The Professional Counselor | Volume 13, Issue 4 467 Reflections In this section, we offer our reflections on the group and extract salient collective themes that have come about through our processing. In our first session, we informed the group members that we intended to write a reflection paper, and they gave implicit consent to this writing; we did not collect data from group members for the purposes of this article. We begin by grounding the discussion of the group by acknowledging our positionality and social location and how that influenced how we approached our facilitation and planning of the group. Sharma, Bianchini, and Cakmak will provide their most salient takeaways from the forming and facilitation of the Taking Action group. Positionality Sharma identifies as a cisgender, South Asian (Indian), middle-class, able-bodied woman who is a doctoral candidate in a CACREP-accredited counseling program and a full-time lecturer in a CACREP-accredited counseling program. I bring a bicultural perspective to my counseling practice and education, and I have attended primarily White institutions (PWIs) for most of my life. As a master’s and doctoral National Board for Certified Counselors Minority Fellowship Program fellow, I learned about the importance and practice of SJA. I am a practicing clinician in private practice (working mostly with White clients), and I engage in advocacy work with South Asian intimate partner violence survivors. Bianchini identifies as a White, cisgender woman who grew up in a predominantly White community in the United States. My family has lived in the United States for several generations and the majority of my extended family identifies as part of the middle class. I do not have any disabilities and am a practicing Christian. I am a master’s-level graduate student and joined Chi Sigma Iota’s social justice committee in my first semester of coursework. Cakmak identifies as a Muslim American, cisgender woman of Turkish origin. I do not have any physical disabilities, but I have been diagnosed with general anxiety disorder (GAD) and major depressive disorder (MDD). I identified as part of the upper middle class in Turkey as a child, and I am middle class as an immigrant in the United States. I have two graduate degrees, one in literature and one in counseling. I have done volunteer work with underrepresented religious and cultural communities since I was in high school. Themes As cocreators and coauthors, we reflected on our collective and individual experiences of facilitating our Taking Action group. We each completed individual reflection sheets within 48 hours of each group session to capture our takeaways, and we processed our experiences together after each group session. We reviewed our reflection sheets individually and noted themes that arose for each of us. We then collectively reviewed the sheets to determine what themes arose across our reflection sheets. We reengaged in the reflection process as we wrote this manuscript. In this section, we highlight the major themes among our experiences. Fear The most significant theme of our collective experience was fear. Throughout each session, fear came up under several different guises, which served as an umbrella for additional themes: judgment, self-efficacy, and humility. Fear was the main antagonist preventing us from doing social justice work before this program. Fear of not knowing the necessary information, fear of saying or doing the wrong thing, and fear of not helping enough or adequately were examples of how this feeling manifested.
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