8 TPC Digest Jennifer Scaturo Watkinson, Gayle Cicero, Elizabeth Burton Addressing Anxiety | TPC Digest Anxiety is a natural part of the developmental process of a counselor-in-training (CIT) and can be particularly evident during practicum. Anxiety often stems from CITs’ doubts about their competency, coupled with their desire to be perfect. Further, CITs often have a strong need for external validation, which creates anxiety and an overreliance on a supervisor’s judgment. Within a constructivist approach to supervision, mindfulness is used to help CITs work with their anxiety by bringing attention to their internal experiences of discomfort and helping them meet that discomfort with self-compassion and nonjudgment. As counselor educators who supervise practicum students and adhere to a constructivist approach to supervision, we recognized the amount of anxiety our students were experiencing and wanted to understand how integrating mindfulness within our supervision could support their growth and development. Mindfulness core concepts (e.g., being present, nonjudgement, and self-compassion) served as a framework for how practicum students made meaning of their internal experiences. To examine our practice, we utilized a practitioner inquiry approach and formed a professional learning community to explore how our practicum students experienced mindfulness as an integral approach to supervision. Through the examination of our practice, we attended to the tensions and opportunities that came with integrating mindfulness into our supervision as a way to highlight what worked and what should change. In this study, we described the various mindfulness exercises we used with our CITs. To understand how 25 of our practicum students were experiencing mindfulness, we analyzed their written reflections pertaining to their practicum experience, along with transcripts from two focus groups. Three themes emerged and were identified: openness to the process of becoming, reflection and self-care, and attention to the doing. When reflecting upon their practicum experiences, CITs accepted where they were in the developmental process and embraced anxiety with self-compassion and non-judgment. Further, CITs perceived reflection as a type of self-care and acknowledged that meditation helped them to stay in the present. Although CITs saw benefit in mindfulness as a part of their supervision, they also desired more focus on the day-today work school counselors were doing at their school sites. While we acknowledged the benefits to integrating mindfulness into supervision, we wrestled with how to create a balance between the amount of focus we placed on mindfulness versus the need our students had to hear stories about the work being done by school counselors. Reflecting upon what we learned, we proposed that balancing the need to focus on school counselor practice and mindfulness could be done by integrating the core principles of mindfulness into case conceptualization while keeping meditation as a central mindfulness exercise. Jennifer Scaturo Watkinson, PhD, LCPC, is a certified school counselor and serves as an associate professor and the School Counseling Program Director at Loyola University Maryland. Gayle Cicero, EdD, LCPC, is a certified school counselor and serves as an assistant clinical professor at Loyola University Maryland. Elizabeth Burton is a certified professional school counselor for Baltimore County Public Schools. Correspondence may be addressed to Jennifer Watkinson, Timonium Graduate Center, 2034 Greenspring Dr., Lutherville-Timonium, MD 21093, jswatkinson@loyola.edu. Practitioners’ Examination of Mindfulness in Constructivist Supervision
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