Psychological counseling emotional reflection examples

Emotional reflection within the scope of psychological counseling is essentially a non-conscious reaction in which the counselor projects his or her own unprocessed emotional trauma, unfinished issues, and inherent values ​​onto the client during the work process. The most common practical scenarios in clinical practice can be classified into three categories: over-involvement, issue avoidance, and value prejudgment. However, there are always different schools of controversy in the industry on whether "emotional reflection is an absolute work error." It is not a black and white issue.

Xiao Zhou, a novice consultant who I met at the internship site when I first entered the industry, stepped through this trap. At that time, she received a visit from a junior girl, who cried and said that her parents forced her to drop out of school and work to save money for her brother to pay the down payment for a wedding house. She also said that "it is useless for a girl to read so many books." Xiao Zhou herself had almost broken up with her family the year before because her parents asked her to use all her savings to repay her brother's mortgage. Before she could resolve this issue in her personal experience, she broke down first and burst into tears faster than during the visit. She blurted out, "Don't be soft. I felt sorry for my parents who gave me 20,000 yuan at the beginning. Now they are asking me for money every day. If you compromise, you will never be able to get rid of this burden in your life." At first, I was still debating whether to communicate with my parents to get the chance to continue studying. When I saw the counselor crying like this, I panicked. Instead, I took out a piece of paper and comforted Xiao Zhou. The focus of the consultation was completely misaligned, and I never made an appointment again after the visit.

Compared with this overflow of emotions on the surface, some emotional reflections are so deeply hidden that it is difficult for even the counselor himself to detect them at the first time. I used to supervise a counselor who had been practicing for five years and had a solid reputation for providing intimate relationship counseling. However, whenever the topic of "pregnancy infidelity" was mentioned during the visit, he would subconsciously change the topic and either abruptly pull back to "Let's focus on your own feelings first" or jump to talk about intimate relationship communication skills, never willing to go deeper into the topic. It wasn't until he had a personal experience at the end of last year that he discovered the root cause: when his mother was pregnant with him, his father had an affair and left home for more than half a year. He thought he had forgotten about this matter, but in fact it had always been suppressed in his subconscious. Whenever relevant issues were encountered, the avoidance mechanism of self-protection was triggered. In essence, it was his own emotional reflection that affected the consultation process.

There is also a more hidden way, which is to use one's own inherent values ​​​​as a criterion for consultation. I heard an example before at an industry exchange meeting: A counselor who insisted on not marrying received a visit from a married woman. The woman said that she had developed a relationship with her work partner. She felt guilty for the husband who had accompanied her to start a business from scratch, but at the same time she felt that she and her partner were the ones who had the true soul compatibility. It was particularly painful to be stuck in the middle. As a result, the counselor's first reaction after hearing this was to frown, and then said, "You chose the pain you are experiencing now, and you should not betray your marriage." This sentence made the visitor so angry that he got red-eyed, got up, and left without even paying the fee. This kind of subconscious judgment is essentially an emotional reflection of the counselor projecting his or her own value orientation onto the client, completely failing to capture the other person's ambivalent emotions.

Of course, not all emotional reflections can fit neatly into these categories. Sometimes they may just be brought in by the counselor's current state. I heard from a colleague a while ago that a counselor had a fight with his son because he was addicted to games the day before. The next day, he received a visit from an adolescent who complained that his parents always watched him playing games and had no freedom at all. He subconsciously said, "Your parents are also doing this for your own good." After saying this, he was confused. This is also a very typical emotional reflex. It has nothing to do with long-term trauma. It is just that the current emotions have not been digested and he accidentally brought him into the consultation room.

Interestingly, counselors from different schools have quite different attitudes regarding how to treat these emotional reflections. Most of the older generation counselors of classic psychoanalysis believe that the essence of emotional reflection is that the counselor's countertransference has not been cultivated, which is a real professional mistake. The counselor must deal with all unfinished issues through high-frequency personal experience, and be a "blank screen" to fully accept the emotions of the visitor, without any private reactions of his own. However, relationship-oriented and humanistic counselors, which have become increasingly popular in recent years, feel that the complete lack of emotional reflection is a false proposition. Counselors are also living people and are not pre-programmed AI. How can they not have any emotions of their own? As long as you can be aware of your own reflection in time and do not regard it as a problem with the visitor, you can use it as a tool to understand the visitor.

I've come across examples before where reflection is used well. There was a counselor who worked with a certain client three times, and each time he couldn't help but feel impatient. At first, he thought it was because the client spoke too verbosely, but later he realized something was wrong: This client always spoke with a bit of a snarky tone, exactly the same tone as his mother who criticized him every day when he was a child. His impatience was not directed at the client at all, but at his subconscious mother. With this awareness in mind, he communicated with Kaifang again, and gradually discovered that her interpersonal relationships were particularly poor in reality, because she always used to speak in a thorny way. She obviously wanted to care about others, but the words she said always made people uncomfortable. Later, he found a suitable time to give feedback to the visitor: "I don't know if you noticed that when you said you were worried about your friend's illness, your tone sounded a bit like you were accusing her of not taking care of yourself. When I just heard it, my first reaction was to refute you." Just such a sentence helped the visitor see behavioral patterns that he had never noticed. After that consultation, the visitor changed a lot.

After doing this for a long time, I really feel that emotional reflection is never a scourge, it is more like a pair of dusty glasses. What you think you see is the visiting problem, but it is actually the gray marks on the glasses. Many novice counselors panic when they discover that they have emotional reflexes, and feel that they are not qualified to do this job. In fact, there is no need for it - doctors can catch colds, and counselors will of course have their own emotional stuck points. The most important thing is never that you will never have emotional reflexes, but whether you can be aware of it at the first time, and either adjust the state in time, or turn it into a tool to promote consultation without harming the client. After all, you have to clean your own mirror first before you can really help your visitors see themselves clearly.