Counselling Session to Help an Adolescence Boy Having Trouble Focusing During School
For this counselling session, I was lucky to get a younger friend who often loo up to me for mentorship and encourage as the volunteer. Apart from being a friend, he is also a family member though a far cousin. It was an interview that took around 20 minutes with satisfactory results which bordered more on reality than a volunteer playacting the role of an adolescent, the friend is actually an adolescent hence it made my interview more real and easy to internalize.
The experience of interviewing the friend with the aim of counseling turned out to be a marvelous one despite first having apprehensions. It is the closest I have ever come to counselling in real lie and as a learning counsellor, this was an exiting moment that was personal. Taking into account the depth of the revelations that he was giving to me about his struggles, I for the first time felt the sense of being trusted with highly personal information and the notion that it had to remain confidential. Throughout the session, the thought that the young friend might feel like I am taking advantage of our friendship to get detailed information from him kept coming to me in my framing of the questions, however, I constantly strived to keep the entire interview professional. The interviewee was able to help me understand the struggles of an adolescent especially in school and the image of an adolescent who is torn between commitment to his academics and the social influence that would not help him at the end of it was well brought out in the session.
The fact that despite being close friends and relatives back at home and still I managed to keep the session professional without evoking the emotions of daily friendship that would compromise the objectivity of the session was the most rewarding feeling that I had in the entire session. It was also rewarding to know through the interview that the social pressure at school between my age group and that of my subject were quite significant despite the very minimal age...
This taught me how much counselling isodynamic and need to be adaptive to the situation as opposed to approaching counselling with a premeditated perspective.
The least rewarding of all the activities that we engaged in during the interview was the inability to get tangible information from his childhood and previous background that would help in understanding his current situation. This may have been occasioned by the assumption that I knew his background yet in the process I overlooked so factors.
This above was coupled up by the most challenging aspect of the session which was balancing on the thin line between keeping the interview professional and focusing on the challenge of lack of focus at school, and having the influence of his background interfering with my thought process, interpretation of his answers and my framing of the questions. There were instances when, after I had asked a question, I felt that it was a question framed from my previous daily knowledge of him and I should have framed the question differently. At times it was also very challenging on what to take as the honest answer and work with especially when he gave an answer that I knew was not the true one. I realized that counselling is a tricky field and keeping the session professional as opposed to reverting to family pool of knowledge was not easy and needed a lot of practice. More challenging was application of the information provided towards solving the challenge at hand.
There were several skills that came out naturally during the interview, but the most outstanding was the ability to implement the active listening skills in the session. I gave more time to the interviewee to talk than I did and this enabled him to ventilate his thoughts, challenges and perspective as I also had the time to take note of the critical points and note them down, This approach of allocating the subject more time to talk also gave me the space to frame more intrusive questions in line with the answers that he gave. In situations where I found myself talking more than…
