This week’s Reflective Diary includes my thoughts on Sue’s presentation, as well as my reflections on our roleplays. To monitor our personal development, we were tasked with identifying responses in ourselves that occur during a helping interaction. We did this with several rounds of roleplay.
The first roleplay of the evening was Emily as the counsellor, and I played the part of the client. As part of unit 5.3, she played the part of a counsellor that was not really listening. Her purposefully asking impersonal and tasteless questions about my problem actually raised a little bit of emotion inside me, and made me remember last week when I wrote about a time when I felt I was not helped by someone I was expecting help from. That was the aim though, so Emily did her job as an incompetent counsellor very well.
The rest of the roleplays were part of unit 5.4; they are to help the person playing the role of counsellor identify their internal responses during a skills practise.
In the second roleplay, Sue was the counsellor and Gloria was the client. Gloria’s problem was that she found a book of matches from a strip club in the pocket of one of her husband’s suits, and she thought he was cheating on her. This did evoke memories inside me of a time I went to a strip club. Gloria was certain that her husband had cheated, but I don’t think visiting a strip club is necessarily cheating.
In the third roleplay, I was the counsellor and Sue was the client. This is the helping interaction where I need to identify my responses. I started with “Hi Sue, what would you like to talk about today?” to which Sue put her scarf to her face and both Gloria (who was observing) and I thought she was crying for real, but it turned out that she was just trying not to laugh. I felt immediate unease and dread when she put the scarf to her face as I thought she was crying for real, and that I would have a real-life upset lady on my hands! I sensed (wrongly) that she was very upset. We had just been talking about her dog dying just before Christmas, which is what made me think she was emotionally on edge. I felt sad for her, as I know how hard it is when loved pets die.
I was thinking that she would present an interesting problem for me to unravel – I was not prepared for her to really not present a problem at all. She mostly communicated with statements like “I don’t know where to begin”, “I don’t know what’s wrong”, and “I can’t talk about it” and she was unresponsive to my tentative enquiries; I sensed I couldn’t push too hard so I kept it easy-going. I acknowledged that sometimes it is tough to know where to begin and reassured her that it can be a common problem, and that she can take as much time as she needs. I remained calm and tried to convey my feelings of wanting to help her by being open with her and accepting of her silence. I felt that I dealt with it well, considering it was nothing I had ever expected could happen in a counselling session.
I got a sense that maintaining the silence was difficult for Sue because she kept putting her scarf to her face when she was trying not to giggle, but for the sake of making it feel real I purposefully interpreted it as discomfort, so I didn’t let the pressure of silence build up too much by reassuring her that her not talking was ok. While I knew that I couldn’t push it too far, by directly asking her “what her damn problem was”, I was trying to think of questions that could open her up, like “how’s your week been?”, “how’s things at work?” and “what’s been on your mind recently?”. Overall, I was happy with my performance, even though our time ran out and we never actually got to the reason she needed to come to counselling. It was definitely a learning experience for all three of us.
In the final roleplay, Gloria was the counsellor and I was the client. My problem was that my cat had died and I was having problems moving on. Gloria did a great job as counsellor. This roleplay ended with floods of giggles and even our tutor joined in.
Sue did her presentation about Transactional Analysis today, in particular Ego States. During her presentation we watched a YouTube video which showed a typical TA session, and it was fascinating to see the client really regress into her Child ego state as the counsellor asked questions about her childhood. Her tone of voice and body language clearly changed. After the presentation, we were given a quiz to see if we could identify which statements belonged to certain ego state. I found it quite interesting because most were obvious to me, whereas others were tricky. For example, Question 5 in which a man (presumably) complains about a woman driver I thought was quite childish, but the answer was in fact from an adult state – the reason being that children are not critical, only adults are. I agree that body language and tone of voice are important, which is why I really enjoyed reading the reasons why the statements were made by a particular ego state – it really made the different motivations and thought processes clear, and it gave me an idea of how the states can be identified in the real world.
Sue also gave us a questionnaire to see which ego state we generally fall into. My results showed that the Parent is my default and dominant ego state. My Child score (78%) was over twenty percentage points below my Parent score (100%), which means that it is unlikely I switch between the two, but there is a chance I do slip into that state from time to time. My Adult score was 68%, thirty percentage points below the other two, which means I don’t often use that state, which does sound accurate to be fair.
I am not surprised that I spend most of my time in the Parent ego state, and sometimes switch to the Child ego state, although I do think that most of my Parent behaviour is done in my head rather than out loud. I did score higher for indulgence, nurturing and caring than criticising, organising and being controlling, and do feel my personality reflects this. I do prefer to nurture and support than control.
