TPC-Journal-V2-Issue3

The Professional Counselor \Volume 2, Issue 3 217 Since seeing clients is new to CITs, negotiating the counseling process and their role is at the forefront for them. They receive live supervision that includes a briefing before the session, a mid-session supervision break, and a debriefing with their supervisor immediately following the session as well that accentuates this development. Client Themes: Counseling Relationship As was the case in the CIT interviews, clients were asked in the interview protocol about the counseling relationship, making a discussion of the relationship inevitable. The way clients experienced the relationship and what they found meaningful in the relationship is how the subthemes for Counseling Relationship emerged. Clients reflected a great deal on the relationship and many subthemes emerged including: Descriptions, CIT Contributing Characteristics and Behaviors, Depth of Understanding, Trust, and Someone to Talk to and Focus on Self. Clients portrayed a wide range of Descriptions of their counseling relationships. Some described having trouble even calling it a relationship since it was new, some described the relationship as different or odd, or had difficulty describing the relationship. Others portrayed the relationship as respectful, comfortable, or easy. Heather illustrates here the uniqueness of the counseling relationship: Really that it’s so odd to have a one-sided relationship almost. I come in and I say all this about myself and don’t know anything about her at all, you know, it’s just so odd. It’s strange to me still. Other clients were focused on CIT Contributing Characteristics and Behaviors, in how they experienced the counseling relationship. Frank illustrates how he experiences his CIT well here: My counselor is very open individual. She doesn’t seem to be guarded. She didn’t seem to be judgmental at all. She always greets with a smile, welcomes me into the office, that’s very important. There is, even today, there is still a stigma to seeing a therapist, there’s still a lot of anxiety around going to see a therapist. So when she greets me and invites me into her office with a smile and a truly inviting nature about it, that makes the session go a lot better because it takes a lot of that load off of me right from the get go. You don’t feel like she’s going to sit and judge you the whole time and she’s very good with eye contact. She doesn’t bore a hole in your head. [laughter] Clients expressed many other behaviors and characteristics such as the gender of the CIT, their body language, listening skills, social skills, empathy exhibited, and genuineness that were meaningful to them. Depth of Understanding was important to clients in how they experienced their relationships with their CITs. Often clients were able to determine whether and how much their CITs seemed to understand them by CITs normalizing clients’ experiences, by their paraphrases and reflections, and by asking for clarifications. Clients could tell whether or not they and their CIT were on the same page, and when their CIT wanted to understand them. Carol’s reflection of her CIT being able to understand her story is a good illustration: Just that I guess I feel like I’ve never been able to explain it to where somebody understood how I was feeling, but she understood exactly what I was trying to say and how I was feeling…and I guess I’ve never really had that before so that kind of stood out that she even though sometimes I felt like I was just babbling, you know, but she understood. She could bring it in and be like, you know, “this is what I’m hearing” and I go “you know what, yeah”. So I mean, that kind of stood out to me that she just really could understand even if I felt like I was all over the place Trust was another important element to the counseling relationship for clients. Many clients felt they were revealing, or would be revealing, intimate parts of their lives in session, making trust critical. The depth of sharing was related to the amount of trust clients felt with their CITs. Wanda explains how the trust she feels with her CIT will be crucial in the future work they will do: I trust her. I feel like I’m going to be able to tell her, you know, there’s other things that I haven’t told her yet that we’re going to probably discuss, and I feel like I’ll be able to tell her that and it’ll be, you know, I don’t feel like she’ll judge me on it. I feel like she’ll listen just from knowing her two sessions. Wow.