Reflective Essay
Reflective Essay – 6th June 2012
My journey to become a Counselling Psychologist began in 2008 when as a Life Coach; I had a self referral who suffered from anxiety over his forthcoming exams in his second year at university. I started collaboratively setting goals to manage his workload and set timetable into manageable chunks through asking him challenging questions so that e can start to think for himself. He had plenty of resources namely his family, time, books but he just would not settle into coaching which left me feeling I was inadequate as a Life Coach and started to doubt whether he could manage at all. As a life Coach I didn’t have a supervisor so had no one to maul this situation over with.
I remember talking to a fellow life Coach with years more experience than I who said ‘my dear anxiety is something you will need to learn about to be able to help this young man’. I then explained that I had a Psychology degree and I could handle it. However, I asked the young man to talk to his GP to see if he could be referred to a specialist. He came back saying there was nothing his GP could do. I referred to my friend who worked with him but said he needed to see a Psychologist. He was alarmed at this suggestion and never returned for Life Coaching and was never to be seen again. It was then that I started looking for courses to enable me to deal with clients with anxiety and depression as I started to realise that a few of my self referrals did have diagnosis and I was out of my depth dealing with this. So it was in 2008 when I enrolled on a long distance course in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy’.
I did the course over 6 months and felt I was ready to work with clients, to my surprise I was still unable to do the job because I had not practiced even though I had a Diploma. Life was hard, clients were available business was good but I knew I was not giving clients my all and inwardly I felt I was taking money for nothing. I approached my Life
My journey to become a Counselling Psychologist began in 2008 when as a Life Coach; I had a self referral who suffered from anxiety over his forthcoming exams in his second year at university. I started collaboratively setting goals to manage his workload and set timetable into manageable chunks through asking him challenging questions so that e can start to think for himself. He had plenty of resources namely his family, time, books but he just would not settle into coaching which left me feeling I was inadequate as a Life Coach and started to doubt whether he could manage at all. As a life Coach I didn’t have a supervisor so had no one to maul this situation over with.
I remember talking to a fellow life Coach with years more experience than I who said ‘my dear anxiety is something you will need to learn about to be able to help this young man’. I then explained that I had a Psychology degree and I could handle it. However, I asked the young man to talk to his GP to see if he could be referred to a specialist. He came back saying there was nothing his GP could do. I referred to my friend who worked with him but said he needed to see a Psychologist. He was alarmed at this suggestion and never returned for Life Coaching and was never to be seen again. It was then that I started looking for courses to enable me to deal with clients with anxiety and depression as I started to realise that a few of my self referrals did have diagnosis and I was out of my depth dealing with this. So it was in 2008 when I enrolled on a long distance course in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy’.
I did the course over 6 months and felt I was ready to work with clients, to my surprise I was still unable to do the job because I had not practiced even though I had a Diploma. Life was hard, clients were available business was good but I knew I was not giving clients my all and inwardly I felt I was taking money for nothing. I approached my Life