Multicultural Therapy Reflection

For second semester my goals fall predominantly under cultural diversity and application. In each area I have strengths and limitations. First of all, I am able to build rapport clients from different backgrounds. In my clinic site, I am open to see diverse clientele. My site serves a variety of persons having different cultural identifies such as low SES, LGBTQ, African Americans, Caucasians, Latinos, older adults and people with disability. I am working on demonstrating knowledge, awareness and understanding towards diverse clients.
The area I need to improve is scientific understanding of contextual factors in treatments and assessment of culturally diverse clients. This semester, I am taking the Advanced Multicultural Counseling Course. The
course will provide me with cultural immersion activities and a lot of academic readings related to the areas I need to improve specifically. I will join a variety of cultural immersion activities at UWM such as Black History Month events. The course will also cover cultural issues believed to impact psychological assessment, treatment, consultation, and education of people from different racial, ethnic, and sociocultural backgrounds. At the end of the semester, I hope to feel more culturally aware in treatment and diagnostic assessment of my clients.
In terms of application area, I would like to improve my evidence-based treatment skills. This semester I have clients suffering from OCD and PTSD. For these disorders, I will apply CBT approaches and some manualized treatments. For PTSD, I had completed prolonged exposure therapy treatment. This semester through my supervisor’s guidance, I plan on implementing PE for PTSD. I thought it is a good idea because if I get supervised PE sessions, I can be more competitive for future practicum and internship applications.
This semester, I will also take Trauma Counseling II course. The course covers a variety of treatments and assessments for PTSD. Through this course, I hope to transfer my theoretical and scientific knowledge to my clinical experience. Especially, learning common assessments for PTSD will be a novel experience for me. Additionally, I will continue exposing myself to academic readings (especially Van Der Kolk’s books), treatment videos, didactic trainings at my site and supervision to excel in evidence-based treatments. My supervisor advised me to look at the cases and discuss with him by formulating cases. Currently, I am working on my case formulation skills.
I am also interested in psychodynamic therapies.
As I attended last semester, I will continue Wisconsin Psychoanalytic Society meetings. Through those meetings, I can learn to be psychoanalytically minded even though I practice CBT or other therapies. This semester, I plan on being more involve with the society and consider of being their official student. This semester, I will learn following topics: the resolution of the transference in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, importance of the frame in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, when patient and therapist are of different race, religion, and ethnicity, mentalization in the treatment of borderline personality disorder.
Another goal of mine is to prepare my clients for termination. At the very first of my sessions, I tell my client when I will leave the site and time-to-time, we touch on termination in sessions. Based on that fact, I will plan my sessions accordingly and help my clients get their needs met and facilitate their transition. I also need to prepare myself for termination. Since I am working with my clients on a long-term basis, ending the treatment will be harder for me. To handle the termination process, I will talk to my supervisor and
peers.
One of the areas I need to work on is competence on pharmacology and health psychology. All of my clients under medication and my knowledge about is limited. This semester I have clients with cognitive disability and clients needs pain management approaches, which I have never encountered. I would like to get didactic trainings on pain management and health psychology to perform competently.
This semester since I have been more familiar with the resources in the city, I can connect my client to outside support groups such as grief counseling and sexual abuse support groups. Regarding interdisciplinary systems, I am interested in respectfully collaborating with other professionals. Since I am working in a hospital, I have to improve this skill. At the end of the second semester, I was planning to be more involved with other professionals and joining case conferences to see their perspective. I started consulting with other providers from different disciplines at my site. I consult with nurses and psychiatrists about prognosis of clients and other treatment related issues pertaining to my clients. I also learned how to conduct suicide assessment and work with suicidal clients. Through supervision and didactic trainings, I felt more competent working with suicidal clients. I understand the importance of self-care activities to protect myself from burn-out at this semester.
For next year, I am applying trauma clinics in Milwaukee since I would like to specialize at PTSD. I am interested in sites offering assessments, group and individual counseling experiences. Especially, in the treatments of PTSD, I think holistic approaches are very helpful. Therefore, Rogers Memorial Hospital or Medical College of Wisconsin Trauma clinic seems like a good f