Critical Course Reflection Essay Example

Most of the theories that I have learned in this course will assist, in future while executing my career, especially when working with families. One, psychoanalysis theory was developed by Sigmund Freud who asserted that there are unconscious forces that drive behavior ("Five Counseling Theories and Approaches," 2017). The techniques help counselors to facilitate clients to talk freely about what comes in their mind without censoring. As a counselor, I will be able to redirect my focus and energy on analyzing past relationships that led a client to be traumatized during his/her childhood and relate them to the current life conditions of an individual. The idea is that when a person reveals and bring past traumatizing events, his/her treatment and healing occurs with a lot of ease. Although the technique involves a lot of time in order to understand someone, it has been proven to yield positive results on the brain of the clients.

The second theory that will be useful for my future career is the humanistic approach, which guides therapist to care more about the present and help the client achieve his/her highest potential. It believes in the goodness of all folks and emphasizes on an individuals self-actualization and self-growth. A client-centered therapy focuses on the belief that a person controls their destinies. The approach will facilitate my work by ensuring am genuine and interested in delivering quality care to my clients. It will enable me to ensure that clients find the meaning in their life by concentrating on self-determination, free will, and responsibility.

In future, I might not apply a cognitive theory which focuses on how individuals thinking can alter behaviors and feelings. The reason why I will not implement this technique is that it does not focus on the real causes of the problem. It is brief in nature and only emphases on the present situation of the clients. Another approach that I will not apply to my career is a behavioral theory. The theory was formulated by Ivan Pavlov, after studying the effects of learned response using a dog that used to salivate when it heard the bell ringing because it associated bell with food after learning for given period ("Five Counseling Theories and Approaches," 2017). Another reason for not applying the technique is because it focuses on rewarding the clients to increase possibilities of positive behavior and punishing the person to reduce the occurrence of negative behaviors. This means that in case, a client is not rewarded after showing a positive behavior, he might go back to harmful actions.

One of the tools that I will bring in my future career is to understand and address issues from a multicultural perspective. It will involve engaging clients from other cultures and openly acknowledge differences that exist between various communities (Furman et al., 2010). I should also do reflection on my personal feeling, prejudices, and stereotypical ideas towards clients from other cultures. This will help me to be self-aware and gain new information that will shape my professional identity.

The concern that I have working with the Hispanic community is the heterogeneity of society due to their various places of origin such as Mexico, Columbia, Cuba, and Puerto Rico (Furman et al., 2010). Each of these people requires a customized therapy, and each of these cultures speaks different languages. For instance, Puerto Rican people have a tendency of speaking loudly, and this is mostly viewed as yelling by people who are not familiar with the culture. One of the things that I have taken from this course is that I should articulate approaches of counseling in a way that they are culturally sensitive to the belief and values of every community am working with in my career. Lastly, I should identify interventions that have been proven through research to be effective for a community that I will be working with as a family counselor.

References

Five Counseling Theories and Approaches - Blog. (2017). Counseling.northwestern.edu. Retrieved from https://counseling.northwestern.edu/five-counseling-theories-and-approaches/

Furman, R., Negi, N., Iwamoto, D., Rowan, D., Shukraft, A., & Gragg, J. (2010). Social Work Practice with Latinos: Key Issues for Social Workers. Social Work, 54(2), 167-174. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/sw/54.2.167