Pavlov's Couch

A Psychology Student's Mental Experience

Archive for the tag “therapy”

19 Sep 2012
3 Comments

The Road Ahead Is Shrouded in Fog

“The future you see is the future you get.”
-Robert G Allen

This year at Head Start Week the group of new students that I am responsible for are Occupational Therapy students. Normally there is nothing course-specific in Head Start Week but OT is the exception to that. While students for all other courses are mingled together for their sessions, Occupational Therapy students get to head off separately for a couple of sessions that are run by their lecturers and tailored to their course. This is in part due to OT being a vocational degree and one that is funded by the NHS.
This means that I get a glimpse into Occupational Therapy and get to learn more about what it involves. Something that I get quite animated about is my annoyance that although, at Brunel, psychology students share a module with Anthropology and Sociology and get to learn about what those degrees/professions involve, we have absolutely no interaction at all with Occupational Therapy and Social Work. Considering we are much more likely to work with people from those degrees, especially within NHS Multi-Disciplinary Teams (MDTs), I have always found this to be a bit of a thorn in my side. It means that many psychology graduates have very little, if any, idea what Occupational Therapists actually do!

The extra insight I have gained this week has reinforced something that has been growing in my mind: Occupational Therapy is another possible future for me. I know I want to help people who need it and make a difference in people’s lives, and I can imagine few other professions that exemplify that as clearly. Occupational Therapists work with people daily to improve their lives.

There is another future path that has been appealing to me recently too: mental health nurse. In particular the kind who work with patients in an outpatient setting and try to help them make progress and improvements in their life and their battle to overcome or live with mental health issues. Although I am not sure I would want to be a mental heath nurse for the rest of my life, I have seen that the skills and approach developed in this profession can be a brilliant addition to anything else I would like to do. I have seen therapists, psychologists, and Occupational Therapists who have had a background in mental health nursing and those individuals have really stood out for me.

So once again I am contemplating what I will do after my psychology undergraduate. The options are:
-Clinical psychology (if I get the very high grades required)
-Neuropsychology
-Therapy (a whole new undergraduate degree)
-Occupational Therapy
-Mental Health Nurse (before going on to do one of the other above)

It is like I am standing on a path and I know it forks ahead of me, but I am looking at a wall of thick fog that blocks my view. The fork is already there, the right path for me. I just can’t see it right now.

Hopefully when I get closer I will.

“It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time.”
-Winston Churchill

“The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time”
-Abraham Lincoln

Posted in Personal and tagged , , , , ,
02 Apr 2012

The Emotional Radiator

You can call it transference, you can call it a form of empathy, you can call it whatever you like. I call it the emotional radiator, and that seems to be a name that is simple enough for everyone to understand.

When you are in a conversation with someone, particularly if you are giving them your full attention and empathy as care workers are trained to do, you will absorb some of the emotions they are feeling. A simple example of this is if you sit with someone who is happy and energetic, your own mood and energy levels will lift a little.

I describe this to service users as like a radiator, the emotions come off the person and in the same way you get warm if you stand next to a hot radiator, those emotions can affect you.

This works both ways, not just with positive emotions but with less positive emotions too. When you are deep in a conversation with a service user talking about feeling hopeless and suicidal, or describing the abusive childhood they experienced, it can have a profound affect on you. It can make you want to cry, it can make you angry, and it can make you feel scared and helpless.

Within clinical NHS settings the approach taken is that the therapist should be an emotional blank slate, never letting what they are feeling show. There is much debate about whether this is the correct or best approach to therapy, or whether a more congruent approach is more productive – an approach where the therapist allows what they are feeling to be appropriately communicated to the client.

You may have guessed already that my own stance does not lie with the clinical approach. But why is this? I feel that the clinical approach does not model a realistic relationship, and since many people with mental health issues struggle with relationships in some way, this is an important element of therapy. I also wonder what it does to the therapist, to construct and maintain such a detachment from their own emotions.

Taking a step back to the STR role, a client-centred approach is vital when talking to service users.

Posted in Psychology and tagged , , , , , | Leave a Comment
17 Nov 2011

Finding my Feet

It feels like things have gone from zero to sixty in no time at all and I’m left behind spinning on the spot. Things aren’t that bad really, but I am feeling like I am struggling to keep up!

I have been given a new piece of work on placement and I feel completely out of my depth! I am supposed to be reviewing research and providing a report along the lines of “what psychological models underpin effective treatment in a forensic setting?” I am having two main problems though, one is that I know almost nothing about psychological models used in offender treatment (the only one I am familiar with is DiClemente and Prochaska’s Stages of Change model). The next problem is my tendency to overdo things and get pulled off at angles (that is not a euphamism! I can already guess who of you are smirking right now!). I suppose this comes from my need to feel like I really understand something before I can comfortably write about it, so rather than just researching the title topic I have a habit of trying to read all the literature on the general topic! I currently have about two hundred pages of articles and six books I am intending to read. Of course realistically this just isn’t going to happen!

And I’m so damn exhausted all the time!

Posted in Forensic Placement, Psychology and tagged , , , , , | Leave a Comment
12 Jul 2011
3 Comments

Seeking Help

I go through phases of feeling there is really something wrong with me, then changing and wondering if it is all my imagination, if really there is nothing wrong with me and I am making mountains out of molehills. So when the letter finally came to say I had been referred to a clinical psychologist, at a time when (possibly thanks to medication) I have been doing well and been depression-free for some time…well let’s just say it took some convincing for me to actually call up for an appointment.

“We don’t have any appointments free. I will call you when we do.” It was hard enough for me to hear that, but I can’t help imagining how others might feel – people in more desperate situations than me, people more sensitive to “rejection”, people who found it even harder just to make that one call. I can’t believe the government is cutting funding to mental health services and charities when what resources we have are already overworked!

I have since had the afore-mentioned call back and booked an appointment. Once again the appointment is ages away – plenty of time for me to convince myself that nothing is really wrong!

On a side note I watched an interesting film the other about mental ill-health: Spider. It was a good film, and had quite an interesting portrayal of the mental illness of tho protagonist. Has anyone else seen this?

Finally I would like to say a quick hi to PianoMaths *waves* (excuse lack of proper link, its a pain on mobile!). PianoMaths kept me company tonight and convinced me to try sleeping. So now s shall do just night!

Nini all!

Posted in Personal and tagged , , ,
17 Nov 2010
2 Comments

The Therapy Issue

ThornsWell, this happened some time ago, but it’s taken till now to write about it.
I am new to therapy. It’s taken some while to open up to a therapist, even with my generally open attitude to things. Seriously, ask me almost anything and I’m happy to talk about it. But there are a few things that will take a while for me to volunteer, not least because I don’t want to admit it to myself.

I had finally started opening up to my new therapist. Just started to admit things to them that I was barely able to admit to myself. The first twenty minutes of the session were about this kind of thing. Then I mentioned something that ruined everything. Two weeks previously I discovered that one of the friends I had met at university, a friend that I had gotten quite close to, shared the same therapist as me. I hadn’t mentioned this in the session I had immediately after discovering it because it’s not something that generally comes up easily in conversation and because my friend had stopped therapy with this therapist a few weeks earlier due to not feeling comfortable with them.

When I did mention it I was in a state of pre-crisis. I knew that the next week or so was going to be incredibly difficult because I was going to talk to my partner at the time about how I felt the relationship wasn’t working (and again, as in a previous post, I stress that this was not a fault of either of us). When I needed a therapist most, when I needed that support and help, I was let down in a horrible way. I told the therapist (Susan Raftery of Uxbridge) that I was building a strong friendship with this friend, and I was met with very accusative language. I mentioned early in the conversation that I hadn’t be quite forward with her the previous week because I hadn’t admitted to knowing this mutual aquaintance in the previous meeting, however the language that I received was very negative: “YOU haven’t been honest with me” “YOU have put ME in a very difficult position”. It was horribly negative, and accusative. “I will have to think about whether I can continue being your therapist” she said. Twenty minutes into the session I left in tears saying “there is nothing more to talk about”.

I understand conflict of interest. Kind of. I mean, it’s not that unusual for a therapist in a small town to have clients that know each other surely? What I really didn’t like was the incredibly negative and accusative talk. *We* hadn’t put her in any kind of position. We had no control over meeting each other. We had no control over happening to share the same therapist. So how the fuck were we to blame for anything that happened??

A week later the therapist called me and said “I cannot continue being your therapist”. To which I responded that I could not continue to be her client considering her reaction! She then called my friend (who was stood next to me at the time) and had a long conversation with her including such quality breaches of my confidentiality like telling her how many therapy sessions I had had, and pretty much accusing me (to my close friend) of lying about what had happened.

So I am no longer in therapy. Not only that, but I do not now feel like I can trust a therapist again. It will take a hell of a lot for me to be able to open up to a therapist, least of all trust that they will be there when I need them most. I have started free counselling at my university, but having someone to bitch at each week doesn’t come close to having someone who will help you explore, understand, and resolve deep psychological issues. So the past few weeks have been a complete mess, and for the first time in years I am actually considering talking to my doctor about going back on medication (which I hate).

Oh yeah, they can’t do that because they lost my diagnosis.
But that’s another story.

Posted in Mental Health, Personal and tagged ,

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