Learning Journal 22

I didn’t make this week’s college session as I had my annual dose of severe cold/flu. In my absence I was left to ponder what on earth to write about. I had to cancel the 2 clients I had booked at Chy and I had to cancel the supervision session I had booked. This was really disappointing. Further, throughout the working days spent off sick, I had to daily make a call to my line manager to tell her I would not be in. This was a tricky part. I had to make that call. Face the music. Call in sick and justify why I could not do my job that day, and every day I had to do it.

When I'm physically not able to go into work its an easy call to make. When I know deep in my heart of hearts that its not happening then I have no problem making that call. Its the grey area afterwards. The days when health is returning and my battle with the annual virus is over the worst bit, that’s when I find it a struggle. Then the call feels awkward, like I have a choice and I'm asking to take the time off. Why should such a normal and necessary thing have to be so hard?

I feel that its due to a lack of assertiveness on my part that I feel this way. The other person, my line manager is not making me feel awkward, or at least not deliberately, its me doing that. However I do have an awful feeling when I'm calling in sick. There could be lots of reasons for this.

Firstly I know I'm letting them down. Others may have to have to compensate when I call in sick by doing the groups or seeing clients that I had arranged to see. There's that obvious and fair sense of imposition on others perhaps.

Secondly When I call in sick I imagine to myself that it doesn’t sound truthful. I imagine what I'm saying isn’t actually honest, even though it is. This is my interpretation perhaps on what the other person is hearing when they listen to me say that I cannot come to work.

Is it fair though? Colleagues are just as likely to get sick and I know that I have the same duty to pick up the slack. I happen to think that I must be quite a mistrustful person myself to be saying that I'm ill and cant work to someone but suspect that I am sounding like a dishonest person. The reason I'm exploring this is obviously with one eye on how I relate to my clients, as how I relate to others and my clients is what I want to develop and become more mindful of.

Being aware that I'm not always honest definitely has an effect on how I listen to clients. I often assume that they are not telling the trust also. How awful this must be. This could be awful if they are telling me about suicidal ideation or perhaps sharing something intimate like historical abuse. What then? Is there the very same voice in my head that will be questioning the intimacy of what they are saying because it sounds too clichéd? Too much? Too not them? Too unbelievable?

Are there certain situations when I find people more believable? Are there people that I tend to believe more? This could be equally bad as I could get sucked into the story of someone that is more likeable, more interesting and getting more of my attention.

There are people that I like more than others, believe more that others and people that I would perhaps not be able to hold in a truly person centred way because of this. If not liking someone affects how you can offer him or her support or not, then equally so much liking someone. This is a relationship difficulty that could impact my counselling work. I see this as very important to me and there’s some work to do here. I cannot be a counsellor who needs to be liked by clients. That would interfere with the congruence, the honesty and the realness of my response. Its all too easy to work out they clients that you do not want to support, but what about the clients that you want to support too much? How is this a helpful and supportive environment?

To work with this I suppose is to be more honest and true to myself and not have those wishes to be liked or valued and to increase my internal locus to feel confident and comfortable in my own judgements. This will I know come more with time and reflection and through constant supervision or self-reflection. If I could walk away from a session and know that I hadn’t done anything in it to be liked or to go beyond saying things that were in the clients best interests, then I feel that that would be maturity and growth in me as a person, not just as a counsellor.

Another relationship difficulty I can notice in me is an inherent sense of fairness around boundaries. This is an area of my life in general which bothers me. I see others and their boundaries and have noticed that I have a habit or default position of not holding them. At work my professional boundaries can get pushed a lot as I will accept doing duty or covering a group when someone goes sick. This seems to fall unevenly on me and I’ve noticed that my line manager will come to me first in many circumstances. The results are that it leaves a sense of frustration and unfairness. This creates strong relationship tensions between me and other workers as I develop a sense of unjustness. However in looking onto why I allow these situations to evolve in the first place might help me to avoid rather than have to handle consequences.

As I look at other colleagues and watch the others that do hold boundaries and the ones that don’t I am struck by something in my team. There is hardly anyone that does it well. Even the ones that do hold boundaries rarely impress me with their grace when they do. It comes off very clumsy and quite defensive or there are a few who will hold boundaries and say no to additional work, and there are a few of us who generally accept it more often than others. Firstly why do we accept the additional and begrudging burden? Is this because we harbour an initial fear of the consequences of saying no? I can be a bit of a people pleaser and just say yes to things my boss asks me to do. This could carry into the counselling relationship if I am not careful. Would I allow the client to arrive late, not pay the fee or cancel at a moments notice? Do I carry such an external locus of evaluation or is there an intrinsic need in me to be liked? I suspect there most definitely is a need in me for this. Yet knowing all I know about the importance of honesty in the counselling relationship and knowing full well that Rogers is clear that it’s the single most important thing in such a relationship, what could I possibly stand to gain from allowing boundaries to be pushed in the counselling relationship? Does my need to be liked or to not offend ride roughshod over what I know to be the right way to do things, to hold boundaries?

Working in the drug and alcohol field is a wonderful place for me to begin to learn about putting boundaries in place. My clients will push and push them. I had a client bring his partner into the session this week. I stated that on this, the first encounter I would accept it but not for future sessions. This didn’t feel great however there were some benefits. The client has a record of domestic violence towards the partner who is from this appearance, the dominant one in the relationship. I got to meet the two of them together so my strategy for allowing a boundary to be pushed as a one off can be workable. It shows some humanity and that I can adapt, however by allowing this it also sets a dangerous precedent as it shows that now from 100% of their experience of me, they can use the service however they like. That’s why I needed to state that in future sessions I would not allow this.