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Counsellor milestones I'd rather not have
Mar. 9th, 2019 02:07 pmYesterday marks my first time advising a friend on how to make a complaint about an unethical therapist
So, counselling school.
The good, first. I learnt so, so much this year. All the teachers are also practicing counsellors who've been in practice for at least a decade and have also taught for years and it really shows in their depth of knowledge and the way they do demonstrations in class. I feel incredibly lucky to have been taught by them, and I'm mostly looking forward to my classes for next year. The other students are also great, and we've all been very supportive of each other.
The ambivalent: The classes have also been difficult in ways that I didn't expect. I took a complex trauma class and expected to be triggered to hell and back, but it turns out that when your teacher is an experienced trauma therapist, they're really good at being able to talk about triggery topics in non-triggery ways. Instead, it was the regular counselling practice classes where we were doing short practice sessions with peers that really fucked me up, because material kept coming up that I wasn't expecting and hadn't prepared for. I'm also slightly dreading taking the compulsory group therapy class next year, because it has a reputation for being rather harrowing, while also looking forward to it because I expect it to be harrowing in a growth-oriented direction.
The bad: Oh boy. One of the lecturers is kind of awful. Lots of anecdotes that don't really connect to the material, wastes class time showing us Youtube videos and having us read random barely-related pop articles off the Internet, has weird grading criteria that literally no one else cares about. And unfortunately he's one of the core staff and teaches several of the core classes, and I'm not done with him yet. That's not the really bad part though. The really awful, horrible part? Is that the program might be about to get shut down. If it is, they're not actually allowed to bail on us completely - they're required by the government to have a plan to get us all graduated, assuming we decide to stick around. But it means that the program quality is going to go downhill. It already has in multiple ways, with lecturers deciding to cut their loads on the spur of the moment, the student support guy for our program abruptly quitting without notice, and a general narrowing of the range of electives available to us. If the program is going to be discontinued, there's no reason for any of those things to improve - why hire new staff if your student numbers are already unsustainable for keeping said staff on the payroll and will only be going down since no new students will be enrolling? And several of my peers I've spoken to are strongly considering leaving, which will be sad since part of what's been great about the program has been mixing with people from all different cultural and counselling backgrounds and being able to learn from each other.
The good, first. I learnt so, so much this year. All the teachers are also practicing counsellors who've been in practice for at least a decade and have also taught for years and it really shows in their depth of knowledge and the way they do demonstrations in class. I feel incredibly lucky to have been taught by them, and I'm mostly looking forward to my classes for next year. The other students are also great, and we've all been very supportive of each other.
The ambivalent: The classes have also been difficult in ways that I didn't expect. I took a complex trauma class and expected to be triggered to hell and back, but it turns out that when your teacher is an experienced trauma therapist, they're really good at being able to talk about triggery topics in non-triggery ways. Instead, it was the regular counselling practice classes where we were doing short practice sessions with peers that really fucked me up, because material kept coming up that I wasn't expecting and hadn't prepared for. I'm also slightly dreading taking the compulsory group therapy class next year, because it has a reputation for being rather harrowing, while also looking forward to it because I expect it to be harrowing in a growth-oriented direction.
The bad: Oh boy. One of the lecturers is kind of awful. Lots of anecdotes that don't really connect to the material, wastes class time showing us Youtube videos and having us read random barely-related pop articles off the Internet, has weird grading criteria that literally no one else cares about. And unfortunately he's one of the core staff and teaches several of the core classes, and I'm not done with him yet. That's not the really bad part though. The really awful, horrible part? Is that the program might be about to get shut down. If it is, they're not actually allowed to bail on us completely - they're required by the government to have a plan to get us all graduated, assuming we decide to stick around. But it means that the program quality is going to go downhill. It already has in multiple ways, with lecturers deciding to cut their loads on the spur of the moment, the student support guy for our program abruptly quitting without notice, and a general narrowing of the range of electives available to us. If the program is going to be discontinued, there's no reason for any of those things to improve - why hire new staff if your student numbers are already unsustainable for keeping said staff on the payroll and will only be going down since no new students will be enrolling? And several of my peers I've spoken to are strongly considering leaving, which will be sad since part of what's been great about the program has been mixing with people from all different cultural and counselling backgrounds and being able to learn from each other.
Counseling school is so great, you guys! (Except for the admin, which continues to suck hugely.)
I didn't realize how badly starved I was for (relatively) non-judgmental socializing or being able to nerd out about the things I'm really passionate about. (Yes, this sounds really obvious in hindsight. I thought that I was getting those things, but turns out the people I was socializing with weren't such a great fit. I could nerd out about things that I used to be extremely passionate about and still find interesting, and I could socialize with people who judged on different metrics).
In the theories class we've been covering the major schools of therapy, and trying out bits of the techniques in class and watching videos of them in action. The more I learn, the more commonalities I'm seeing between the techniques and the assumptions the theories make, modulo the underlying theory, which makes sense given the figures everyone keeps quoting about how the choice of modality makes up around 15% of the benefit of therapy, and even then it's more about the therapist feeling confident and comfortable with that modality rather than whether the modality is objectively better or not.
In the therapeutic communication class, I've discovered that being in the therapist role is strangely calming and leaves me feeling serene and at peace with myself and the world afterwards, even when there are other students less than a meter away ready to give me feedback on my technique. My current theory is that I'm focusing so hard on the client and on empathising/understanding them that I forget to be anxious or self-conscious for a while, and that the work of connecting with them is such that I've already known as soon as I finished that I've done a relatively good job, so there's no real fear or defensiveness associated with getting feedback. I'm not sure whether I hope that it keeps feeling like that as I learn more detail and get more feedback on what I'm doing (and see people with more complex problems rather than fellow students). On the one hand, it's definitely better than feeling really drained or learning to dread the experience because it feels hard. On the other, I'm suspicious of addictive experiences just on principle, and this certainly qualifies as one.
Another thing I've (re)learnt in communication class is how much meaning can depend on small details in speech. For example, I had a conversation with another student about the difference between asking directly about something versus framing it as "I'm curious about how [thing] is for you". I'd been viewing "I'm curious about [x]" as sort of a cheating method of sneaking a question in while technically not asking it as a question, but he found that when it was a direct question he jumped straight to intellectual and cached answers, while the "I'm curious" framing encouraged him to be curious and explore his experience.
I didn't realize how badly starved I was for (relatively) non-judgmental socializing or being able to nerd out about the things I'm really passionate about. (Yes, this sounds really obvious in hindsight. I thought that I was getting those things, but turns out the people I was socializing with weren't such a great fit. I could nerd out about things that I used to be extremely passionate about and still find interesting, and I could socialize with people who judged on different metrics).
In the theories class we've been covering the major schools of therapy, and trying out bits of the techniques in class and watching videos of them in action. The more I learn, the more commonalities I'm seeing between the techniques and the assumptions the theories make, modulo the underlying theory, which makes sense given the figures everyone keeps quoting about how the choice of modality makes up around 15% of the benefit of therapy, and even then it's more about the therapist feeling confident and comfortable with that modality rather than whether the modality is objectively better or not.
In the therapeutic communication class, I've discovered that being in the therapist role is strangely calming and leaves me feeling serene and at peace with myself and the world afterwards, even when there are other students less than a meter away ready to give me feedback on my technique. My current theory is that I'm focusing so hard on the client and on empathising/understanding them that I forget to be anxious or self-conscious for a while, and that the work of connecting with them is such that I've already known as soon as I finished that I've done a relatively good job, so there's no real fear or defensiveness associated with getting feedback. I'm not sure whether I hope that it keeps feeling like that as I learn more detail and get more feedback on what I'm doing (and see people with more complex problems rather than fellow students). On the one hand, it's definitely better than feeling really drained or learning to dread the experience because it feels hard. On the other, I'm suspicious of addictive experiences just on principle, and this certainly qualifies as one.
Another thing I've (re)learnt in communication class is how much meaning can depend on small details in speech. For example, I had a conversation with another student about the difference between asking directly about something versus framing it as "I'm curious about how [thing] is for you". I'd been viewing "I'm curious about [x]" as sort of a cheating method of sneaking a question in while technically not asking it as a question, but he found that when it was a direct question he jumped straight to intellectual and cached answers, while the "I'm curious" framing encouraged him to be curious and explore his experience.
So, I just attended a talk by Carol Fowler, an academic who works in articulatory/gestural phonology. She is awesome and her talk was awesome - I was more impressed by it than I've been by most other talks, even though is only varely related to my usual interests. I'm now going to try to capture as much of it as I can remember, and since it's about cogsci-ish stuff I'm putting it up here where other people with similar interests can read it, if they want. It's quite rambly though and I don't know enough about phonetics to really explain most of it clearly, so if you want the cool/easier to understand bits, skip down to the embodied cognition/mirror neuron section.
Relevant jargon:
gestures: when applied to speech production refer to movements of the tongue, jaw, lips, etc.
formants: the frequences of speech sounds. More specifically, most speech sounds show up on a spectrogram/graph/whatever as 2 or moer lines at various heights which our brain combines to produce a sound.
VOT - voice onset timing: I'm not really sure what this is since it's outside my area but it's one of the qualities of the speech signal that lets you distinguish between different sounds. VOT's vary across demographics in much the way you would expect, which is to say that it varies between individuals but there are also broad gender/cultural trends.
TMS: transcranial magnetic stimulation - it's gotten popular recently as a way to shut off areas of the brain but apparently it's also what they use for stimulating specific muscles directly.
Stop - a consonant that involves full stoppage of the vocal tract. The most consonanty consonants that exist. Letters like p,t,g are stops.
Overall argument: a really big part of language perception relies on embodied cognition type stuff, because trying to reconstruct actual sounds from a continuous stream is really really hard.
Phonetics stuff: Speech signals are not consistent. For example, /gi/ versus /gu/, the formants are what you would expect for the vowel parts (/i/ is high, /u/ is lower), but the onsets that make people hear the /g/ look like a little downtick on the first one and a little uptick on the second. The short noisy burst that is a stop looks almost exactly the same regardless of whether it's a /p/,/t/ or whatever, so Liberman guessed that speakers must be using articulatory information to disambiguate them. The proof of this can be seen in the McGurk effect, where you listen to one syllable and see another being mouthed and what you perceive is usually somewhere between the two but closer to what you see. The McGurk effect has been replicated in multiple modalities, including one Carol recounted one where the listener put their hand over her face while she mouthed various syllables, and another one where people got a puff of air on their necks to mimic the aspiration of the /p/ in /pa/ versus the non-aspiration in /ba/. Writing is one of the few modalities that doesn't show an effect. When you put other syllables such as /ar/ or /al/ in front of an ambiguous /pa/ or /ga/, people hear it in a way that indicates that they're overcompensating for the effects of coarticulation of the two consonants. (the other theory had to do with formants, but a Tamil linguist finally found a minimal pair to test both theories and it came out in favour of overcompensation)
The peception by synthesis argument: Someone (Liberman?) thinks people understand speech by modelling possible gestures until they find the correct one. Carol disagrees with this because in perception you only have a very limited time to work out what they said, and your brain doesn't enjoy being wrong because that means more work, so trial and error seems unlikely. Also, no one actually speaks identically so there's no way I can model what you said accurately in any case (although this one's kind of a weak argument, because it's a matter of getting close enough)
Mirror neurons and embodied cognition stuff: People primed with thoughts about old people moved more slowly on their way to the lift afterwards. Subjects made to hold a pen between their teeth, forcing their mouth into a 'smile', were more likely to perceive other faces as smiling. In speech perception, if people had a machine pulling their mouths up or down to mimic the shape of their mouth when forming various vowels were more likely to hear ambiguous vowels as the one corresponding to their mouth shape, even though they weren't making that mouth shape deliberately. Similarly, when TMS was used to stimulate subjects lips or tongue while hearing various consonants, they were more likely to perceive the consonant made with that part of the mouth. People watching other people walk have short bursts of neural activity corresponding to leg muscle movement, this kind of thing doesn't happen when watching a movement that isn't humanly possibly, like wagging a tail. Similar effects in speech perception. When TMS was used to knock out part of the articulatory apparatus, people's speech perception suffered. When subjects had their jaw moved in a specific way by a machine such that it didn't actually affect how they produced a specific vowel, it still had an effect on how that vowel was perceived by those subjects later.
The chinchilla experiment: chinchillas kept in a US lab were successfully taught to distinguish between /pa/ and /ba/. More interestingly, the acoustic properties they were picking up were specific to English - apparently the way English speakers distinguish between the two sounds (something to do with VOT's) is fairly unusual, most languages put the boundary somewhere slightly different. So that's evidence against there being a special human phonetic module for speech perception. Other animals can do it too, chinchillas are just the silliest and therefore one of the strongest examples of it not being anything special. But Carol mentioned that she's skeptical of this experiment and would like to see it replicated.
Questions: Do blind people have correspondingly worse speech perception since they lack a lot of the cross-modal information which is apparently so important? Studies of the mirror neuron/embodied cognition stuff in signed languages.
Relevant jargon:
gestures: when applied to speech production refer to movements of the tongue, jaw, lips, etc.
formants: the frequences of speech sounds. More specifically, most speech sounds show up on a spectrogram/graph/whatever as 2 or moer lines at various heights which our brain combines to produce a sound.
VOT - voice onset timing: I'm not really sure what this is since it's outside my area but it's one of the qualities of the speech signal that lets you distinguish between different sounds. VOT's vary across demographics in much the way you would expect, which is to say that it varies between individuals but there are also broad gender/cultural trends.
TMS: transcranial magnetic stimulation - it's gotten popular recently as a way to shut off areas of the brain but apparently it's also what they use for stimulating specific muscles directly.
Stop - a consonant that involves full stoppage of the vocal tract. The most consonanty consonants that exist. Letters like p,t,g are stops.
Overall argument: a really big part of language perception relies on embodied cognition type stuff, because trying to reconstruct actual sounds from a continuous stream is really really hard.
Phonetics stuff: Speech signals are not consistent. For example, /gi/ versus /gu/, the formants are what you would expect for the vowel parts (/i/ is high, /u/ is lower), but the onsets that make people hear the /g/ look like a little downtick on the first one and a little uptick on the second. The short noisy burst that is a stop looks almost exactly the same regardless of whether it's a /p/,/t/ or whatever, so Liberman guessed that speakers must be using articulatory information to disambiguate them. The proof of this can be seen in the McGurk effect, where you listen to one syllable and see another being mouthed and what you perceive is usually somewhere between the two but closer to what you see. The McGurk effect has been replicated in multiple modalities, including one Carol recounted one where the listener put their hand over her face while she mouthed various syllables, and another one where people got a puff of air on their necks to mimic the aspiration of the /p/ in /pa/ versus the non-aspiration in /ba/. Writing is one of the few modalities that doesn't show an effect. When you put other syllables such as /ar/ or /al/ in front of an ambiguous /pa/ or /ga/, people hear it in a way that indicates that they're overcompensating for the effects of coarticulation of the two consonants. (the other theory had to do with formants, but a Tamil linguist finally found a minimal pair to test both theories and it came out in favour of overcompensation)
The peception by synthesis argument: Someone (Liberman?) thinks people understand speech by modelling possible gestures until they find the correct one. Carol disagrees with this because in perception you only have a very limited time to work out what they said, and your brain doesn't enjoy being wrong because that means more work, so trial and error seems unlikely. Also, no one actually speaks identically so there's no way I can model what you said accurately in any case (although this one's kind of a weak argument, because it's a matter of getting close enough)
Mirror neurons and embodied cognition stuff: People primed with thoughts about old people moved more slowly on their way to the lift afterwards. Subjects made to hold a pen between their teeth, forcing their mouth into a 'smile', were more likely to perceive other faces as smiling. In speech perception, if people had a machine pulling their mouths up or down to mimic the shape of their mouth when forming various vowels were more likely to hear ambiguous vowels as the one corresponding to their mouth shape, even though they weren't making that mouth shape deliberately. Similarly, when TMS was used to stimulate subjects lips or tongue while hearing various consonants, they were more likely to perceive the consonant made with that part of the mouth. People watching other people walk have short bursts of neural activity corresponding to leg muscle movement, this kind of thing doesn't happen when watching a movement that isn't humanly possibly, like wagging a tail. Similar effects in speech perception. When TMS was used to knock out part of the articulatory apparatus, people's speech perception suffered. When subjects had their jaw moved in a specific way by a machine such that it didn't actually affect how they produced a specific vowel, it still had an effect on how that vowel was perceived by those subjects later.
The chinchilla experiment: chinchillas kept in a US lab were successfully taught to distinguish between /pa/ and /ba/. More interestingly, the acoustic properties they were picking up were specific to English - apparently the way English speakers distinguish between the two sounds (something to do with VOT's) is fairly unusual, most languages put the boundary somewhere slightly different. So that's evidence against there being a special human phonetic module for speech perception. Other animals can do it too, chinchillas are just the silliest and therefore one of the strongest examples of it not being anything special. But Carol mentioned that she's skeptical of this experiment and would like to see it replicated.
Questions: Do blind people have correspondingly worse speech perception since they lack a lot of the cross-modal information which is apparently so important? Studies of the mirror neuron/embodied cognition stuff in signed languages.
