Success of Helping

At the beginning of my counseling practicum, I set a goal to feel a clear measure of difference in my level of confidence in treatment planning, and to be able to better see and articulate reasonable goals for a client.

This is one of the areas where I am most pleased with the changes that have come about from this experience. I definitely feel more confident in reasonable treatment planning and goal, largely because I have a much better understanding of what reasonable goals can look like.

When I was becoming frustrated with the fact that we continued to meet and yet I was seeing no healthy or positive change in the behavior of the girls, my supervisor told me two things that were extremely helpful in this area. For one, she explained the idea of trajectory. She said that if a client is on one path, if you stretch out that path to a long-term conclusion, you will end up in one place. But if you are able to change a client’s trajectory, even a tiny bit, even one degree, it doesn’t look like really anything right at the beginning – there is barely any difference at all. But, if you follow that out to the long term, you will see that much later, the ending places of two different trajectories (even two that were only off by the smallest bit) are quite different.

The other thing she told me was that you might not see any changes in their behavior right now. The only thing you might do is to show them that their behavior is not the only way that things can be but that there are actually other choices. Even if that is the only thing you accomplish and they keep acting just as they did and the only thing that is different is that they see now other options (even if they don’t take them), that is actually a huge thing. If they only ever saw one inevitable path, then their future is set in stone. But if you can help them to see the existence of other paths, who knows what they might choose in the future.

This feedback was extremely helpful for me, as I was able to see that success in counseling cannot only be measure by radical, immediate, behavioral change. In fact, it can often not be measured by that. This perspective allowed me to have much greater hope for the long-term benefits of having planted some healthy seeds, even if I don’t ever see them grow.