Selfe refelaction paper - Essay Example

Based on the discussions undertaken in this course, students learned that child counseling is a way of giving children the kind of assistance they need to develop in a holistic and healthy approach. It provides them guidance in properly adapting to the various life circumstances. It allows them to grow properly within a complex environment. Child counseling is no easy task because it certainly needs a special kind of knowledge and skill in attending to the needs of the kids, entering their delicate world, and connecting to them.

It has been learned as well that as a child counselor, it is vital that the counselor recognizes and understands the importance of the children, and respects this importance to further comprehend the child situation of every child. The very nature of counseling—providing guidance and advices for future decision making process—makes it usually confused with psychotherapy, but counseling and psychotherapy are actually different. Psychotherapy pertains to a wider range of providing treatment and is usually concerned in emotional issues and complexities.

As the name implies, psychotherapy involves psychological methods of ascertaining the root cause of the problem and deeper understanding of the child’s emotional problems (Henderson & Thompson, 2010). Counseling, on the other hand, is the more specialized kind of treatment and assistance as it centers on a more specific circumstances. Counseling is sometimes provided as an additional assistance to patients who undergo the psychotherapy process. Unlike the psychotherapy process, counseling focuses more on the behavior pattern of the patient and is usually a short treatment.

Psychotherapy, on the contrary, is a longer treatment with the client. Counseling can help children in many ways, especially in treating impacts of any abuse in the past. Through proper counseling, the sufferings of the children who have had endured an abuse—emotional, physical, sexual—in the past can be healed. The point of counseling is definitely not to remove all the sufferings of a child, but to help that child understand and accept his or her sufferings. It is quite not possible to remove all the sufferings of a child because suffering itself is deeply rooted in a child’s system that it has already become part of the child’s life.

The various circumstances that make a child suffer would always be part of his or her past and the child’s definition of who he or she really is. If counseling means removing all the sufferings, then it is like removing those parts of a child’s life that define him or her further. Hence, the pain remains in the suffering child while the suffering child is becoming a stranger to him or herself. Real counseling must not aim to remove these sufferings. Instead, real counseling must help suffering people to become aware and sensitive of their miseries to learn their own stories and rediscover themselves.

In this course, the students learned that it is very essential for a counselor to have a compassionate heart to listen to the stories of the patient. Listening is very important in the process of healing because it is not only the counselor who learns about the sufferings of people, but people themselves learn about their very own sufferings that eventually helps them understand their circumstances and accepts their present, and only then, I can effectively suggest directions to go. This course also assisted in realizing that the concept of defense