Assignment 1.

I believe that my cognitive-emotional style is likely late formal operational. I am able to talk
about myself and my feelings and I am able to analyze myself and my identity. However, I
believe that I’m in the late formal operational because I have some ability to connect these
reflections and analyses with systems in my life. For example, right after I graduated college, I
experienced a loss similar to client #3 - my horse Belle died. While it might seem relatively
minor, my entire identity was wrapped up in my relationship with horse and with my perception
of myself as a horse person. After a rough four years of college, I had been looking forward to
moving into a new stage of my life that was truer to how I saw myself in my mind’s eye. This is
where I move a bit beyond what client #3 talked about. Unlike client #3, I recognized that this
loss affected me so greatly because of how attending a wealthy, predominantly Greek life school
had impacted my sense of self. As a lower-middle class girl who was a visible standout from
others (tall, plus-sized, different clothes, etc), I put all my stock in going back to who I was and
what was comfortable after I graduated. When that plan went out the window, I lost my identity
and that sense of “redemption.”
My cognitive-emotional block is definitely being able to experience emotions at the sensorimotor
level. I can look back on a feeling, name it, and describe it, but I really struggle to experience it
in the moment again. My entire family was raised and carried on with the coping strategy of
“let’s just push all this emotion deep down and then one day, we’ll die” so bringing emotion
back up is a struggle.
I’ve actually already run into some struggles with my style in my practicum. Many of the clients
I work with have been at the sensorimotor or concrete style of cognitive-emotion. It’s been
slightly irritating to feel like I’m not reaching them or like I’m not getting the depth that I should
be out of them. Now that I understand that this is a cognitive-emotional style discrepancy, I can
begin to learn as much as possible about how to process with each style. Being cognizant of how
I view a situation and recognizing that not all clients are experiencing things the same way will
be very important.