Essay On Mitigating Issues Faced By Nascent Therapists

Psychological Counselling is effective for addressing various issues and helps deal with anxiety and stress. It is considered the stepping stone toward the manifestation of psychological issues, and resolving mental problems can be achieved by necessary treatments (Hanley, 2021). This process provides a private and safe space for individuals to express their issues to a professional. The therapists are registered and trained to provide an empathetic and genuine response to relieve an individual from an adverse mental condition by using requisite tools. Therapists can administer Counselling in different settings concerning its type and necessity (CPA, 2022). This paper aims to discuss the importance of Counselling and the significance of therapists as well as the major issues they face and deriving standard mitigating techniques. It will also explain the different processes of channelising those issues by developing necessary adaptable techniques.

 

 

Counselling is a professional psychological treatment administered with a broad range of culturally sensitive and informed practices to improve the psychological wellbeing of people with mental issues. It is beneficial as it increases the functional ability, accentuates coping with uncertain situations, and alleviates and prevents negative emotions from making a long-term impact on the mind (Cuijpers, Reijnders & Huibers, 2019). This mental health rejuvenating process effectively promotes positivity and wellbeing to deal with transitions and difficulties in professional and personal life and impacts physical health. Clients can vividly identify and understand different viewpoints and evaluate any problem by seeing it as a diorama after going through this healing process.

 

Mental health professionals engage with individuals, children and families to implement and increase psycho-education, promote advocacy and provide support for prevention (APA, 2022). The therapist helps their clients to develop a better understanding of executive functioning and constructs needed emotional skills for decreasing significant symptoms of psychological illness. A therapist always tries to serve essential mental health services in an empathetic, genuine and unbiased way to provide authentic and objective guidance to achieve maximum mental peace (Walsh, Cassidy & Priebe, 2017).

 

The major practices of a psychotherapist include being attentive to the client, observing the client minutely, analysing the situation or issues faced by the client and developing comforting strategies for the client to reduce distress (Heinonen & Nissen-Lie, 2020). Furthermore, concerning mental health diagnosis, the therapist tries to identify the particular past or present incidents that influence the adverse mental health of the client, reduce the symptoms, change the behavioural pattern, modify cognitive ability or thinking pattern, and inspire to introspect to understand the perspectives of others (Relojo-Howell, 2022). Psychotherapists work in different settings, including the community centre, mental health hospitals and clinics, general hospitals, schools or other educational institutions, military, corporate or governmental workplaces, private clinics and even on online platforms.

 

A psychotherapist requires skills in different areas to assist the clients in getting rid of their past traumatic episodes or current events and help in managing these symptoms. The effective skills required in a therapist include active listening to the clients with no disruptions to make the clients feel attended to, important and supported. It is crucial to maintain respect and confidentiality of the clients and needs to be strictly practised by professional counsellors (Lamont-Mills, Christensen & Moses, 2018). Keeping the credential data private, maintaining professional boundaries, and maintaining legal and ethical responsibilities are other significant skills requisite in a psychotherapist (Darby & Weinstock, 2018). Moreover, resilience, emotional robustness and patience are other critical issues sufficiently essential in a psychotherapist. In addition, a psychotherapist must remain unbiased and non-judgemental and be an acceptable critique with maintaining their ethical principles.

 

Psychotherapists are required to adopt suitable training to deal with clients having emotional discomfort and mental issues with definite symptoms. Besides, the therapists need to possess the critical thinking ability that can help them to see the client's situation from outsiders' perspectives, analyse the disturbing elements acting as precipitating factors and evaluate the situation concerning providing the condition of the clients (Lundh, 2019). It can also help to diagnose accurately and suggest necessary feedback or referrals to the clients. In addition, the problem-solving skills of the therapists assist them in examining and evaluating any situation to derive a suitable solution and deducing necessary treatment plans for the patients to increase their coping mechanisms (Muntigl, 2020).

 

Beginning counsellors face some common problems while administering Counselling, and this can raise complications in a range of professional areas. It was seen in several scientific studies that significant issues are faced in different sectors such as lack of adept in the job, mental health problems of the therapist, dissatisfaction in job and many more (Etherington, 2017). The most prevalent challenges are lack of needful training and lack of exposure to the application. It restricts the therapists from implementing their theoretical knowledge into pragmatic practice.

 

 

Moreover, keeping personal judgement aside and avoiding incorporation of biasness or stigma is another difficult issue that requires to be negated while administering Counselling or therapies. Concerning this, as the clients belong from different cultural backgrounds with distinctive values, emotions, and ethnicity divergent from the cultural background of the therapist, it makes their treatment process difficult (Walsh, Cassidy & Priebe, 2017). This is because the influence of judgement sometimes affects the therapy and deduces biasness from the therapist leading to hesitation and reluctance or overdependence from the client.

 

 

In addition, therapists face a massive challenge while handling reluctant patients who are hesitant to open up and possess a negative approach or are sceptical about embarrassment, shyness and guilt during the counselling process. Young adult or adolescent clients with mental health issues mostly show arrogance or rebelliousness toward the therapist owing to non-willing indulgence in Counselling (Stige et al. 2021). Consequently, it becomes difficult for the counsellor to build rapport, share mental health problems and derive suitable treatment procedures.

 

 

Burnout of the therapists is another major issue that psychotherapists mostly face. The therapists need to listen attentively to the emotional trauma of numerous patients consecutively and handle them with care to derive a suitable solution for their mental wellbeing (Kotera et al., 2021). It causes immense work stress within them and creates emotional draining or exhaustion, which ultimately leads to mental health deprivation. Everyday pressure leads to burnout and stress, affecting the professional performance and personal ability of the psychotherapists.

 

 

Maintaining proper professional boundaries to restrict building any relationship also is a major issue faced by therapists. The continuous appearance of a client and prolonged treatment implementation on a particular client leads to over-dependency of the client on the therapist. It sometimes turns out to break the boundaries, creates a limitation for the client, and develops urges to build a personal relationship with the therapist (Stoll, Müller & Trachsel, 2020). This is considered unethical, and sometimes, the therapist can terminate the treatment process for stubborn clients to constrain them from building the relationship.

 

Several strategies can be adapted and considered by therapists to reduce the challenges of increasing their professional efficiency. The most significant is not to avoid the mental health issues and the psychological needs of a therapist by consulting with a counsellor to counter the psychological illness developments such as anxiety, depression and emotional fatigue. Deriving job satisfaction can only be possible by consulting with hierarchies, identifying the disrupting issues, regulating the working process and following a specific work schedule for coping with professional stress (Murphy et al. 2018). Moreover, accepting diversity, acknowledging differences and adapting to the differences can help therapists to put their judgments and biases aside (Wade, 2022).

 

 

Coping with a reluctant client becomes difficult to deal with as it derives several challenges in the treatment procedure and therapy administration. The most beneficial way of eradicating this challenge is to handle those patients calmly and composedly. That can be achieved by expressing empathy, building a positive relationship, using kind language and voice intonation, applying paradoxical interventions and giving them time to be open (Laverdière, Ogrodniczuk & Kealy, 2019). Concerning the desire and pace of the client, the therapist requires building rapport, planning suitable treatment and drawing a planned mutual goal for achieving the mental stasis of the client.

 

Moreover, burnout can be avoided by following certain steps and following a specific schedule, as well as a defined number of cases to handle in a particular interval. It will help them to deal with several clients and prohibit them from working with superimposed professional stress generated by enormous clients (Finan, McMahon, & Russell, 2022). Strictly mentioning the boundaries and making the clients understand and request to adhere to the ethical regulations is an effective way of resolving issues regarding relationship building. Additionally, the maintenance of certain rules from the therapist's end from the initial period of the treatment helps in implementing balance between the professional and personal lives of both the clients and the therapists persistently (Stoll, Müller & Trachsel, 2020).  

 

Thus, it can be concluded that Counselling is a beneficial method administered by trained therapists from the very beginning of their careers. Certain crucial skills and responsibilities require adhering to while practising therapy on clients. Several challenges can be faced by the therapist while being actively engaged in the therapeutic process. As a result, specific mitigating strategies can be considered and adopted by the therapists to eliminate adversity and challenges; they face in their professional life. 

 

APA. (2022). Counselling Psychology. Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/ed/graduate/specialize/counseling

 

 

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