Career Counseling (Theories of Psychotherapy) by Savickas Mark L

Author:Savickas, Mark L. [Savickas, Mark L.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781433809811
Publisher: American Psychological Association
Published: 2011-12-21T05:00:00+00:00

A Qualification

I suggest that practitioners routinely inquire about early recollections. Most clients protect themselves by sharing early recollections that relate to the issues at hand and with which they themselves are ready to deal. Then, during the assessment routine, practitioners can decide if they will address the preoccupations with the client and if so, how. According to the client’s emotional readiness and the practitioner’s comfort, the early recollections may be discussed at varying levels of depth, from the superficial to the profound. Nevertheless, even if the early recollections are not discussed at all during counseling, understanding the client’s core concerns is useful in drawing a sensitive life portrait.

Some practitioners disagree with this suggestion, believing that beginning practitioners may not be ready to confront the problems or able to handle the pain that clients reveal in early recollections. The counseling relationship provides a holding environment, one that culturally structures discussion of difficult stories. Practitioners must be able to hold the client story and address it authentically. Early recollections routinely evoke self-interpretations that clients perform as felt meaning. So if a practitioner is not prepared to deal with strong emotions, then that practitioner should not ask about early recollections. If the practitioner takes this option, and sometimes it is necessary because of time limitations, then the practitioner looks for the problem and preoccupation in the responses to the first question about role models. The models present the client’s proposed solution to the issue, so practitioners may concentrate just on the resolution and avoid directly addressing the client’s preoccupation and pain. For example, if a client models a heroine’s courage, it implies that the early recollection might be about feeling scared. Other common examples are extroverted models who resolve shyness issues or independent models who resolve dependency issues.

To substantiate the caveat about using early recollections, consider one told by a client who recalled that one day after returning home from the first grade, she could not find her mother. Searching the whole house, she eventually discovered her mother lying on a bathroom floor with blood flowing from her cut wrists. The child stood helplessly, watching her mother die. The practitioner must be prepared to hold this pain so that the client can consider it as a nuclear scene in her life story. If the practitioner feels overwhelmed by the story, then the practitioner becomes less effective. Of course, a practitioner feeling overwhelmed still can express this shared pain and try to process the emotions with the client. However, this is not the goal of career construction counseling. In counseling with the client who had passively witnessed her mother’s last moments of life, the goal was to meet the client’s request for help in shaping her career. Using this early recollection, it became clear that she wished to turn passivity to activity by dealing with dying people. I thought that she might be interested in working at suicide prevention, but the client’s reaction indicated that suicide prevention did not fully address the pain of watching helplessly as her mother died.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.