erratio | Entries tagged with therapy

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.

Last term, when we covered Gestalt Therapy, it was the most impenetrable thing I've ever seen. It's one of the very few topics where the more I read, the less I felt like I understood what the heck it was about. And then the lecturer did an in-class demonstration and I went away going "what did I just watch?". A week later after thinking about it, I had a slightly better idea of what he'd been doing, but my view on Gestalt was still basically "????????".

In the time since then, I've worked my butt off in personal therapy. I don't know how much concrete progress I've made, but I have a much better idea of what the target is that I'm trying to hit and what kinds of things I need to work on in order to hit it. I mention this because we're covering the modalities again this term, but in greater depth, and this time when I did the Gestalt readings and paid attention to the lecturer it made sense. It's such a trippy feeling, that I wasn't explicitly doing anything related to it in the meantime and yet this time around it felt less like a load of weird impenetrable nonsense and more like a description of something that's inherently not very easy to describe (and also obscured further by a bunch of unnecessary jargon, but that's a different issue).

Concurrently with the lecture on Gestalt, my housemate has gone to a leadership/self-development retreat thing and has come back with a lot of... very similar ideas to Gestalt, really, where before he used to be overly focused on trying to be an advice dispenser. And I'm pretty sure he sounds impenetrably mystical now to a lot of people. His next step is trying to figure out how to communicate the same concepts in a way that doesn't alienate the SSC/LW-type crowd.

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 just went back to my last life update post to see when it was, and a lot of things have changed since then! Given that it was over three years ago, that's really a good thing.

In very rough chronological order:

I started a relationship with the Canadian guy I met online, and we visited each other several times
I exited the PhD Linguistics program with a Masters, because academia is a terrible place for me
I started volunteering for an online peer counselling service
I moved to Canada to be with Canadian Guy
After a couple of years of that, things weren't going so hot, and so when he got a job offer in Hungary I took that as my cue to initiate a break up and move back to Sydney. (the breakup didn't entirely take, but we get along so much better now that the relationship expectations aren't hovering)
I started dating a boy in Melbourne. Still long distance, but at least it's only a relatively cheap 1.5 hour flight to see each other
I enrolled in a Masters of Counselling and Psychotherapy
A friend of mine who owns a company in the UK has hired me to do technical writing stuff, and the income from that is good enough to keep me afloat without eating into study time

So obviously the thing I'm most excited about in there is enrolling to become an official counsellor person. Classes just started a couple of weeks ago and so far everyone and everything is lovely. (Except for their admin. My friend commented that I have Siderea-like powers of getting into weird administrative situations, and this definitely qualified.) Also, everyone here seems to dislike CBT, which I find kind of hilarious given its position as the gold standard everywhere else. I'm a little nervous about things like 'eye contact' and 'making legible expressions' as so much of my social experience has involved either the Internet or interaction with people who were just as socially anxious/awkward as I was, but I think that'll pass as I get more into the program. I'm also nervous about my placements, since some of the students are counsellors who've already been practicing for years and how can I compete with them for placements? But I suspect that will be fine too, since those other people probably don't want to do their placements at the kind of places that I do.

So, a funny thing happened: I've been relying more and more heavily on HabitRPG, my calendar, and other external aids to tell me what to do and when to do it. As part of that, I've ended up joining a bunch of guilds on HabitRPG and been posting most of my NVC notes to the 'chronic illness guild' there. But, I still want to post them here too, since I think it's really useful stuff that should be shared with as many people as possible.

( Communication stuff )

( Reminding yourself that you choose all your tasks )

Crossposts: http://erratio.livejournal.com/147022.html

Chasing a link from NancyLebovitz on LW, I've spent a few hours this week reading Focusing, by Eugene Gendlin, which reads like a New Age-y self-help manual, providing instructions on how to focus on a 'felt sense' and attain a 'body shift', or 'felt response' including some troubleshooting for the various steps, and then cramming in a whole new manual in the last chapter or two called The Listening Manual, which provides explicit instruction on total listening, active listening, and listening in a group. Despite the weird (to me) language, I saw enough similarities between focusing and techniques that have worked for me to suspect that at least parts of it are quite useful for teaching techniques that I mostly stumbled on, and possibly the whole thing really is as good as Gendlin thinks it is.

A very quick summary, with excerpts from the notes I took.

( Summary )

And a random quote from the troubleshooting section, quoted for truth: "Most people treat themselves less like a friend than like a roommate they don't like"

And now for how this relates to the 'best' known therapy out there, CBT. In short: it doesn't. Most of the techniques I was taught that are explicitly part of CBT seem to be the complete opposite of focusing. For example, let's say I have a party to go to, and I feel scared/anxious/reluctant about going. If i was CBTing, I would list out all the things I was afraid of with regards to the party, recognise them for the exaggerated/distorted ideas they were, and come up with more realistic/balanced alternatives for those thoughts, combined with a hefty dose of "and what's so bad about that?" directed at those fears. If I was focusing, I would tell myself "ok, I think I'm afraid of specific things X,Y,Z about the party, but I'll put those aside for now and see what my fear says if I listen to it directly", and then do so. So one involves enlisting your rational side, both to come up with reasons for your emotions and then to counter those reasons, while the other is more of a Zen thing of approaching the problem holistically and not analysing any of it. I was originally going to then draw some similarities between the steps of CBT and focusing, but the more I think about it the more it seems like there aren't any, and that a lot of the techniques that I've gotten reasonable mileage from have come from reading elsewhere or suggestions from my therapist that weren't directly related to the CBT framework.

I suspect that CBT is more popular partly because it's much easier to teach and apply, and because it looks and feels a lot more 'sciencey'. Also because I can't find any papers or studies anywhere about whether focusing actually gets better results than regular talk therapy, let alone the CBT branch.

Crossposts: http://erratio.livejournal.com/126529.html

So two weeks on with my whole not being Jewish thing, a couple of points have come up. The first being that I told my family and got even less response than I was expecting (I wasn't expecting Mum to be terribly bothered in the first place, since she's been known to eat ham and bacon occasionally). Turns out she's much more concerned about the identity and 'marrying in' parts than the religous bits. And since I've already told her multiple times that I don't intend to make a special effort to marry in, that's pretty much the end of that problem. The second being that I still haven't gotten around to putting a pork product in my mouth, partly because I don't eat much meat to start with, but also because it turns out that I developed an aversion to the idea of eating pork in much the same way that I'm not keen on eating anything from McDonalds or KFC, despite having eaten there with great enjoyment in the distant past. I think about eating them and get a response from my brain indicating that they're not really food and if I want food I should go eat something else. So I'll basically have to go out of my way to eat some ham occasionally until I've convinced myself that pigs are edible after all.

In non-religious news, thesis is coming along nicely, but so is the deadline. As of today I have 3 weeks left to finish writing, polish it, and then get it printed, bound, and handed in. Scary stuff. I'm enjoying it a fair bit though, when it's not tedious or anxiety-provoking. Enough to continue with this academic writing stuff in the future? Maybe. I'll see how I'm feeling in 3 weeks.

In other other news, I'm still visting a psychologist on a regular basis. Progress there is not coming along so nicely, it's more of the one step forward, two steps to the side and then do-si-do around your partner before heading back to where you started variety of progress. Actually, that's not entirely true, I do think I'm slowly making real progress, it's just frustrating not to be improving faster. And to add insult to injury somewhat my psychologist reckons that my perception that I still have so far to go is itself symptomatic of my overly-perfectionistic thinking. So, uh, I guess that when I stop feeling like I need to make progress to be normal, that's when I'll know that I've achieved normality?