Humanist approaches to Education Post 3

Ideas and  Reflections: Introduction to Counselling 3

The main points that have had impact on me from my third counselling session :

As per each weekend session, beginning the day with a meditation exercise sets a great learning mood for me. I still prefer the ‘leaves in a stream’ mediation and have now taken to putting each thought on over-sized rain drop. The rain sounds I have always enjoyed for the white-noise, so it is natural progression to go from this soothing sound to incorporating it in a meditative practice. I have several downloaded Youtube videos of rain without music that I use, but there is a site that is also very good: https://rain.simplynoise.com/ . I will practice this daily to set an example for my kids. Hopefully they will join me. I have also started the CBT prescribed lessons for angering as outlined in the Thoughts and Feelings book. This course has set me on a path of self-discovery and correction that I have been seeking but never able to quite focus in on. I was going to take the the MBSR sessions at Brandon University but I figured my two daughters had a direr need. The first session they were railing against the wholes situation in txt. When Angela and I ignored these invectives, they stopped. Once they arrived home at 10 they both admitted that this process could be healing and restorative if they give it a chance. This was a great relief to me.

The biggest learning experience I had this weekend is where I learned not to be complacent about my helping skills, during our practice sessions for goal-setting. I believe that I was not prepared mentally as there was a sort of disconnect from the previous sessions. I imitated to my session partner ( Cindy S), that I felt I would have done better the skills practice, had I had the momentum from the last weekends’ sessions. Also it may have been the familiarity with the person who played the client, which lead me to rush through the first stages of counselling to get to the main goal-setting section, which I felt was the main objective of the days role-playing session.  Even though I knew we had 20 -30 minutes, my main focus was to get to the practice in the goal-setting stage of helping a client. Coupled this with the fact that I was studying activity scheduling, the first stage of cognitive behavioural therapy for depression in the Thoughts and Feeling book, and that I had a client who was depressing, I immediately started into a long-winded, advice laden pontification on the benefits of this method to help the client get mobilized. I didn’t let the client prioritize her problems or help her construct a mutually agreed upon plan since I did not follow the prescribed ‘boiling down the problem’ script. These factors were a major stumbling blocks to being an effective listener that day. Perhaps, for me anyway, if I had gotten to do a section of goal-setting right after what we practiced in the session 2 weekend, I might have not flubbed so badly. The situation was like I was on a train that was derailing and I couldn’t get off; so I continued along in a self-conscious, rambling, manner until both Cindy and I started to debrief in order for me to save face. Thankfully the Prof was quite supportive, knowing that we are all on a continuum of learning to be better helpers.

I found it interesting that we were told that using formal diagnostics tools from the DSM was acceptable to get at the root of a problem. After a cogent explanation of their effective uses and possibilities for misuse I believe they can act as yet another tool in a helper’s arsenal of tools. It make sense to use them when appropriate to an individual case to augment counselling work and expedite diagnoses so as to help the client get to their self-helping plan more quickly.

The discussions around Reality Therapy and the WDEP method really resonated with me. I fully believe it is this combination of cognitive behavior, reality, and mindfulness therapy that, used in the right manner and correct proportions, can help everyone be much better human ‘beings’. The demonstration by Dr. Brown and a client of the WDEP model in class time was excellent because it had immediacy, and provided a less contrived, more genuine feel to a counselling setting than the videos.  The ability for him to stop periodically to add timely clarifying comments, and to make sure we caught important details, I thought was immensely effective. I found myself wishing I could have recorded it and re-watched or shared with others.

Student presentations comprised a lot of this weekend and were mostly done very well. It is a great way to cover a lot of material from the book but can tend to become more of lecture than practice because of the presentation format. I believe if had to read each one of the presentations and chapters for content beforehand and then have a 30 minute in-class working session to practice the skills, it would increase the impact and acquisition of the skill. Had we had to create a lesson around the skill that all class members would have to participate in for the whole day, it could have the impact similar to the counselling session. I’m not sure what format this process would take because the major flaw in this approach is having a number of creative and inventive clients. Also a lot of the value for me was lost due to my deflation over having used chapter 13, Activity Scheduling from the third edition of the book rather than what I was supposed to have covered, brief exposure.  I was also coming down with a cold and my zombie-like feelings ruined the enthusiasm I had in previous sessions. 

The political aspects of the use of counselors in school is a huge stumbling block to being an effective helper. There are a number of persons in guidance/counselling positions at BSD schools who are ineffective and there are no mechanisms to make sure they are keeping up their skills or have a mentor for continual reflection during daily practices. Add to this that some have no credentials at all and were placed in the position years ago and it becomes evident why senior administration does not want the guidance counselors actually doing in-session type work, even though Masters candidate now currently get more courses than either psychology nurses or social workers. The push for social workers in schools may have liability issues around parent buy-in, but as I mentioned to my classmates, it is a measure that some principals are employing to get ineffective non-participative guidance counselors out of their inner circle. It is a hobbling factor if part of your team is not working and if they have no relationship with kids or they choose not to counsel, then the onus falls to the principal and vice principal. The fact that senior administration does not value guidance counselors may be because they see them as supplemental and their experiences with them, when they were principals in school, may color their impression.  I believe education of senior and school administration needs to take place around what counselor can do for students now. Also, corrective measures need to be taken to remove those who are not qualified or not doing their jobs effectively in order to help all students from K – 12 in the BSD. This however would mean there has to be timely and accurate assessments for growth and reflective practices. This has not been my experience to date. I believe it will be a very tall order to achieve, given the inertia to the status quo that  I have experienced. Change and accountability are what is needed and they are in short order  due to a lack of true leadership at many levels.

Humanist approaches to Education Post 2

Ideas and  Reflections: Introduction to Counselling 2

The main points that have had impact on me from my second counselling session :

The counselling exercises this weekend I found very helpful because we revisited our nonverbal, opening and invitational skills. I was surprised that they had not vanished from my skill set, even though I had not been pouring over the content in the text. I therefore surmise I have internalized some of what I have practiced. The reasons this is revelatory to me is that I believe that, to date, my learning experiences have been mostly audio visual in nature, employing a mostly psychological splitting mode where I do not interact with others well and mainly see them as uninformed or not willing to learn. I know now that everyone is on a path that is different from me. I have also learned that I can learn and experience differently in a collaborative practical and hand-on manner while still using my intellect to guide me. I have been always seeking knowledge that is more intellectual in the absence of knowledge about my relationships and myself. Now that I have experience mindfulness, I realize what I have been missing and know I need to take a dramatically different approach to my relationships building and learning in the future. This I wish to share with both my daughters: Olivia who has Crohn’s disease which has brought on depression which has been around for well over a year; and Julia who is dealing with anxiety which is causing her spiral into depression an exhaustion. Julia is not listening to what her body is telling her so I will recommend further to her counsellors’ behest, the mindfulness techniques I have learned. Olivia and I will take the mindfulness-based stress reduction course; me supporting her so that she can get help since she tends not to follow anything her mother or I suggest.

The sessions also helped to dispel the notions I had about myself being less than empathetic in most of my dealings with people. I do however question what my performance using these skills would be like in a less clinical setting.

I have been practicing calming, mindfulness techniques and telling my wife and kids about how transformative, the information and practices have been. This home practice us keeping me grounded enough so that situational triggers which used to anger me have a lot less effect. This is especially true while driving on the streets of Brandon where I usually am infuriated daily.

Non-judgemental listening and acceptance of others differences figure largely in my new direction since practicing these counselling skills this weekend! Congruence has been sorely lacking in my outlook of ‘the other’ even though I purport to be accepting do to my experience with the down-trodden and marginalized, as I had spent all my career previous to Brandon School Division on Aboriginal reserves. I was not walking-the-talk as it were.

I have also curtailed my reading Common Dreams (http://www.commondreams.org/  ), TruthDig  ( http://www.truthdig.com/  ), and Democracy Now ( http://www.democracynow.org/  ) and books that I have by Chris Hedges, Henry Giroux, Naomi Klein and others who speak truth to power against the neoliberal elite world we live in. The reason is I feel I need a better worldview; one that does not give me a mood that will cause me to brood over the state of the world, which then triggers a sense of being emasculated and without agency to the oppressive forces at play in the world, and which affects my every relationship. These counselling sessions have reinforced and solidified within me the ‘circle of control /circle of concern’ guiding principle, which I always believed but never practiced.

Recordings was a great idea. It helped me have something more permanent to refer back to instead of using my dubious memory. It is more factual and has the anxiety of the performance removed so it can be examined more clinically. I think that maybe a professional actor, who could challenge in our counselling role to make sure we are guided towards getting thing wrong and then correcting the errors. Learning from failures is quite powerful and I believe may mirror real-life situations more aptly.

I found I was waiting for the moment to pounce on the client in the challenging scenario. I was expecting it. The unexpected is and being put on the spot so we err in our practice I think would be beneficial too. This I got from a client who role-played having a still-borne baby from a relationship from a married man. I had to suppress my shock and remain calm without becoming zombie-like in the face of this extremely challenging narrative. Most men would have great difficulty empathizing in this situation I believe. I am thankful that she did drop this bombshell on me because I had to think and feel my way through it, not just react. This helped me immeasurably.

Pithy phrases I like since they can elicit a create a discourse around the meaning and volume of knowledge hidden behind them. I refer to ‘thoughts are not facts’ and ‘wisdom without thinking’ aphorisms in The Mindful Way Through Depression text. I think that they are a sort of mantra you can keep for yourself that can trigger awareness too, once the skills of mindfulness have been practiced and internalized. During our ‘Thoughts in a Stream’, exercise, as I let all thoughts set on a leaf and drift downstream, these phrases kept coming back to me. I put them on a leaf and let them float away as well. They did help me refocus however.

Humanist approaches to Education Post 1

The Introduction to Counselling course I found to be very different because is was not just an intellect and textually-based thinking and writing course. It provided extremely valuable, hands-on experiential session in Cognitive Behavioral Theory methods, Choice Theory, Mindfulness techniques, and reality and acceptance therapies as well as the theory for the latest advances in neuroscience which augment these counselling initiatives.I would highly recommend it to all teachers since they are counselors to all students , friends and colleagues, and will learn valeable skills to help themselves through self-reflection and learning to let things be.