Becoming a Reflective Practitioner

Becoming a Reflective Practitioner

• Reflection enables helpers to recognize their emotional reactions, personal biases, and past experiences that could affect their practice
• Self-examination helps to differentiate personal feelings from professional judgment and enhances empathy
• Reflective practice can be developed through;
  • Supervision (reviewing cases with mentors)
  • Peer support (discussing with fellow learners)
  • Personal therapy (experiencing therapy to enhance self-awareness)
  • Journaling (recording thoughts to facilitate skill growth)

What Is Helping?

• Psychological helping addresses emotional and mental challenges
• Interviewing is used in counseling, research, and assessments
• Counseling and psychotherapy encompass professional relationships aimed at fostering change
• Coaching is focused on personal development to achieve goals

Challenges in Learning the Art of Helping

• Perry's Model of Development in helping includes:
  • Dualistic stage: Thinking in right/wrong terms, seeking clear answers
  • Multiplistic stage: Recognizing multiple perspectives
  • Relativistic stage: Understanding context shapes decision-making

Who Can Be an Effective Helper?

• Essential traits include a positive view of people, emotional stability, self-care, intellectual curiosity, and courage

The Nuts and Bolts of Helping

• Core skills (active listening, reflecting, paraphrasing) and therapeutic techniques (empathy, rapport, questioning) ensure effective interventions and client outcomes

Stages of the Helping Process: A Road Map

• Establishing the relationship, assessing the problem, setting goals, intervention and implementation, and evaluation and termination are key stages

The Importance of the Therapeutic Relationship in Creating Change

• The therapeutic relationship’s quality is the strongest predictor of client success, often outweighing specific techniques

How Can a Helper Create a Therapeutic Relationship?

• Enhancers in therapy include presence (fully engaged), empathy (understanding and sharing client feelings), and self-disclosure (sharing appropriate personal experiences)

Other Factors that Help or Strain the Therapeutic Relationship

• Distractions like noise or interruptions can weaken rapport
• Soundproofing, white noise machines, and ensuring a comfortable setting may minimize distractions

Transference and Countertransference

• Transference is when clients project past emotions onto the helper
• Countertransference is when helpers emotionally react to clients in a way that disrupts objectivity

Differences Make a Difference

• Cultural background impacts the helping relationship with client values, beliefs, and social stressors, which can influence trust, engagement, and overall treatment effectiveness

What is Culture, and What Should We Do About It?

• Understanding acculturation is important because clients adhere to their cultural heritage in varying degrees, influencing their values and therapy expectations

Culturally Adapting Treatment

• Modify established interventions to align with cultural beliefs, engaging in culturally appropriate communication, and regularly checking in with clients

Skills for Helping Someone Who Is Culturally Different

• Broaching addresses cultural differences openly in therapy, fostering trust and transparency

Listening to the Client's Story

• Active listening helps clients feel heard and validated while allowing the helper to fully understand the client's experiences before offering guidance

Nonverbal Communication Between Helper and Client

• Eye contact, body position, attentive silence, warm tone, and appropriate facial expressions are key

Opening Skills

• Open questions invite broad responses (e.g., "Can you tell me about that?")
• Closed questions seek specific facts (e.g., "Did that happen recently?")

Reasons for Reflecting

• Reflecting communicates empathy, provides feedback, encourages exploration, and uncovers hidden emotions

Reflecting Content, Feelings, and Meaning

• A client's message has content (factual information), feelings (emotions tied to experiences), and meaning (personal significance)

The Skills of Paraphrasing

• Reciting facts without summarizing meaningfully, being distracted, being judgmental, and turning paraphrases into questions are mistakes

• Effective paraphrasing builds trust, encourages deeper exploration, and ensures the helper accurately understands the client's experience

Week 1: Introduction to Helping

• Main goal of counseling and psychotherapy - aId clients in changing thoughts, feelings, and behaviors
• Interviewing focuses on assessment and diagnosis
• Counseling uses techniques to persuade/encourage clients
• Coaching supports goal attainment without regulation
• Stages of developmental trajectory to Therapy: Naivette, Novice, Initiate, Apprentice, Journeyman, Expert, Master
• Perry's Model: Dualistic, Multiplistic, Relativistic stages
• Ethical Guidelines: Confidentiality, duty to report harm, non-judgment, feedback, appropriate techniques, competence
• SUDS Scale measures distress levels from 0 (no distress) to 10 (extreme distress)
• Helper Qualities: Humility, Compassion, Critical Thinking
• Therapeutic Factors: Strong relationship, motivation, self-efficacy, emotional expression, practice opportunities
• Therapeutic Building Blocks: Invitational, reflecting, advanced reflecting, challenging, and goal-setting skills
• An example of good opening question in therapy: "What brings you in today?"

Week 2: Social and Cultural Dimensions of Therapy

• Psychological safety is the assurance members are not punished/humiliated for speaking up
• Emotional safety refers to the belief one should not experience nor be triggered by negative emotions
• Therapists address bias by questioning assumptions and considering alternative perspectives
• Culture comprises learned behaviors, values, beliefs, & customs shaping an individual's reality
• Dimensions of diversity consist of personality, education, income, religion, ethnicity, sexual identity, and geographic location
• Cultural safety stages: awareness, sensitivity, competence, and safety
• Value imposition occurs when a counselor tries to define a client's values; it violates ethical practice
• Racialized groups underutilize psychotherapy due to cultural stress, lack of culturally competent care, and historical distrust
• Acculturation is adapting to a dominant culture, influencing therapy outcomes
• Western psychotherapy structures may not suit diverse populations due to cultural differences in expressing distress and seeking support

Week 3: The Therapeutic Relationship

• Key stages in the helping process: Relationship Building → Assessment → Goal Setting → Intervention → Evaluation
• A therapeutic relationship focuses on resolving issues, confidentiality, and no overlap with personal life
• Therapeutic alliance is a collaborative, trusting relationship between therapist and client
• Key alliance tasks: Safe haven (empathic responsiveness) and secure base (support for client growth)
• Roadblocks to communication include giving advice, moralizing, interrogating, judging, or distracting the client
• Transference is when a client redirects past feelings onto the therapist

Week 4: Listening & Non-Verbal Skills

• Objective countertransference is client-induced
• Subjective countertransference is based on the therapist's past
• Therapeutic building blocks: invitational, reflecting, challenging, and goal-setting skills
• Self-disclosure helps clients untangle experiences/gain clarity and connection
• Active listening means attending to and encouraging clients without interfering. SOLER (Sit straight, Open posture, Lean in, Eye contact, Relaxed posture) promotes engagement.
• Silence allows both therapist and client reflection and processing
• Excessive questioning may overwhelm the client/disrupt the conversation's natural flow.
• Minimal encouragers: Brief statements like "I see"/"Right" show attentiveness.
• Ethical concerns of physical touch in therapy: intimacy/fulfilling the therapist's emotional needs
• Common errors in asking questions: jargon, leading questions, excessive questions and using "why" questions.
• Cognitive empathy means understanding one's perspective.
• Paraphrasing means summarizing the client's key message in their own words
• When reflecting on client's feelings, prioritize the emotional tone
• Avoid changing their statement's meaning when paraphrasing
• Non-verbal listening skills: nodding, eye contact, leaning forward
• Empathy defined by Carl Rogers involves entering another's world without prejudice and deeply hearing their experiences.
• Components for Effective Therapeutic Presence -Intentional listening, attention, and involvement
• Change involves verbal skills, empathy, trust, communication, and persuasion
• Therapist responds by validating the client's experiences/open discussion about spirituality, cultural sensitivity/building trust
• Acknowledge emotions & explore non judgementally
• Build rapport/Foster trust while maintaining therapeutic boundaries
• Effective strategies involve empathy, non-judgement, active listening, consistency and goal-setting
• Non-verbal communication creates empathy and trust

Explore the development of reflective practice through supervision, peer support, therapy, and journaling. Understand the nature of psychological helping, interviewing techniques, counseling, psychotherapy, and coaching. Discover Perry's Model of Development and the challenges that arise while learning the art of helping.