After rereading this book six years later, I have some new understandings.
Teacher Xi Juan has many fans, who are attracted by her flexible and powerful consulting style and her compassion, creativity and life energy.
Here are some reading summaries:
In my daily work, I find it much more interesting to accompany students to face various topics than to teach geography, which is what I want to do more in my heart.
"Speaking out" is a rare thing in itself, and there is no need to do anything about "speaking and expressing". People often create new possibilities in their own narratives.
From the perspective of listening, I believe that narrative itself will produce some possibilities and evolution, but I am not in such a hurry to do anything in listening.
My expectation for myself is that my listening can always be closer to visitors, break through the shackles of mainstream culture, and get close to the values, beliefs and actions cherished in people's hearts or relationships.
Life is a place to meet different challenges constantly. Before one challenge is overcome, the next life challenge appears.
I found that the problems and challenges are just appearances, in fact, they are all aimed at stimulating our potential to tap our undeveloped strength. Although it may be extremely hard and uncomfortable to face them, we will gradually discover in the process of tempering that we can face problems and challenges with richer and stronger ourselves. It seems that the purpose of problems and challenges in our life is to find ourselves and know ourselves.
Try to accompany people to get close to their own strength in the dialogue. Now I am not in a hurry to help people solve problems quickly.
It is often said that each case needs to find a suitable consultant or consultant. It may be suitable for some people, but it may not be suitable for everyone, so the matching of cases and consultants is also a running-in process.
I am very grateful to Judy for her help and dedication, but maybe her professional taste is too strong for me. These feelings are just an intuition. Now think about it carefully, in fact, those uncomfortable feelings coincide with my current concept, that is, "de-expert", and no longer use the existing family therapy theory to define all families.
When you have some consulting experience, you can start asking yourself: What kind of consulting experience do you like as a consultant? Why? What experiences do you dislike? Why? What did you learn the most from the consultation of these consultants? What will these studies bring to your own reflection and practice in providing consultation?
Parents hope that their children can feel warm, and they will not give up easily through their care and care.
If you leave the consulting major or get off work, of course, you should take off the role of consultant and live and talk as you please.
Counselors should also let go of the expectation of helping others after work and live a normal life.
Can I consult my friends and family? According to my professional training, the answer is no, in order to avoid the neutral position brought about by the dual relationship.
But if there is an urgent problem, you can try it. But if there is more demand, this friend must find another consultant. Therefore, it is necessary to clarify the role from the beginning to avoid unrealistic expectations of friends.
Interview with anthropology. The interview of anthropological thinking is how to ask the families of husband and wife about their life experiences at different stages of life.
No treatment, no treatment, but understanding. Let the family review, sort out, precipitate and reflect in the narrative.
My role is a student-like visitor, asking more questions and opening up the space for telling stories.
The direction of the visit is roughly like this:
Please tell us how your life is now.
What life experiences make you satisfied and happy?
What life experiences are difficult and challenging?
How do you want to face and manage these difficulties and challenges?
These anthropological interviews, seemingly non-therapeutic problems, contain countless therapeutic significance.
Cases, relatives and friends can visit. Of course, this kind of interview also needs to be trained in advance, understand its concept and grasp the spirit of asking questions, so that the designed questions will be in place.
This is an understanding interview, not a problem-solving interview.
Structured interviews can design questions in advance, or some questions, and some semi-structured interviews can be designed temporarily in on-site interviews.
The key point is: design questions according to the theme, let go of your own presupposition, and let the interviewee complete his story well, without dealing with and solving it, but constantly curious and understanding.
Interview intention: Keep asking the interviewee to tell more stories about his experience. This kind of interview is non-interference, non-processing and non-suggestion. It is completely devoted to researching and collecting the stories of the interviewees, which usually takes at least one or two hours.
Anthropological interviews can train visitors' listening, attention, comprehension, curiosity and reaction ability.
Consulting is not easy: once you become a consultant, people from all directions begin to have high expectations of him.
People tend to have a "myth" about consultants. They believe that once people learn to become consultants through different channels, they will certainly know how to face all kinds of difficulties and challenges in life and can quickly adjust to the best state.
I have found from many foreign counselors that no matter how great they are, when they encounter different life topics, they will go through shock, pain, struggle or dark period like those who have never studied psychological counseling, and they will need time to debug, and sometimes even get stuck for many years before they come out slowly.
I said to a graduate student, "If my mother has been repeating the same story for decades, it means that there are more stories behind this story, which have not been told, seen or heard." What stories have mothers been telling for decades?
Do you want to try to ask your mother how you grew up after this? How can I lose my mother's love for you and still love my children when I grow up? How did that love come from? How did you do that? What was the hardest part of your childhood? How can you go through such a big loss and take care of your child so well? If your mother sees her daughter in heaven, she is loved by students and takes good care of her family. What do you think is the most rare thing about her daughter? "
After listening to my question, the graduate student made it clear. She has never been curious about her mother's experience, nor has she realized her mother's difficulties, so that she can know how to be with her mother when she gets home.
Counseling and life will gradually merge, which is a fusion of attitudes, but not reluctantly, so it will take some time.
In fact, every school has its own uniqueness and development. Just like making friends, everyone has his own characteristics, but whether he can become a friend depends on fate, whether he will come or not.
It is a very good practice to use movies and novels to cooperate with theoretical analysis, which is an intellectual fusion.
Teachers will ask us to use movies or novels to present different theoretical analysis cases. Also write: What would I do if I were a consultant? How will I consult?
Self-monitoring: During the consultation, you can conduct self-monitoring when the case allows you to record, video, record and print a verbatim transcript.
You can ask yourself: What theory is affecting you in your dialogue work, or what ideas, ideas and assumptions are affecting your dialogue with visitors, or the perspective of looking at cases.
This can bring you a lot of reflection, learning and growth, and you don't need to rely on others.
I have students who have studied psychodrama and game therapy for many years, and then studied narrative therapy for many years. They are constantly merging. See how to wander, play and create between the three schools. I also accompanied him to integrate, explore and find the possibility of cooperation among the three schools.
Integration itself has no standard answer.
No matter how complicated the case is. How difficult it is for us to solve problems for them, but we can always open up various possibilities by asking appropriate questions. The following examples are sentences that I often share with students and can tell visitors.
Your question is really complicated. Have you had a chance to say this before?
What do you think of that?
Thank you for telling me this challenging question.
I heard four key points, 1234, right? Which do you prefer to talk about first?
Only by constantly learning from them, making them understand their spiritual values and their persistence and efforts in the face of difficulties through humility, respect, curiosity and different dialogues can I bring them changes.
Young, limited experience, what can I do?
I think it is the process of constantly thinking about how to ask questions to start people to know, accept, cherish and thank themselves more. I am working harder and harder on how to ask questions, and dare not say that I am an expert in solving people's problems.
I hope I am a witness to accompany people to find inner strength to face their own difficulties.
Therefore, a fundamental theme after learning psychological counseling is how we listen to visitors.
Some counselors feel that just listening is too passive to reflect the value of counselors. When I ask him, visitors can talk well and counselors can listen attentively. What are the tourists' feelings?
When consulting, I usually say: it seems that listening well is also valuable.
I asked him at the beginning of the interview, how do you want me to accompany you in this interview?
He said, can you make the teacher listen to me carefully? Because I never had a chance to talk about it.
Two hours later, he told me that it was all over and I could start interviewing her. I tried to accompany, witness and visit her and her lover's strength and emotion through narrative perspective. Finally, I tried to ask her late lover what she would say to him if she saw her persistence along the way. She said that her lover would say that she had grown up, and he was relieved.
After listening carefully, the follow-up visit can be carried out very well, and accompany her to sort out this life course that she didn't have a chance to sort out in the past.
So listen carefully and understand what the visitors want us to hear.
Most novice consultants are very afraid of the silence of visitors and always try to deal with it.
I also had this experience when I was consulting in the early days, which seemed to represent the failure and uselessness of the consultant himself. Now I feel more and more that there may be a story behind silence. Don't worry about turning silence into expression at once, and being with his silence. Let visitors feel that he is not a failed case.
Try to create a space for dialogue, so that silence becomes comfortable without being labeled as pathological.
You can first establish a trust relationship and understand information other than the problem. What does he like and where does he live? How did he come to the clinic?
There are many reasons for silence, some of which may be beyond our understanding, so accepting silence or slowly understanding the ideas behind silence has always been kind, which our consultants can practice.
I said to my mother: it doesn't matter, as long as the girl can come. Many teenagers will choose not to participate, and I am grateful that the girl can come.
I found that only by taking care of myself can I accompany different people in a better state, so taking care of myself is also an important and beautiful responsibility for me.
After facing, sorting out, reflecting and understanding the experience, it seems that the experience is not so negative. Moreover, the relationship between the parties and the experience is no longer a hostile relationship, but a friend relationship, which is a kind of integration.