Jude Austin, assistant professor and clinical coordinator in the professional advisory program at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Texas, began his internship like many clinicians – with the ambitious goal of saving lives and strengthening customers. When he saw a client who was in an abusive relationship, he tried to do just that and assured her that she was a strong, independent woman who could stand up to her husband. The customer took his advice. She went home and told her husband that she didn't have to endure his abuse. He replied by hitting her.
The client returned to her next consultation session with a black eye, and Austin was stunned. After his recovery, he coped with the crisis by informing the client that he should report the abuse, even if she could not do it herself. At that moment, he realized the power he had over his customers' lives and that his words and savior mentality could kill someone if he wasn't careful. After the incident, Austin sought therapy of his own to better understand his identity and role as a counselor.
Consultants are not immune to mistakes, so they often have to deal with "failures" in their work. Jennie Vila, a licensed professional consultant (LPC) in Edison, New Jersey, would see Austin's interaction with his client as a learning experience, not a failure. In fact, she doesn't believe in failure. When a consultant learns something after a mistake, it is a success, she claims.
"Some of these struggles can still hurt you, but you can use them to move forward," said Vila, a member of the American Counseling Association, who likes to talk about the importance of thinking. "You don't have to stay in [the pain] if you are willing to learn from it."
Fortunately, counselors can learn from the mistakes of others. Here are some lessons that other advisors and ACA members say have learned the hard way.
Lesson 1: Set Realistic Expectations
Jude Austin, an LPC and licensed marriage and family therapist who works in a private practice in Temple, Texas, and his twin brother Julius Austin, a clinical therapist and coordinator of the Drug Abuse and Restoration Office at Tulane University , agree that a common mistake many counselors make at the beginning of their careers is to be an “ideal” counselor rather than being themselves.
Julius, an LPC in Louisiana, admits that he has personally experienced this. From the day he started his advisory program, he began to develop an idealized version of the future. "Dr. Austin ”- a professional consultant who never made mistakes, immediately identified a customer's emotions and knew exactly what to say at the session. "As a beginning clinician, one of my biggest problems was overcoming the fact that [this ideal] Dr. Austin didn't exist," he says.
When Vila, a certified integrative wellness and life coach and owner of Growth Mindset, worked in a hospital, she also had assumptions about what to do at the session. She had a customer who stormed into Vila's office during active mania episodes and asked for help to pay her bills. Vila called the credit card, rental, and utility companies while the customer waited with her in the office. When the client had run out of patience to wait, she got up abruptly and tried to leave the room. Vila would remind them that if they hung up and called back later, they would only have to start waiting again.
Vila, now the vice president of the New Jersey Counseling Association, had thought of advice as more than helping a customer pay his bills. She was frustrated and discouraged and finally said to her manager: “What am I doing for this customer? We just call and pay their bills at the meeting. I'm not helping her. "
But the manager corrected Vila: "No, you model what it means to have social skills in the world. She needs that now. It doesn't have to deal with deeper issues. "
This experience helped Vila to realize that “not every session or client you work with is deep psychotherapy [requires]. Sometimes it is life skills or soft skills. It is a separate type of therapy. "
Lesson 2: Embrace that therapy is an active process
Consultants often struggle with a feeling of failure when they feel they have been confused or could have done better. But sometimes clients tell an advisor directly that the advisor has let them down.
Sam Gladding, a consulting professor at Wake Forest University and LPC in North Carolina, recalls a time when he was too rogue and thoughtful with a client. At the end of the session, the customer said to him: "You haven't done a good job. I expected you to work more actively with me."
These words stood out, but they also taught Gladding a valuable lesson – this advice is not just about listening to the client or offering minimal encouragers such as "Uh-huh", "I hear you" and "Tell me more" , Instead, advice is an active process. Now he makes sure customers ask more interesting questions like "What do you want to do?" "What do you think would be a good answer to that?" and "What are your options in this matter?"
Instead of starting the sessions with what customers want to talk about, Gladding asks, "What do you want to work on?" This wording sets the tone and expects advice to include work and action.
Ultimately, "our interaction [with the client] will make or interrupt the session," said Gladding, a former president of ACA. "We cannot control everything, [we] we can control what we can and we have to let the other person do what he wants."
Lesson 3: Think about what you bring into the therapeutic relationship.
Counseling is a professional relationship, and for this reason the personal life of the counselor can influence the meetings. When Julius Austin was working as a clinician at a university in the last year of his doctoral program, his PhD supervisor called him and said his committee had requested some final revisions. This meant that he would not graduate this spring. He was devastated and embarrassed. His family had already bought tickets and was looking forward to seeing him and his twin brother Jude graduate together. As soon as Julius hung up, he received another call informing him that his next customer had arrived.
In retrospect, Austin says he should have explained the situation to the customer and postponed the session so that he could take the time to process the messages he had just received. Instead, the client came in and started talking about her decision to leave school and travel the world to gain real-life experiences.
Austin remembers opening his mouth and unleashing his frustration with the customer by saying, "You know, traveling doesn't work that way." He painted a dark picture of travel – one filled with misplaced luggage, missed connections, and lost photos.
The customer was silent for a few seconds before answering, "I'm sorry you didn't have a good travel experience, but I don't think that's the case with everyone. I think I will go now. "
Austin, co-author with his brother Jude on the recently published ACA book Surviving and Thriving in Your Counseling Program, says that he has had a great relationship with the client up to this point. But after this encounter, he never saw her again. He immediately regretted what he said, but advisors don't always get a second chance to fix their mistakes in the session.
Austin still complains that he lost a client that day due to his personal struggles, but the lesson he learned from this experience has positively influenced his handling of subsequent therapeutic relationships. He says he has become more aware of how he is feeling at the moment and has more intentions of what he says to customers at the meeting.
Similarly, Suzan Thompson, a privately held LPC in Virginia Beach, Virginia, admits that her own feelings may affect her relationship with a guardian. At their last joint meeting, the supervisee said: "I will contact you about supervision in the future." Former supervisors had made similar claims without asserting themselves, so Thompson was skeptical. Without explaining this fact, she replied, "I doubt you will."
Thompson, author of an ACA member's blog about failure ("Toolkit for Transformation: Allow Yourself to Fail") immediately regretted her answer. She tried to process her mistake through supervision, journaling and EFT tapping (Emotional Freedom Techniques). The misstep remains in her head, but she hasn't made a similar mistake anymore. In fact, Thompson recently laughed when another supervisor said they wanted to continue supervision and replied, "I would be happy to see you back."
Sometimes a simple regionalism or expression can lead to a misstep. Since Jude Austin is from Southern Louisiana, he says that he often uses "man" in his greetings (for example, "Hey, man" or "How are you, man?"). Once a new customer who was changing sex was waiting in the office. Austin went out and said casually, “Hello man. Ready to come back? "
The customer's face immediately changed. Austin didn't know what he was doing yet, but he decided to address the tension the moment they started their session: “It feels uncomfortable right now. Did I do something to make you feel uncomfortable? "
After Austin discovered his mistake – and that the client preferred her / her pronoun – he apologized and explained that "man" was a common phrase from which he came. Nevertheless, he promised not to use the sentence again.
Lesson 4: Forgive Your Mistakes
Jude Austin had been in a surveillance site for eight hours when he was meeting with a customer. It was a beautiful autumn day and the windows in the room were open. The client spoke in a low, low voice, and before Austin knew it, he had dozed off for a few seconds. When he woke up, the client cried and said, "You're right."
The client, unaware that Austin had fallen asleep, asked what had affected them the most in the last few seconds of the session. The client said, "They were sitting there listening so quietly."
Austin was put to shame. Although he hadn't been caught dozing, he knew he had failed the client because his job should be there – and he hadn't been. He sought supervision and found that he wasn't taking proper care of himself, including getting enough sleep.
Gladding, president of the International Association of Marriage and Family Counselors, also fell asleep during a session with a client, but his client noticed and was not happy. Gladding apologized and tried to get the focus back on the client by asking how people in the client's own life may not be listening. (Gladding wrote about this experience in his book Becoming a Counselor: The Light, the Bright, and the Serious, published by the American Counseling Association Foundation.)
These experiences taught Austin and Gladding how important it is not only self-care but also self-compassion.
Consultants must "forgive mistakes [their]forgive [their] own thoughts, and [themselves]," adds Julius Austin.
From Vila's perspective, self-compassion is the greatest component when someone views an event as a success or failure. Counselors are great at reminding clients to exercise self-compassion, but counselors must apply the same courtesy to themselves, she says. Of course, this is often easier said than done. Vila finds it helpful to externalize her problems or frustrations and ask herself, "If I had a customer who came to me with this problem, what would I tell them?"
Lesson 5: Don't be Afraid to Be Vulnerable
Initial consultants often feel like fraudsters, whose mistakes they mark as being unable to work. For this reason, Gladding and Julius Austin say that educators and supervisors should be vulnerable and share their own mistakes.
"As educators, it is important to share times when we feel uncomfortable, when we fail, when we have a setback, or when things didn't go so well for us at the session." Austin says. "Being so vulnerable to students can really help [them] understand that it is possible to fail and still build meaningful, strong relationships with customers."
Austin also strives to be vulnerable to customers by using the inside-out technique, which means that he shares everything he feels inside with the customer. So if he makes a mistake in the session, e.g. For example, if you miss a feeling word or are not as attentive as it should be, he speaks to it as soon as you notice it. For example, he might say, "I feel like I've missed something in your experience and I think we should go back in our steps."
Jude Austin agrees that the inside-out technique is an effective way for consultants to deal with missteps. For example, he sometimes finds that couple sessions can quickly escalate into a fight and feel overwhelmed. When that happens, he verbally verbalizes his own needs: “You have to stop talking for a few seconds. I feel lost and it takes me 30 seconds to collect myself. And when I feel lost, I cannot imagine how lost you must feel. "This technique can give consultants the break they need to find a productive way to move forward.
"It takes a lot of courage to be vulnerable," says Vila. Like many other advisors, she had meetings later when she wished she had said or done something else. In this case, she is open to customers and says, "I was thinking about what I said in the last session. It bothered me. Did it bother you?"
Vila will also contact customers when she has a day off. For example, if your dog is not feeling well or is recovering from a cold, she will apologize in advance if she is not 100 percent in session.
Lesson 6: Curiosity Approach Sessions
One of the biggest mistakes clinicians can make about multiculturalism is not curiosity about differences or equality, says Julius Austin. He admits that it would be easy for him to assume that a male African American who is also a former sports student would share exactly the same experiences as he did, but the reality is that all experiences are unique regardless of whether there are two People they share certain similarities. "It is really important to approach every person, every identity with curiosity and childish ignorance and humility," he says. "To understand a person's experience, as a clinician, you have to give yourself permission to learn and be wrong."
Jude Austin wishes he would ask two simple questions more often to avoid possible uncomfortable moments or misunderstandings during the session: "How is your experience with me at the moment when you sit down and look at me?" and "Think about who you are as a person – your background, your sexual orientation, your race / ethnicity, etc. What should I know about you so that I can build a better relationship with you?"
Lesson 7: Accepting Positive Habits
It is easy for consultants to mentally beat themselves up for mistakes, but they can adopt healthy habits to counteract these mistakes. Gladding often uses thought stopping techniques, e.g. B. focus on the negative thought for a few minutes and then say "Stop" softly in his head. Sometimes he changes the landscape (e.g. going outside) or trains (e.g. going for a swim) to clear his mind. Gladding jokes that the day he fell asleep in the session, he should go for a walk with his client.
Ultimately, failure is about how a person internalizes an event, Thompson notes. If the person sees himself (and not the activity or technique) as a failure, he has to deal with his negative self-talk, he says. To help her monitor and manage her negative self-talk, Thompson started a morning routine in which she writes to a friend about something she is grateful for – like a nice day or the fact that her dog didn't bark and wake her up Morning.
Vila also focuses on the positive by running a message board titled “A Good Thing Today” (a practice she took over in a psychiatric clinic where she once worked). This includes writing down a positive thing that happened to her that day. Sometimes it is as simple as "a customer thanked me" or "there was no traffic on the way to work" and sometimes it is something more remarkable like "I got a promotion".
According to Vila, it can initially be difficult for consultants to say something positive about a bad day. In fact, she admits that on certain days, the only good thing is that the day is over. "But when you start looking for more positives, at some point you will find it difficult to choose something to put on the board. You retrain [and] by rewiring your brain to do more for the positives to search and filter out and not to concentrate so much on the negative, ”she explains.
If consultants find that things are not going well at the meeting, Gladding advises them to take a few minutes to gather before proceeding. They could apologize from the session and quickly speak to a manager or colleague, or they could just take a deep breath and look at their notes to gain new perspectives and new insights, he says.
Lesson 8: Taking Risks
Consultants can avoid taking risks for fear of making mistakes or failing, often for good reason. In 2001, Thompson, who offers professional advisors training in supervision and complementary and integrative therapies, left a good job to open their own private practice. Shortly after taking this career risk, she was separated and divorced. She admits that she might have felt like a failure (and in some ways) at that time, but decided to focus on how she could use the experience to learn and grow. While slowly building up her practice, she devoted one hour a day to learning a new counseling technique – EFT tapping – which is now the main consulting approach she uses in her practice.
A few years later, Thompson suffered another loss when she lost a close friend due to miscommunication. But here, too, it ultimately turned the situation into an opportunity. While using counseling tools to cope with her loss, she found that throughout her career she had accumulated and learned from such tools. She decided to write them all down. Within a few days she had put together a list of 75-80 tools and descriptions. The list eventually developed into a card game called the Toolkit for Transformation, which provides other advisors with practical tools and strategies to help clients and themselves with setbacks.
Mistakes in the session can also become information that will help counselors better understand how they can help their clients. Thompson once forgot that she had lowered a fee for one of her customers and accidentally overwhelmed the customer for a month. The client noticed the mistake and awkwardly mentioned it in her next session with Thompson. The customer's concerned face immediately changed to relief when Thompson apologized and said she would deduct the overpaid amount from this session. This information prompted Thompson to ask about money in the customer's life, and she found that the customer had money problems that had not previously been addressed at the meeting.
“Our greatest struggles are also our greatest opportunities for learning and growth. These biggest fights – especially when they get us on our knees – also bring with us our life lessons, ”says Thompson. "We really don't learn when we're in our comfort zone."
Lesson 9: Become Friends With Failure
Errors in the course of a consulting career are – in one word – inevitable. “You fail almost every five minutes as a therapist in the session. There's always a little mistake, ”says Jude Austin.
Consultants will not always say the right thing or be “perfect” in every session. As Gladding notes, perfection is not a human trait, so consultants are sure to make mistakes. The important part, he says, is that they learn from these mistakes. Indeed, Gladding suggests that self-doubt can be a strength in counseling, as it helps counselors to reflect more deeply on their role and better adjust to clients who are vulnerable and have a difficult time.
Austin's misstep with the client in an abusive relationship stayed with him, eventually forcing him to think about his identity and purpose as a counselor. "One way to deal with mistakes is to find out what you're doing," he says. Experience taught him that he was not there to "save" customers, but to guide them through difficult situations and give them tools to help them help themselves.
Experience (and other missteps that followed since then) also taught him that he cannot avoid failure. "Failure is part of our experience," he says. “You have to build a relationship with failure. Make it your best friend [as a supervisor once told him]. Find out how it feels. Find out how this affects your family and relationships. Because the more you are aware of your mistakes and who you are when you fail, and how you react when you fail, the more freedom it gives you to treat these mistakes more honestly with your customers.
As in all respects, therapy will have an appropriate proportion of missteps and misunderstandings, and this can make counselors feel like failure. But remember, you are not alone in this feeling. If you apply a growth philosophy, you can learn from your mistakes and continue to grow as a consultant.
So go ahead and fail. You never know what you will learn from it.
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Lindsey Phillips is the author of Counseling Today and a UX content strategist. Contact them at [email protected] or through their website at lindseynphillips.com.
Letters to the editor: [email protected]
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