Confessions of a Therapist-In-Training

The end of August marked the beginning of a nearly year-long adventure in counseling at a local campus wellness center. So far, so good - I LOVE this work! I am working under the supervision of a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) and am counseling with students who are coming in with a wide variety of presenting issues, from grief to relationship troubles to anxiety and/or depression to low self esteem.

I have been pondering the fact that many people come to counseling expecting the counselor to know what to do, or to tell him/her what to do, to FIX it. I knew this, coming into the internship, and have even experienced it myself, kind of expecting to be directed in a counseling session to do something or try something or talk about something specific … and I have recognized on a personal level that my counselor's direction isn’t always what’s most needed or most appropriate to help me grow. However, I didn’t anticipate how easy it would be, from a counselor's vantage point, to go right along with the client and feel pressure to provide solutions. I know, intellectually, that I want the client to reach their own solutions, that I don’t want to be the “expert advice-giver,” that I don’t want to tell them what to do. In practice though, it’s hard to avoid falling into that trap! If I am given that much power by a client, it’s very difficult not to take it and run with it.

My supervisor proposed the image of a road trip … where the client is the driver and the therapist is, to some degree, the navigator. We may suggest directions to go, and some clients may need more encouragement or direction than others, but ultimately those decisions are left up to them.

Right now there is a big emphasis, in many helping professions, on deferring to the client as the expert on his or her own life. No matter how much I know or experience, I will never understand exactly what my client is going through from their perspective ... and acknowledging that with humility in the counseling room can be a huge piece of what it takes to develop a meaningful therapeutic relationship.

Having said this, I have also found myself caught in a bit of a quandary over where counseling as a profession really enters the picture. Obviously there are many different reasons, approaches, and responses to counseling. I find myself wondering if traditional counseling (I’m not sure I’m even clear what I mean by that, but for lack of a better description) isn’t one of the most conservative (and least postmodernistic) fields there is. For example, when there is such an emphasis on being strengths-based, we are making a value judgment just by designating various abilities or aptitudes as strengths ... and thus implying that their opposite or lack would equal weakness. When meeting with a client who is depressed, we can suggest with reasonable certainty that there are things that WILL (nearly 100% of the time) help, such as exercise, a healthy sleep schedule, and healthy food choices. Here there is not so much of the postmodern “create your own reality - go your own way and make whatever you want to have happen, happen” attitude but rather a feeling of “it is almost certain that these things will help you … how can I help you resolve your concerns about them so that you can see that too?”

What do you think?