How My Major Lessons Learned From My Practicum Experience

The main dissonance I experienced during my practicum was my tentativeness in speaking up to my supervisors when something made me uncomfortable. I worked on it and improved, but for the first two weeks I was overly concerned about being a nuisance. No one ever treated me as such and I am aware that was due to my own insecurities at being new to counseling. I did not want to step on any toes nor act like I knew more than they did. For example, there were times I witnessed a student be what I considered to be extremely rude to my supervisors without ramifications. This made me uncomfortable, but I chose to respect the choices of my supervisors. However, as time progressed, I found ways to mindfully address disrespectful students by pointing out their actions and by asking them if there were more respectful and effective ways of communicating. In the beginning, I was surprised to notice the dissonance I first had towards my feelings about some students. Largely, how intimidated I found them which I know sounds silly, my being the adult. However, many of the students I interacted with came from troubled homes and were conditioned to be aggressive and confrontational. I quickly had to learn to hold my
I am a passive person who leans towards flight opposed to fight. I was forced to learn that many of the students within the schools’ population were used to resolving conflict by retaliating with physical violence. When counseling someone, I learned the importance of discovering what conditioning each student had experienced in their life up until the present moment. So many of them experience adults with caution and feel like no matter what they do or say, they are always in the wrong. I learned to honor their life experience and after developing a therapeutic alliance, managed to invite them to explore their