On Becoming a Counselling Psychologist: Making Sense of Presence

Abstract

This reflective essay offers a personal account of my experience during my counselling psychology training. Research highlights that the person of the therapist contributes to clients’ improvement beyond the intervention, advocating the importance of personal development beyond a competency-based model. Consonantly, counselling psychology appreciates how practitioners bring their “self” to the therapeutic relationship, thus valuing their training, wider knowledge, and lived experiences. Accordingly, I will explore significant events that illuminate the personal dimension of my professional practice while also considering the wider empirical knowledge. Furthermore, as the beginning of my training has focused on the person-centered/experiential approach, I will conceptualize my experience within the framework posited by Rogers. Specifically, I will begin by reflecting on the theme of power to expose how personal issues might affect my development as a trainee. Second, I will illustrate how engaging with feedback has brought to awareness aspects of my “self” that relate to the theme of acceptance. Third, I will consider personal strengths that have the potential to enrich my practice and are encapsulated by the theme of lightness. Last, I will suggest the theme of presence as my attempt to make sense of challenges and limitations that I have faced during my training. By presenting these themes, I endeavor to offer a picture of how I have grown into a new place in my development as trainee counselling psychologist.