Realizing the overlooked facts

I had a role play last week and it was a really priceless lesson i had with a music therapist, Mr James. He is also one of the psychology lecturer in UCSI. I was assigned to play the role of the therapist, using client-centered therapy. It was one of the humanistic approach, which focuses on client's feelings and more "informal". It sounded easy but based on the lecturer, it was actually the toughest approach and it requires years of training. For me, every single words to be used in this session shall be picked carefully and for normal  person without training, we need to think twice or even think for a few days to see whether it is appropriate to the therapy or does it matches all the criteria.

Let me brief this therapy. There are a few important techniques we need to follow to conduct this therapy session. The first is empathy. We do not ask the client question and we normally use open ended question to know something. The second technique would be unconditional positive regard. It's very important to show the client that you are interested in the conversation and willing to help him/her. This can be shown by our body language and also gestures. And, it is very important that the therapist shall never make any judgement to the client. Genuineness is also one of the techniques. The therapist shall share a little of his/her real life experience to the client to show genuine, to make the client feel you understand him/her more since you have also came across that problem. Last but not least is the active listening. The therapist will use a lot of the paraphrasing technique to clarify or understand how the client feels. Basically, these are all we need to know in this level. Frankly speaking, before i am introduced to therapy sessions, i feel it is useless. I thought everybody can do it. However, it seems to be skillful because it was not easy and it is to be said, professional.

The lecturer has never stop emphasized that therapist should not give advice to their clients. The therapist have to be really good in communicating to lead their clients to find the answers their own. We human has actually contain a lots of so called bull shits thinking in our mind. For example, I am such an idiot if I do not get A for this class, it was such an easy subject, and an idiot shall not live in this world. For another approach, the therapist will challenge the client by making him/her realizing, who said failing is an idiot? who has proved that an idiot shall not survive in this world? It's not that we shall not set a goal in our life, setting a goal is important, but we can actually eliminate the bull shits word from a sentence. For example, I MUST get CGPA 4.0 in this semester, if not my life will be like hell. We can change it to, it will be NICE if i get 4.0 for my CGPA. Or, in higher demand, we can make the sentence to become I WOULD LIKE TO get 4.0 for my CGPA.

 Besides that, in my own role play, i have wrote this sentence " I know how you feel" in my script to show my unconditional positive regard. I thought it was good enough but the lecturer let me realized the fact that, therapist should be professional. Everybody will know how to say this whenever a someone approach you and tell you that he/she is upset or something. So rather than saying I know how you feel, we should also use another techniques to lead the client to talk more and understand more about his/her feelings. Another example is a client have difficulty in communicating with his/her parents. He/she did not want to go to the university his/her parents have chosen because of some reasons and was wondering how to express himself/herself to let his/her parents to know about it. It's so stupid to say the things that many people already know. For example, this university is expensive. I'll give another better example here, for example two branded cleanser one is made in America the other is made in Korea. The sales point should not be, these two products are branded. Everybody know SKII is branded right? In another way, the salesman/salesgirl should promote it in this way, Korea branded cleanser is a better option for me(a chinese) because Koreans have the same skin colour as we are. Thus, we will automatically have this type of "stereotype" that they understand us better since they also have the same skin. They know exactly the way to brightens our skin. The lecturer was awesome to pin-point these mini-mini stuffs that we overlooked sometimes. 

Okay, this pic is totally random. HAHA. Long or short fringe? :p

HOWEVER, It's another long post. Just wana share what i have learnt in class :) amazing critical thinkings.