explore other cultures, take constructive risks, engage more completely in relationships.


More Secrets

• What we do is often absurd. A lot about counseling doesn’t make sense. We don’t fully understand how and why it works. We don’t agree on the best way to approach this craft. And even when we do help people, we can’t always explain why it happened, or why the effects did or didn’t last.


More Secrets

• Your family still won’t listen to you. Perhaps it’s a coincidence (or maybe not, given the personal reasons people enter this field), but one of the reasons both of us studied to be a counselor, and then attained more advanced degrees, is because we wanted the respect and approval of our families. Even with a master’s degree, then a Ph.D., then being professors, then authors, our families still don’t take us any more seriously than they did before.


More Secrets

• People don’t want what you are selling. Even the clients who seem cooperative and motivated may have hidden agendas. The honest ones tell you directly they don’t trust you. The really difficult clients will pretend they want counseling, and even report that they are improving, but secretly they just want to keep you from getting close.


More Secrets

• You will have to empathize with people you don’t like. One of the most important skills you will learn is how to maintain a nonjudgmental stance with your clients. This is easy with nice people; the true challenge is sustaining this attitude toward clients who offend you with their attitudes, values, and behaviors.


More Secrets

• You will never know enough. You will never get it right. No matter how hard you study, how compulsively you strive for perfection, how many books you read, how many degrees you attain or workshops you attend, you will still not know as much as you need to do the job.


More Secrets

• You will forget everything you know and learn it again. Your program is going to cram your brain with more information than you can possibly digest. When you start your practicum and internships, you’ll discover how much you’ve forgotten and will have to revisit your texts. If you pursue a license, you will relearn everything your professors taught you all over again to prepare for the exam. Expect this cycle to continue throughout your career.


More Secrets

• Who you ARE is as important as what you DO. As much as you want to learn all the content and skills and fancy techniques of counseling—to fill up your bag of tricks—your essential kindness and caring and commitment are as important as what you can do. We don’t mean to say that being knowledgeable and highly skilled are not important, because they are—but rather that they are not enough.


More Secrets

You must also work hard to make yourself into the best kind of person you can be—someone who is compassionate and dedicated to making the world a better place.


• Many changes don’t last. As hard as it seems to help people to change, that is only the first step. Look at how many times in your own life that you have started to make changes you said were important—losing weight, starting an exercise program, calling your mother regularly, saving your money, studying two hours per day. You really meant it when you promised yourself to do those things.


More Secrets

You may have even made solid efforts to get things going. But how long did the changes last? Never forget that your job not only involves helping people get started on their personal transformations, but involves making those changes permanent.


More Secrets

• You will be haunted by those you helped, and those you didn’t. The relationships you develop with clients will become so intimate, so moving, so challenging at times, that their memories will stay in your head as long as you live. For better or worse, you will be irrevocably changed as a result of these encounters.


More Secrets

More Secrets

• You will learn how not to cry, and you will still cry. Clients fear that their pain will overwhelm us, rendering us unable to help them. Our task is to remain calm and focused even while listening to tragic stories of loss and suffering. We can do this not because we become hardened and detached, but because we appreciate that when clients disclose painful material, they are releasing a heavy burden.


More Secrets

As our faces show a composed compassion, inside we feel a kind of happiness for them that they’ve been able to put their pain into words and let their tears start to flow. We feel privileged that they would share their suffering with us. But there will still be those moments when our therapeutic composure is punctured by the intensity of their pain or the terrible sadness of their lives, and we will tear up with them.


More Secrets

Those moments are not counseling mistakes; they are experiences of deep connection and a healing message to clients that their suffering is witnessed. Those moments remind us of our humanness, and they are profound and precious.


Some More Secrets

• You won’t have enough time to do what you want, or what needs to be done. You have to pace yourself. You have to set limits. You can’t possibly do everything that needs to be done, especially in the time constraints that you must live with.


Some More Secrets

• Supervision isn’t always available when you need it most. A lot of the time you’re on your own. Even with the best possible supervision available, you will still find yourself having to figure out many things on your own. Almost every session will present you with questions that you can’t answer.


Some More Secrets

Every day you will feel flooded by challenges and internal conflicts. Even if you had the opportunity to talk to a supervisor about all of them, you will still have unanswered questions. Somehow, some way, you are going to have to learn to live with the complexity and ambiguity of what you do.


Last Secret

• Counselors are not just trained or educated; they are grown. You must remain committed to your own growth and development. This does not mean simply taking more classes or going to continuing education workshops. It means seeking help for yourself when you need it. Most of all, it means practicing in your own life what you ask of your clients.


Musashi’s Practical Advice

• Do not think dishonestly. • The Way is in training. • Become acquainted with every art. • Know the Ways of all professions. • Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly

matters.


Musashi’s Practical Advice

• Develop intuitive judgment and understanding for everything.

• Perceive those things which cannot be seen. • Pay attention to trifles. • Do nothing which is of no use.


Be Humble

• In a supervision conference, one counselor lamented her frustrations and confusions about a particular case in which she felt lost, inept, and discouraged. “How, after all,” she pleaded, “can I work with this client when I have no idea what is going on?” The supervisor softly responded in a voice that rose above the chatter of advice directed at the counselor.

• “Don’t worry when you don’t know what you’re doing,” he said. “Worry when you think you do.”


Questions To Ponder

• What are some of your most perplexing questions about counseling that you would like to be able to answer before you graduate?

• What ethical dilemmas might be most difficult for you?

• How are you bias?• What strengths do you have as a counselor?• How has your idea of counseling changed from

the beginning of your professional journey-and now that you read the text?


Final Note

• Your commitment to the counseling profession is not to be taken lightly, nor can you realistically expect to treat your career as a mere job in which you just put in your time. Counselors are passionately committed to helping their clients to become more productive, fully functioning beings.


Education

Chapter 15 - Toward Closure: Advice for the Passionately Committed Counseling Student