placements

My female owner is currently doing her 4th placement (or 5th, if you consider the 100hour she clocked in Woodbridge Hospital in her previous job).

1st placement: Triple P Clinic
Was a good starting place because the manualised programme (parent training) is structured and all she had to do was to adjust accordingly to the family’s unique circumstances. Supervision was good, stable and beneficial.

2nd placement: University Clinic
A highly stressful experience, due to short timeline, variety of cases and a dodgy supervisor who was neither reliable (told her to go drinking at the pubs to get a sense of Aussie culture) nor dedicated (cancelled sessions and more). To soothe her anxiety, she over-prepared for her clients by reading up on therapeutic techniques to deal with their presenting problems (i.e. content).

She also took up several neuropsychological assessments to beef up her clinical hours. That also had an exponential effect on the amount of time she had to spend on writing reports. Her hard work was unexpectedly recognised when a client wrote in to the university with a $200 donation in recognition of her “good service”. Note: she was being supervised by a neuropsychologist for all these cases. So her dodgy supervisor had no part to play in this.

3rd placement: Residential aged care
You have heard heaps about her grouses. Certainly a very dark period of 2009 for her. A great sense of frustration, stuckness and incompetence followed her through the months. Unfamiliar with older adults, she also spent a great deal of time reading up on different kinds of therapy (e.g. reminiscence, grief and loss counselling etc) and later found that she could barely use any, coz the older adults were not engaged in therapy.

Supervision was technical (“so what are the three good things you did? What are three things you can improve on? What would you have done differently?”) and a chore. She wanted to skip supervision so many times, but held on, in the name of being professional. The silver lining in the placement? Being paid for it.

4th placement: Private school
She decided to deal with her professional anxiety about over-preparing for clients. Hence, she chose to focus less on content but more on process issues. E.g. building rapport, therapeutic alliance, being with the student (rather than just doing things), a lot more reflective listening, validation, flowing with the student’s needs, being more alert and sensitive to non-verbals, giving space and being comfortable with silence etc.

A couple of significant changes she made: making sure she has enough sleep to keep herself in tip-top condition to be with her students, not wasting time reading on techniques but in-session, focussing on being with her students, reading their body language and using herself (as person) as the main therapeutic tool (as opposed to her knowledge of effective therapeutic interventions).

Supervision has been awesome. Her supervisor has been supportive and enlightening. She gently corrected my female owner’s misconceptions about different issues, and brought in alternative perspectives during case discussions. My female owner feels that her strategy for this placement is bearing fruits. She finds herself more confident and less anxious when seeing students. To top it off, a student with severe depression recently wrote in to her teacher, thanking her teacher for referring her to my female owner. My female owner had not implemented any therapeutic techniques (think good old CBT) in the five sessions she had with her. All she did was to sit and be with the student, allowing her to talk about anything that is on her mind and when appropriate, reflect to provide emotional support. Seems like process skills are highly important in working with this population.