Dyad #1 Reflection

I just logged off from my first dyad experience with my partner, Cami. In the moments

(and hours, and days, if I’m honest) before we began, I was experiencing a significant amount of

anxiety. How would this go? What exactly was the objective? What information would I need to

gather and what would happen if I failed to do so? But as soon as the recording began, I felt a

surprising feeling of calm. Overall, I felt that I did well for this being my very first time

conducting a treatment planning session.

I feel that one of my main strengths included my attending behavior: head nodding

(appropriate but not excessive), eye contact, and leaning forward. When I watched the video

back, however, I realized that when I was making “eye contact” I was actually looking at Cami

on the screen so, in the playback, it never appears as though I’m looking at her, rather

somewhere off to the side. That is a fix I will make going forward. Attending behavior is one of

the biggest ways to show respect and interest and doing so in a nonverbal way allows the client

to maintain in the drivers’ seat and to speak freely. However, if I am being brutally honest in

evaluating myself, I do feel that I could have done an even better job with eye contact. It felt

unnatural for me to be looking away as much as I did but I was only doing it because I was

trying to take obsessive notes because I was afraid of missing important information. It was only

toward the end of the interview that I remembered it was being recorded and that I could go back

and rewatch it while writing my notes. That is something I will work on in our next exercise.

Attending behavior is the most natural part of the interviewing process for me in that those are

the things I already do naturally in my daily life. Other strengths that I noticed included

validating the client’s feelings, encouraging, and asking clarifying questions. There are other
aspects of the clinical interview that feel substantially more awkward and require a lot more

mental effort on my part that I hope will come more naturally with time and practice.

One of the most uncomfortable parts of the clinical interview for me is the feeling of not

knowing what to say next. I enjoy listening as the client speaks and showing my engagement

seems to be instinctive to me. I find myself wishing that there was just a set list of questions to

ask, write down their answers, and move along to the next list of questions. That is part of the

reason that I really enjoyed the intake process: because there was a certain formality to the

process and I was able to ask a lot of questions (something that feels comfortable for me) in

order to begin forming the therapeutic alliance and gathering basic information about the client.

All that said, I realize that talk therapy is far too dynamic and personalized to be limited to a list

of generalized inquiries. I just want to get better and feel more comfortable with knowing the

exact things to say that will guide the conversation to the places that it needs to go. Specific

skills that feel particularly challenging for me include summarizing and reflection of meaning. I

feel like my brain cannot hear and summarize or infer quick enough during the conversation.

How does one go about gaining the ability to do that? I’m still searching for the answer to that

question.

There are a few ways that I plan to improve my skills. The first is to reread the sections of

the textbook dedicated to the various methods of communication. Additionally - and as much as

it scares me - I believe that the best way to improve my skills is to continue practicing until it

becomes second nature. I loved that there was actually a section of the textbook titled “Not

Knowing What to Say” in which Margaret Gibbs (1984) stated, “​​Imposter doubts need to be

shared, not suppressed, in the classroom as elsewhere.” I already feel myself starting to struggle

with the feeling of imposter syndrome but it’s an immense relief to know that the industry
standard on the subject is to acknowledge it as normal and to use it as a learning opportunity and

a chance to build stronger connections with peers and supervisors.