Year 2 week 3

This week was about the therapeutic contract and I was very sorry to miss it. Its something I’m dreading in the exam. Its something I know that I include but struggle to quantify and never am able to repeat. That’s why I wanted to be there.

The therapeutic contract is the part of the agreement between counsellor and client that covers how they will actually work together. How the counsellor can be supportive to the client and what it is that the client actually wants to achieve. It is important for many reasons but partly because it empowers the client as they can be part of forming the process that they are about to engage it. They can help to shape what it is they are part of.

Being person centred, it is very much an expression of our embodiment of this core condition to bring a therapeutic contract into to how we will work with clients. To engage them in the process to formulate the relationship is key, this is where the relationship really begins I suppose. There are of course formalities and these need to be delivered prior to the relationship going any further as the client has the right to know what to expect and indeed the counsellor has a duty to be clear about what they expect too. Times, prices, timeliness, confidentiality with a disclaimer, cancelation policy and not arriving intoxicated for example are all very important boundaries and rules that necessarily surround the counselling experience. There are of course basic and practical reasons to have clear prices, expectations and a fair and consistent cancellation policy for example, but further, this ties into the ethical treatment of clients, such as their autonomy and justice. All clients need to feel that they are making an informed choice about what it is they are getting into. Also a clear standard cancellation and price policy treats all clients fairly and justly. That sort of clarity is good in terms of my boundaries I feel, as what would be a pattern for me would be to bend a price or extend a time, and then develop resentments at a later date. But this would likely affect the counselling service I provided and so absolutely must be avoided. Anyway, following that there is the actual working relationship, the level of connection, the expectations of the client and the ability of the counsellor to meet perceived needs, that all should be clearly spoken about as best possible, given that the clients needs may well be fluid and changing.

As a counsellor in training I wish all my clients to be open and honest and to take the process seriously. However the person sat opposite me may not be in the best place to trust me yet, if ever. What I am confident about is the power of the relationship in person centred counselling and so at all times, it is that which is important and necessary. That involves treating the client with respect and understanding. So how can I go about doing that in those initial stages of contracting?

For me it’s about openness. I would want to state openly that I have a person centred training and try my best to unpack that for the client. By letting them know what it is I feel is needed from my perspective, accepting of the client, being non-judgemental and treating them with positive regard creates a potential environment for them to feel they can trust me. Is that what they would like?

Letting the person know my level of training and my role and seeing how that fits with what they are expecting is important too and seeing if that is what they were expecting. All I can do is be open about that.

When I’m working with drug and alcohol clients, there is something akin to a therapeutic contract in so much as I work with their goals. I often draw a conceptualisation or node link map of whats going on for them, and we can draw together what is and what could be and in between is the work we can do. In this respect its probably the nearest to a therapeutic contract in my actual job.

Now I’ve had a chance to look through some guidelines on contracting, I’m pleased to find I was not so far of the mark. Finding out what the client wants to achieve is a very importsant part of the therapeutic contracting. Finding out what they want to work on gives us both a chance to know something very important. It may be that I am not trained to work on say issues around bereavement or perhaps feel that a certain mental health issue is beyond the support that I can offer safely. That is very important to know in advance.

For the client, to have shared their expectations or goals is very important. They may be happy with just talking and being heard each session. Or maybe they have a clear goal in mind that by the end of the sessions they would like to feel more able to know what to do about a certain life issue. Hearing them say this and gaining full understand about what it is the client would like is crucial, as this may well need to be unpacked together as the expectation may be unrealistic, such as ‘I would like to know whether or not top stay with my husband’. Well that may well be something the person feels able to know or not, but it is not necessarily going to be a product of counselling, as this can only offer a safe and non-judgemental place to be heard, and hopefully to make sense of their own thoughts.

I start my new placement this week. I’m not nervous at all. I’m excited to be doing something new. I like a challenge. It will be really good for me. Bring it on!

Year 2 wk 2

Well this is easy. Reflecting on roles on that impact my life, that I carry around and could impact my client work.

Out of a selection given to us I chose the JUDGE, the PASSENGER, the WORKAHOLIC, the HUSBAND, FATHER and SON. I added CYNIC.

Being a judge is privately something I feel we all are. It’s a natural or should I say perfectly forgivable reactive behaviour to me. Its surely not possible to be always accepting as we move through life dealing with our own exchanges, negotiations and contracts, so then we judge others.

When I judge someone I am making an assessment based on what information I have that they have behaved or acted in a way that is somehow gradable, measurable, knowable, and this affects a response.  It could be good or bad. In counselling and likely in life, either are to be watched. Assessing someone’s behaviour as positive could be damaging to the relationship you are trying to build with another, as it could become something he or she and even you then need to maintain it going forward. Judging someone negatively is perhaps easier to understand as being undesirable as this could make the client doubt themselves, dislike themselves, change behaviours to fit in with another (have an external locus) and make them feel less than worthwhile, or defensive, or both.

Its not something that is natural to me, being non-judgemental. I feel its often like a switch I put on. Sometimes it feels like I have to flick it on when I’m going into a session or being with other people. – There’s a confession.

A wiser than me co-worker once noted that I could carry round a picture of Rogers in the car, like a little Buddha to remind me to be person centred at all times. Its not a bad idea but like smoking pictures on fag packets, I would get warning fatigue and ignore the Rogerian Buddha I think.

I had a go at stating what being non-judgemental actually meant to me, in my words.

·      Being ok with who they are

·      Not feeling negative about anything they describe or tell me about

·      They are who they are and that’s ok

·      I don’t know there person opposite me, I do not know their story their highs and their lows, so it would be a mistake to make any assumptions that I can attach a agreement or disagreement with

·      Not swinging between positive and negative but being even, flat and neutral

·      Not praising

·      Not criticising

How would this affect me in client space? Well clearly I wouldn’t want to be any of the things I have mentioned there with a client. To praise or criticise would be detrimental for the client. I recognise in me that there is someone who is very judgemental and I notice it from a positive and a negative side. I strongly believe that growing up in a household with both parents who were extremely focussed on judgements as a way of motivating me and my sister, had a lasting impact. So from that place being judgmental is kinda part of me, it’s a constant inner voice. I suspect its an inner external locus of evaluation as its others views that I hold in side me that make me judge.
To be with a clinet and be a better, more rounded and less externally orientated person I feel is to listen to my inner voices, catch them happening, and challenge them. To be only guided by what the client is experiencing. I know this takes practice and reflection and actively exploring what I have heard.

The passenger is a part of me that sits back and lets life just happen. I’m in two minds as to whether this is a bad thing all the time, as sometimes its ok I think to just let things sort them selves out, but other times I think its necessary to be involved and to make a difference.

I may be verging on the workaholic at times. I know this to mean that I spend not enough time with my wife and children as I’m unhappy about thie balance. Yet at the same time it is me that makes that rolling decision to be catching up, doing a little bit more or being on another course. Its part of me to want to be better, tyo actualise, to grow and expand. But why? What am I achieving by all the work and study?
I strongly suspect that I am motivated by a desire to not be lazy, to not be seen as underachieving and this comes from within. The externalised voice of judgment that is internalised within is a strong motivator for me.

If I’m sat opposite a client and they are not trying to better themselves, how could I be with that? It would on some level jar a bit as I hold this belief that life is some kind of upward growth journey – a process by which ‘we become the person we were always supposed to be’ (Bowie). But maybe that is because my formative years were so disappointing to myself, that I am now governed by some desire to make up for lost time, to counter-balance and to make amends. Can I challenge this core belief? Will I be ok if a client doesn’t share it? What I do fear is that I wont be open to another person not sharing the same belief that I do. Would I be ok with them having completely different conditions of worth as these seem to be to me? What would that mean? Would it invalidate my goals and work? Also when exploring another persons reality, would it be understandable to me if it didn’t fit my own schemas? That would be a serious issue I think. Not that I didn’t understand them, but that I was trying to understand them at all. The point about being able to work with another surely is that they are different to you, and that has to be ok.

Husband father and son are all fairly self-explanatory. Everyone is someone’s child and I feel that is often good to remind myself of. They were innocent once, running around in nappies or having their first kiss. Sometimes that reminded of our shared beginnings is all it takes for me to recognise what I have in common with others.

The cynic is a part of me that I have a mixed relationship with. Sometimes it can be valuable to entertain myself with cynicism and humour. I like that I can off-load some of my stresses that way. However all too often it is my way of coping with being overloaded or stressed. When my needs are not being met I can become critical and cynical.

I recognise that this has been part of me since perhaps the days of watching Blackadder in school when I was an impressionable teenager. The humour seemed to work by making others laugh in school and so I had a reward circuit being created and so the cynic was born.

In school however no one likes a cynic really I don’t think now looking back. I feel it pushed others away and perhaps still does. I recognise that then I needed to be liked and needed some form of feedback loop to give me a sense of people liking something I did, but also that I was deeply unsatisfied with my lot.

Cynicism is like a form of non-specific criticism and if someone can be cynical about anything, it means that they could be cynical or critical about them, and so I feel it pushes people away. I used it a lot in school because I was very unhappy at not being terribly important, at not being very anything at all. This perceived pointlessness fuelled my dissatisfaction with life from an early age I think. I recognise now that it is still very much part of me. I cannot feel futile or pointless and like I am not going somewhere. I suspect that during this time my ability to self-actualise was very much on hold, stifled and out of my control. In my school days I couldn’t see a path to happiness, and was also mired in a sense of not having any control over things. There can be no worse feeling than that of despair and having no control over ones destiny.