Voices from the Field

Defining Moments in Counselor and Therapist Development

Michelle Trotter-Mathison, Julie M. Koch, Sandra Sanger, Thomas M. Skovholt, Michelle Trotter-Mathison, Julie M. Koch, Sandra Sanger, Thomas M. Skovholt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135844141
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

All professional counselors and therapists can identify a number of turning points in their careers – moments, interactions, or processes – that led to key realizations regarding their practice with clients, work with students, or self-understanding. This book is a collection of such turning points, which the editors term defining moments, contributed by professionals in different stages of their counseling careers. You'll find personal stories, lessons learned, and unique insights in their narratives that will impact your own development as a practitioner, regardless of whether you are a graduate student or a senior professional.

1
Introduction to Defining Moments

In 1988, Tom Skovholt and Patricia McCarthy published a series of brief, story like articles from the counseling profession in a special issue of the Journal of Counseling and Development. The narratives were called “critical incidents” and were written by counselors, therapists, and counselor educators from a diverse array of backgrounds. Years ago as first-year doctoral students in the Counseling and Student Personnel Psychology Program at the University of Minnesota, three of us (Michelle Trotter-Mathison, Julie M. Koch, and Sandra Sanger) had the opportunity to explore these critical incidents as a part of our doctoral seminar.

In the field of clinical supervision, Heppner and Roehlke (1984) have defined a critical incident as an incident or “turning point” that results in change in a professional’s perception of himself or herself. Several authors, including McCarthy Veach, Bartels, and LeRoy (2002a, 2002b), have used the term defining moment to signify these kinds of catalysts for growth or development. For the purposes of this book, we have chosen to use this term, defining moments, because we believe it captures the essence of the experience—one that plays a key role in counselors’ subsequent development—without the negative connotations that are sometimes attached to the word critical.

A defining moment can be positive or negative but has a significant influence on professional identity. When we read the narratives in the Journal of Counseling and Development as graduate students, we were drawn in by the intimate accounts of the ways counselors were inspired by their clients, discovered something meaningful about themselves, or uncovered what the true essence of counseling was for them. The stories were written about topics ranging from crisis counseling to a practitioner’s personal experiences with mental illness. We were struck by how candidly the writers spoke of their personal and professional experiences; they expressed both their struggles and the ways they had grown.

Our reactions to having read through these critical incidents, or defining moments, ranged from relief to surprise. We found that we weren’t as alone as we believed in our struggles with the challenges and surprises of working with clients. We were also surprised that a similar resource had not presented itself earlier in our training. Throughout graduate school, we found ourselves thirsting for the kinds of “real-world” experiences that seemed to enlighten us by leaps and bounds beyond what we could pick up in a text.

The first sentences spoken to us by our first “real” clients and our first, seemingly fumbled responses have etched themselves deeply in our memories. Interactions with clients have shaped our development in ways that coursework never could. Yet there were only so many clinical experiences we could have at one time. Reading the vivid firsthand accounts provided by new and seasoned clinicians gave us an opportunity to vicariously experiment with ideas beyond our direct experience. We learned about encountering a homicidal client for the first time without needing to directly stomach the anxiety that comes with the threat of violence. We also glimpsed secondhand the unique effects of certain life experiences, such as the birth or death of a child, upon one’s professional life. Reading the narratives gave us a flavor, as students, of what it is like to be a professional in the field. It also revealed to us that the distinction between student and professional is not quite as sharp as we had once believed.

The overarching messages that we gleaned from the defining moments we read were that all therapists grapple at times with difficult clients, difficult reactions, and difficult emotions and that to do so is only human. Beyond these more concrete struggles, however, we also came to understand that there is one specific area of development that demands focus as a therapist, that screams out to us for attention. The message from the defining moments is about reaching out to tolerate ambiguity. We may not be able to reach out to tolerate ambiguity with grace. That is asking a lot of students who are struggling with … well, a lot of things. The plate is usually full, sometimes overflowing. Accepting ambiguity with humility is made more possible by reading the defining moments of others’ struggles. We are grateful to have had the chance to lay the foundations for these lessons before we left graduate school, and we hope that others will have similar experiences in taking comfort in, and learning from, the experiences of others offered here.

Skovholt and McCarthy’s (1988) collection of critical incidents was a meaningful training tool for our doctoral seminar. It inspired each of us to reflect on our counseling education and to spontaneously compose our own narratives. Some of us explained the significant moment when we were “called” to the field of psychology, when we knew this was the profession in which our talents and interests intersected, while others wrote of our first experiences as beginning counselors. Through this sharing of defining moments, we felt motivated to seek out others’ stories and ultimately came to the decision to compile a new collection of stories related to counselor and therapist development. It is our hope that this collection of defining moments will build upon those published two decades ago in contributing to training counselors, therapists, and other helping professionals and in facilitating personal and professional growth.

Now, through recent years as we have worked to become more competent practitioners, we find ourselves similarly engrossed, moved, and inspired by the stories shared in this current collection of narratives. The authors in this collection invite us into their inner lives. They share with us from the inside what happens when a catalyst for change or development, a defining moment, occurs in their lives. In this book, you will read a story of how the death of a loved one forever changed one man’s life and his counseling practice. You will step inside the mind of a predoctoral intern while she sorts out her conflicted feelings related to her client’s suicide. You will read about how being a mother influences one woman’s work as a therapist and teacher. In fact, you will find a whole book of engaging narratives. We hope this collection will draw you in and inspire you in the same way it inspired us. We hope that reading these stories will allow you to tap into your own motivation to pursue what we consider a meaningful, noble, and valuable career field of counseling and therapy. We hope the defining moments in this book create new energy and renew excitement for your education and work.

DEFINING MOMENTS AND THE REFLECTIVE PRACTITIONER

In training to be counselors and therapists we are taught to be reflective practitioners. In our classes and professional lives a major task is to examine our motivations, biases, strengths, and weaknesses—essentially to know ourselves. The notion of being a “reflective practitioner” is not new to our profession. It is something that sets us apart from other professions as our work as counselors involves art, science, and ourselves among the primary tools. To effectively use all of these tools, we must continually examine and reflect upon ourselves as therapists, educators, and researchers as an integral part of our professional practice and responsibilities.

Hubble, Duncan, and Miller (1999), in The Heart and Soul of Change, tell us that relationship factors account for approximately 30% of the variance in counseling outcome. This drives home the point that it is essential for us to look deeply at our personal and professional selves and to examine who we are as helpers and how this affects our ability to build meaningful relationships with clients. One way of doing this is by reflecting on significant events that have influenced our development as counselors. The process of identifying and articulating these developmental pieces is a way for us to get a more complete picture of who we are as practitioners, what we bring to the counseling relationship, and what we value in our lives, our relationships, and the counseling process. By retelling stories of our most influential and meaningful moments, it is possible that we will find new meaning, learn something about why they were meaningful to us to begin with, and potentially hear feedback that helps us to expand our view of our developmental impasses. Stories of professional and personal development are powerful. It is a gift that so many are willing to share their stories and to allow others to learn vicariously from them. The writers who contributed to this book were brave, insightful, and willing to challenge themselves when composing their own defining moments.

CREATING COMMUNITY

Reading and reflecting upon defining moments is one way to get a deeper look at the inner lives and thoughts of other professionals and trainees in the field. In this way, we can aspire to support and guide each other through the ups and downs of working as counselors. Through sharing our stories, our community of counselors can train each other. Counseling is often a solitary profession, and sharing defining moments is a way for us to create community, a way for students and professionals in the field to create a mechanism for sharing integral moments of meaningful learning with each other. Parker Palmer (2004), in his book A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life, writes:

Of course, solitude is essential to personal integration: there are places in the landscapes of our lives where no one can accompany us. But because we are communal creatures who need each other’s support—and because, left to our own devices, we have an endless capacity for self-absorption and self-deception—community is equally essential to rejoining soul and role. (p. 22)

The counselor’s office can be a lonely place for practitioners. The space between therapist and client is filled with the weight of the client’s despair, dreams, and desires. As practitioners we may find ourselves perpetually sitting perfectly still, poised to listen and absorb, with barely a chance at the end of the 50-minute hour to reflect, take a breath, and reset our frame of mind to prepare for the next incoming client with a different story, a different need, and a different way of being. In between clients, we write notes, return phone calls, and address billing issues. The hours stack up on one another, end to end, until another day has gone by without a chance to engage with another person in a simple, nonprofessional manner.

Those of us who work in the academic community as faculty members, students, or researchers also grapple with the presence of solitude as a career hazard. It may be all too easy for us to become holed up in our offices, trying to secure that next grant, to prepare for classes, and to polish off that manuscript we keep meaning to attend to. Add to this countless committee meetings, likely far removed from the initial reasons we pursued this work, that often spiral off into unproductive gripe sessions riddled with the nuances of office politics. Soon the outside world may start to fade away, as the endless tasks continue to mount. Even in those instances when we have the opportunity to meet face to face with our colleagues, we may easily lose sight of the community that is sorely needed to sustain us all.

At the end of the day, we all know this work can be particularly isolating and draining because of the aloneness of it. Ethical codes and standards upholding the confidentiality of clients’ disclosures prohibit us from sharing the specifics, and sometimes even the broad generalities, of our days with those who are important to us. Hectic schedules crammed back to back with meetings, classes, and precious little research and writing time can preclude our attempts to build a working community with our colleagues. For practicing therapists, clinical supervision becomes one of the few places where we can unburden ourselves of some of our secrets, not only those we are bound to keep about our clients, but also those that reveal aspects of our own selves as therapists and people that we are sometimes reluctant to examine or disclose. Similarly, peer consultation groups can serve as a forum for educators, researchers, and practitioners to solicit feedback from and to provide support to others. Of course, supervision and peer consultation may fall short at times, as supervisors and supervisees alike are busy. Anxiety about scrutiny from an authority figure or peer may also cause us to stop short of disclosing everything that goes on in the counseling office or classroom.

Another resource available to helping professionals—outside of supervision, peer or otherwise, and the kind of didactic learning that occurs in graduate school—is the accumulated and polished wisdom of students and practitioners who have gone before us. Case studies are an often sought out resource that provide what novice therapists often crave: real examples of how clients might present, the issues they may bring to the table, and the means by which seasoned clinicians interact with these clients. The study of defining moments extends the potential represented by case studies and supervision for enriching one’s practice beyond the realm of purely clinical material to include, for example, issues that crop up around personal life experiences and complexities in academic life. Novice therapists can benefit from knowing that there are others out there who have walked paths similar to their own among the numerous dimensions that make up counselors’ beings. We believe that in addition to students, experienced therapists and faculty can also connect with the authors of these stories and benefit from remembering that even those with more experience under their belts are human.

COUNSELOR DEVELOPMENT AND DEFINING MOMENTS

In addition to serving as prompts for counselor self-reflection, defining moments also have the potential to assist novice and trainee counselors in traversing the developmental arc along which all beginners progress as they find their way into the realm of the professional. Many trainees report that the single factor contributing most potently to their development as counselors is practical experience in the field (Furr & Carroll, 2003). One large international study found that, of eight sources, experience with clients was the most influential source of development for therapists overall (Orlinsky & Rønnestad, 2005). Novices rated it second only to clinical supervision. This does not require any kind of intuitive leap to understand; learning by doing allows for the integration of previously learned didactic content with the necessary process of seeing clients, bringing the seemingly dimensionless content alive. However, practical experiences in counseling can be difficult to come by for the neophyte whose only previous exposure to the helping field consists of earlier attempts in assisting friends and family, a process that is qualitatively different from offering professional help. Role plays with other counseling trainees, which are known by trainers to be key in promoting development of the use of basic counseling skills, in our experience are often dismissed by trainees as lacking realism. While we certainly do not suggest that such an essential tool be discarded by trainers and supervisors, we do believe that the reading of and reflection upon defining moments written by other practitioners can provide another means by which trainees may be exposed to “real-world” situations in the helping field without compromising client treatment.

Of course, development as a clinician does not occur solely within the boundaries of graduate training. Congruent with theories of lifespan development, which do not limit development to the early years, we come into knowing about how to be therapists, as well as who we are as therapists, gradually, over time, and within the context of repeated interactions with clients and other professionals. The defining moments offered here can apply to the growth of therapists at all stages in their careers.

Rønnestad and Skovholt (2001, 2003; Skovholt & Rønnestad, 1995, 2003, in press) offer a model of counselor/therapist development that is based upon the results of a large qualitative investigation. Their model describes the evolution of therapists’ development across the entire spans of their careers—from trainee to senior professional.

In Phase 1, The Lay Helper Phase, novices offer nonprofessional help to acquaintances and family; they can be prone to quick problem identification, advice giving, and boundary issues. High school or undergraduate students who enjoy “helping others,” possibly through volunteer work or peer tutoring, might be classified as lay helpers.

Individuals enter Phase 2, The Beginning Student Phase, when they begin graduate school in a counseling-related field. It signals a time of high dependency, vulnerability, and anxiety in trainees as they seek out the “right way” to counsel. Much of their technique is modeled upon that of expert clinicians. For example, a master’s-level practicum student might write down everything her supervisor says or recommends and use those notes word for word in session.

In Phase 3, The Advanced Student Phase, students have established a basic level of professional competency but tend to vacillate between feelings of increased comfort on one hand and insecurity and vulnerability on the other. They continue to value support and validation from senior clinicians. Advanced practicum students and interns may value time not only to discuss skill development, but also to process how they are feeling about their experiences, supervision, and their own personal development.

Following graduate training, individuals move into Phase 4, The Novice Professional Phase. At this time, the demands of graduate school and constraints of supervision are left behind, but in their wake, therapists often discover that graduate school has not prepared them as well as hoped or expected for the exigencies of more independent practice. In this phase, therapists learn to increasingly incorporate their own personalities into treatment.

As counselors gain more experience, they move into Phase 5, The Experienced Professional Phase. They begin to focus on establishing authenticity as a primary developmental task. Experienced professionals nearly universally recognize the centrality of the therapeutic relationship in contributing to client change. They also become increasingly comfortable with the necessary ambiguity present in counseling interactions.

Following the accumulation of more than 20 years of experience, counselors enter Phase 6, The Senior Professional Phase. At this level, therapists have built a practice based on their own authentic, idiosyncratic approaches t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Confidentiality Statement
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Introduction to defining Moments
• 2: The Lay Helper Phase
• 3: The Beginning Student Phase
• 4: The Advanced Student Phase
• 5: The Novice Professional Phase
• 6: The Experienced Professional Phase
• 7: The Senior Professional Phase
• 8: Defining Your Own Journey
• Using Your Voice… Articulating Your defining Moment