Reflection Paper On Counselling

MEDD8678 Counselling Process, Ethics and Skills

Reflection Paper

1 INTRODUCTION AND PERSONAL BACKGROUND

Instead of being in the frontline as a teacher or school counselor, I work as a research assistant. Despite staying in a school environment, seldom do I have the chance to interact with students directly. Thus, this reflection paper is writing with personal experiences as examples rather than an application to work life. It attempts to review what have been learnt from a counseling teacher’s perspective, and take a counselee’s perspective to see the effectiveness or the possible difficulties encountered.

2 LEARNING OUTCOMES

2.1 ESSENTIAL OF NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION

Counseling skills: mirroring and self-disclosure

When facing a decision-making

Yet another discovery is we share universal needs, the need of acceptance and being valued (Maslow, 1954). For a counseling teacher, active listening and reflection of contents, feelings and experience are the skills learnt from this course. To listen deeply, not only attend to what counselees say, but also communicate your empathic understanding using verbal and non-verbal words (e.g. nodding head, eye contact, etc.). Taking a counselee’s perspective, I feel being valued that he/she really listens to me by heart. The sense of significance may help in relationship building as it increases the favorable feelings towards the listener. I have encountered a teacher who several times gave me a feeling of insignificance. I felt like he was disregarding me since when I seek advice in face-to-face situations, seldom would he have eye-contacts with me and he would walk away when you were still talking. His body movements communicated that he did not attend to you maybe actually he did though, since he returned and gave me advice. I learnt from this helpee’s experience that active listening is a way to show one’s regards and attention. No matter how trivial the issue will be, once a person opens a conversation with you, I may have to whole-heartedly listen to

A resistant counselee remains silence or takes the response, “I don’t know”, frequently. Mitchell (2015) also listed different interpretations for what it means to be “I don’t know”. He suggested that we need to figure out what counselees mean when they say, “I don’t know”. One possible meaning is they really do not know the answer. Counselors may respond and convey an understanding of the difficulty to reach an answer. Another meaning of “I don’t know” is that they know the answer yet not ready to share with you as they are not close to you. The approach is to wait and do not force the counselees to share. Counselors may empathetically show their understanding to their resistance and embed a message that they are always welcome when they are ready to disclose. “I don’t know” could also mean the counselee may not be cooperative to give his/her answer, or indicate that it was the end of the conversation. Mitchell attributed this resistance to the therapeutic errors like a not well-developed