My Experience at a Counseling Session - Essay Example

My Experience at a Counseling Session Introduction I am a mother of two girls of 5 and 6 years old. And honestly it is not easy to deal with them. Part of me understands them, their age and all that comes with it. They are wonderful girls. But it’s when they fight and start screaming that my anger starts to boil. Besides that my younger girl has taken to challenging me. She won’t do what I tell her to do and she always gets me late. She really drives me up the wall sometimes, most of the times. Unfortunately, I have not been good at dealing with it all. So I have resorted to screaming and yelling at them. And so I have become, at least the way I see it, nothing more than a screaming and yelling mother to my children. In recent times, I have been feeling that I am being too hard on them. Or that I am not teaching them in the right way. Sometimes I have felt like they are growing afraid of me. Then I start to feel that I am being the obstacle in the way of their happiness. This has made me feel guilty and disappointed in myself. I know being a good mother does not mean letting them do whatever they want and getting away with it. But I want them to love and respect me, not fear me. I want to be a gentle and a loving mother to my daughters. I want to stop yelling and screaming and be more patient and understanding with my children. For a while, I had been thinking about visiting a counselor. I had decided that I needed help or I would lose my mind and my children. I knew I needed help. It would cost me my family if I didn’t. I didn’t want to do anymore emotional damage to my children, or myself. And so in December 2011, I went to my GP. He prescribed anti depressants and referred me to a counselor. I had to wait 2 weeks for my session. Meanwhile, the anti-depressant did not help. Instead, they gave me nightmares, I suffered cold sweat and bad backache, and I did not feel any happier. At this point I really looked forward to the session. I was most interested in hipnotherapy, and I knew a certain counselor trained on it. My Feelings Before the Session I wondered if the counseling and hipnotherapy would really work. I was looking at the things my daughters did that always got me screaming and yelling. And although I needed help to stop the habit, I still felt the habit was justified. So I wondered how possible it would be for me to see them do the same things and be able to stop myself from screaming again. These feelings made me grow somewhat overprotective of myself. But even as I held this debate in my head, a part of me knew visiting a counselor was the only choice I had. I weighed my options and decided which one was the most important. And so, my skepticism slightly pushed aside by necessity, I decided to attend the appointment. I looked forward to the session and was full of hope that this would cure me fix me heal me. During the Session The process followed the counseling skills pattern: Introduction, building rapport, gathering and discussing the information, conclusion and homework (Carrie, n.d.). Her house was a brick building. The door was open. She wore a long skirt with a simple blue t-shirt. She looked about 60-65. She leaned toward me with a smile on her face, reached out her hand and said, “Good morning. You must be Juliet. I am June.” I noted the absence of ‘Doctor’ and I started to feel that I was in the hands of a peer. Her home office was neat, quiet and- in spite of a cloudy morning- was warmed by the heater slowly blowing warm air. I grew even calmer. June first directed me to the soft brown sofa. She then offered me tea before sitting on the other end of the sofa with her own cup of tea. She took a sip and I followed on cue. Then I placed my cup on a table in front of the sofa. She did the same. She employed a number of techniques in the session: questions, active listening and paraphrasing when I made vague statements, taking notes, all the while making me feel comfortable and cared for. I could sense it in her body language. She first explained to me the terms of doctor-client confidentiality and asked me if I understood. I said yes. And we continued to sip our teas occasionally as she got down to the questions. She asked me if I was comfortable, warm enough, and let me know I was free to use the blanket within reach if I needed it. As I answered her questions, she kept looking at me. Now that I think of it, I see that the questions got me into a talking mood. We had struck some rapport. After a while, I had calmed down and gotten into the conversation. I am not aware when she made the transition, but she started asking me more complex questions that needed more elaboration. I don’t remember exactly how the interrogation went, but I remember this bit: Me: The eldest, she’s 6, she picked up the remote and started changing the channels. She was looking for a cartoons channel…(she nodded). Me: The youngest, 5, wanted another cartoon channel. She wanted to keep looking until she found any other cartoon channel showing anything else besides her sister’s choice June: I understand (and we giggled about it). Me: So a fight ensued. I was cooking in the kitchen and could hear the high pitch screaming of my youngest (I was quiet for a while). Doctor: Do the children always fight over the TV remote? Me: Not exactly. Doctor: But they do over other things? Me: Yes. Doctor: How does this make you feel? Me: Honestly, it drives me crazy (I said without hesitating). Doctor: You mean angry? Me: Yes…(I said reluctantly). Doctor: And what do you do then? I hesitated at this point. All this time, the questions had overtaken me and I had forgotten about being alert. Answering the questions had somehow calmed me down. But now once again, I was alert. Nonetheless, I had to make a choice. The counselor had not done or said anything to make me feel uncomfortable. All she had done until that point was give me an ear. All the time she had been asking me the questions her voice had stayed calm. And above all, she had listened. While I still hesitated, she did not push me, explicitly or even implied it in her body language. She was giving me the room to decide whether I wanted to go on or stop. Finally, I decided I needed the help. Having come to that decision I opened myself up and told her exactly what I had wanted to say all this time. I explained about my habit, what I thought it was doing to my relationship with my children and what I feared it would eventually do to them, even me. I told her, “I fear that maybe there is a part of me that doesn’t love my children…” Indeed, this was not an easy answer to give. But I had decided to speak the truth about I really felt. After the interview, we had a discussion. During that time I said exactly what I wanted from her, help to stop the screaming and yelling, go about guiding my daughters in a way that is healthy. The counselor first told me that it was normal to be carried away by our emotions. But she advised me against viewing my habit as evidence that I did not love my children. “Just the fact that you need this help is evidence enough that you care a lot. You care because you love your daughters,” she told me. She then asked me to lay on my back on the sofa. She told me to relax as she put on some smooth calming music, accompanied by soundtracks of waves and surfs in the distant background. Then she asked me to relax completely, pay attention to the music and the beauty of the sounds, and think of the moments I have shared with my children. I sank and sank into a kind of trance. The more I listened to the music the more I sank. While I listened to the music, I also paid attention to the counselor’s voice following me as I went and I started to remember our moments together: the days they were born, the birthday celebrations, the moments I take them to bed and I am reluctant to leave, the nights when I read them bedtime stories and I stop when I realize they are long asleep and the times we have spent with each other. These images made me feel most comfortable and happiest as I relived them. And I knew without a single doubt that I love my children whole-heartedly. Theoretical Approach June seemed to have adopted an integrative theoretical approach. Basically, she seemed to employ Gerard Egan’s (2010) ideas as he presents the in ‘The skilled Helper, 9th Edition’. She aimed at making me comfortable and allowing me to tell my story, like I would when chatting with a friend (Gerard Egan2010). She let me go on when I wanted to and stop when I did not, even as she encouraged me at times to let it all out. She would say, “Tell me more,” or just nodded, yet implying that I had to choice. The casual setting of the room was very much similar to what was described in ACAP’s module unit 2, page 5 (Geldard and Geldard, 2005) But by asking me to focus on what I wanted, restore my emotional control with my children, she was also using solution-focused approach, aimed at getting “The Three Principle Goals of Helping” also proposed by Gerald Egan. Equally, by emphasizing the need to pay attention to all the aspects of my life, June was using the counseling skills theory. Each seems to have a role to play in the whole counseling session. Conclusion: After the Session I don’t know how long I lay there. But when I woke up I had found the first most important answer; that I love my children. The counselor helped me start to see my behavior as only a manifestation of my dissatisfaction with other aspects of my life, as well as giving too much attention to my children and forgetting other things that I love, shopping, watching DVDs. And I started to discover that what I needed was to handle my life evenly as a positive first step towards solving the problem. That was the first session. The next session was exactly 2 weeks after the first session. During the waiting period, she gave me homework, advising me to pay attention to what I love most about my children, not the things that they do wrong. But when I walked out of there, I started to feel comfortable about myself as a mother. I felt normal for the first time in 5 years. I am not ‘there’ yet. But I am well on my way. References Carrie, S. n.d. “Basic Counseling Skills Everyone Can Learn and Use,” Basiccounselingskills.com. n.d. Web. March 5, 2012. Egan,G. (2010). The Skilled Helper: A Problem-Management and Opportunity- Development Approach to Helping(9th ed.). Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole. ACAP Module ,Unit 2.page 5 Geldard, D. & Geldard, K. (2005). Basic personal counseling:A training manual for counselors (5th ed.,p.332). Sydney, Australia: Pearson Education. Read More