But Does It Work?

Posted by: Dawn Schell on April 1, 2011 9:29 am
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Hello and welcome to my virtual office.  If I could, I’d be stretching out my hand to offer you a warm handshake and I’d give you my most welcoming smile and saying – “Please come on in and have a seat.  If you were actually entering my office you would see that I have chairs set up for us.  The aim here is to create a sense that we are in the same room together [as much as is possible in this virtual space!].  I invite you to make yourself comfortable and take your time reading my blog post.

This gives you a fairly typical example of how I start my online counselling sessions.  I wanted to give you a little taste of what it’s like as we begin an ongoing conversation about online counselling.

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*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA

Essentials of The Therapeutic Relationship

Posted by: Maritza Rodriguez on April 1, 2011 9:23 am
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The therapeutic relationship is unique in that for many clients, it is the first intimate connection they have had with another person where profound feelings, beliefs and thoughts are exposed. Counselling should provide the client with an open and safe setting that emphasizes self-exploration and change without the client feeling the need to censor or conform.

There are three important qualities a client should look for when seeking a therapist that Carl Rogers emphasized: empathy, genuineness and respect. Empathy is the ability to identify with and understand the client’s situation, feelings and motives. It provides the foundation for a therapeutic relationship because it establishes the personal connection. Traits of genuineness include being open, honest, and sincere and an absence of defensiveness and phoniness. This allows the client to be at ease and increases the opportunity for valuable inquiry and awareness. Respect establishes the safety that is essential in a counseling relationship.  By accepting the client as a whole, including strengths and weaknesses, an environment has been established where profound issues can be brought to the surface for examination and transformation.

The client-therapist relationship is essential to establishing a successful outcome by promoting willingness for the client to share and engage with the counsellor. This promotes increased propensity toward self awareness and change in behavior, thoughts and beliefs. It is also important that counseling remain client focused by discussing and defining the goals of the client, rather than the counsellor imposing their own mandates and judgments. This further reinforces the vital characteristics of a positive helping alliance: empathy, genuineness and respect.




*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA

How To Take The High Road With Your Kids When The Low Road Is All You Can See

Posted by: Guest on April 1, 2011 9:14 am
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Do you ever feel like pulling your hair out when you are trying to get your child to take Tylenol for a high fever and they are refusing adamantly? Or you are trying to have a short phone conversation and you are interrupted 2000 times by a tiny human that “needs to find his Darth Vader action figure NOW”? Or the weather-appropriate clothes that you were summoned to advise upon, and mother nature would agree should be worn on this 10 below day, are being cast aside for a tank top, capri’s and a shiny pair of flats have become the insanity inducing attire? And through it all, getting to your 9:15am meeting that you begged to have pushed back so you can gently and lovingly drop your kids off at school, as opposed to ejecting them from the car, is now history!

You know this scene. All parents do. We start out with the best intentions (we always do); we are on the high road or as Daniel Siegel (physician and author of Parenting From the Inside Out) calls it, the “High mode.” This type of functioning or “processing” as Siegel refers to, gets the name due to the part of the brain that is in the top front, called the prefrontal cortex. When we are processing in the high mode, we are engaging our rational mind, we are able to be reflective, flexible, and have a sense of self-awareness of how we are being received. In this mode, we can moderate the tone and volume of our voice, speak with love and kindness to our children, use open body language and offer mutually respectful and dignified choices for our children to respond to as well as relevant and related consequences can be used should they become needed. In this mode, we are the parent we want to be. So what happens?

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*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA

Living with Uncertainty and Using Clients’ Career Stories to Empower Career & Life Choices

Posted by: Mark Franklin on March 31, 2011 4:36 pm
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“After graduating university and spending only six months in a boring engineering job, Bruce Kirkby ditched the nine-to-five life, packed his rusty pickup, and headed west in search of adventure. He’s been going full tilt ever since. The journeys that followed have taken him to every corner of the planet, from Everest to Arabia, Ethiopia’s Blue Nile Gorge to the rivers of the Arctic. Bruce has ridden horses across Mongolia and camels across Arabia’s legendary Empty Quarter. His account of that journey, ‘Sand Dance, By Camel Across Arabia’s Great Southern Desert’ was published in 2000.” Now with a family and two children, and based in Kimberley, BC, Bruce travels less and writes more, including his weekly Globe and Mail column.

Hi, I’m Mark Franklin, practice leader of CareerCycles, a career management social enterprise in Toronto, producer/host of weekly Career Buzz radio show, and new blogger here at CCPA. Bruce Kirkby was a recent guest on Career Buzz – listen here. When asked about a personal strength aligned with his career, Bruce said “my ability to live with uncertainty.”

Bruce is proof you can formulate a career around one glowing strength!

Here at CareerCycles, our team of eight Associates has been using a holistic, narrative and strengths-based method of practice to empower over 3500 clients. In future blog posts I look forward to sharing more insightful career stories, and helpful tips and techniques to empower your clients through their career stories, and in so doing, enrich your own careers and lives! Meanwhile, please LEAVE A COMMENT and share your experiences with clients’ career stories… do you use a narrative approach? If so, what do you do? What do you think of Bruce’s story? What’s an important turning point in your own career story?

 




*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA

Counselling in Elementary Schools: The Tension Between Ideals and Practice

Posted by: Guest on March 31, 2011 2:59 pm
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I did my training in school counselling at OISE/UT in 2006. It provided me with a broad, rich background in a whole host of theoretical orientations and modalities. It also reaffirmed some of the deeply held beliefs I held about the importance of trust in healing relationships.   But what it did not, and perhaps could not, provide me with was a full appreciation of the difficulties I might encounter in trying to apply those values and  principles to the real-world setting of an elementary school. Below are a few examples of what I mean.

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*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA

A Multicultural Tale of Mistrust

Posted by: Guest on March 29, 2011 1:39 pm
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“And you will not put the mental illness on my son…” said the woman with a heavy African accent and an angry voice. That was a message left over the weekend on my work phone. A few weeks into my new job as a multicultural liaison for an agency in greater Vancouver, this was what I encountered on a Monday morning, as I arrived at my office. The woman was a recent refugee from Africa. She came with her baby and a boy in Grade 3 – my client.   This boy was having a lot of trouble in school; he would not stay in class, but wander around the patio sometimes leaving school grounds, often showing aggression towards other students during recess. Various staff had attempted to make contact with him but he would withdraw, hiding under tables and hugging himself as he rocked back and fourth.

I had a meeting on Friday with the school counsellor, teacher, school liaison, my client’s mother and grandmother, and  the mother had agreed that her son would start seeing me.

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*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA

Be SMART About Setting Goals

Posted by: Curtis Stevens on March 28, 2011 10:45 am
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The following are the opinions of the author and don’t necessarily reflect the thoughts and opinions of the collective group of the CCPA

It’s March.  How well did you do on your New Year’s Resolution?  Are you still working on it?  Have you forgotten about it? Have you ever been in counselling and decided that “it didn’t work for you.”  Have you put any thought into why?

First off, one can argue that there are basically two reasons why people fail at meeting their goals:  1) Either they have no resolve at all, and it is impossible for that person to lose weight, stop smoking, be nicer, work harder, make more money, spend more time with family or whatever the case may be. Or 2) they are setting the wrong goals.

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*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA

Creativity: Is it in all of us?

Posted by: Guest on March 28, 2011 10:32 am
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I am very excited to be writing my first blog entry for Counselling Connect.  Every two weeks I’ll be bringing you information and opinions about Creative Arts Therapies including best practices, tips, techniques and news from the art therapy community in Canada and around the world.  Many people in the counselling field have heard of art therapy but are still not quite sure what it entails.  I look forward to sharing this wonderful and creative therapeutic modality with all of you.

Art therapists help individuals explore their feelings and emotions using a variety of materials.  In my practice, clients have the option of choosing paints, pastels, markers, clay, fabric, collage materials and repurposed every day objects amongst other things. They often begin with art materials they are comfortable with but with gentle encouragement, others begin to explore new ways of expressing themselves.  It is often an enlightening, exciting and safe experience for clients.

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*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA

I Don’t Care and I Don’t Want To: An Intervention for Apathetic Youth (Part 1), by Chris Dasch

Posted by: Guest on March 18, 2011 10:36 am
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This is an article reposted from our Newsletter “Cognica” – Fall 2010 Edition

Introduction

I want to share with you one brilliant, yet perplexing interaction I recently had with a student.  While working on trying to foster a relationship with one of my particularly unmotivated and disengaged students, we had shared many conversations together, and had come to the point where we could openly and honestly look at his behaviour and comment on the apathetic nature of much of it.  I had tried in many ways to engage and motivate this student, both from an academic standpoint, and an emotional one.  Towards the end of one of our conversations, he very eloquently stated the following paraphrased idea:

” I know that you are trying to help me Mr. D., but have you ever thought that maybe you are the one that needs the help. I look around and I see a lot of people stressed and upset.  They’re always working or fighting or tired, and I don’t really want to be like that… at all.  Even you seem pretty burnt out sometimes.  The way I do things, there is no stress.  I don’t worry and I enjoy myself a lot more than a lot of the people around me, especially my family.  Maybe you guys got it all wrong.  Maybe you need to be more like me. ”

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*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA