Tissues
I had to open a new box of tissues in my office yesterday. I was taking perverse pleasure in the fact that I was still on my first box of tissues since I began my internship. Other clinicians make their clients cry a great deal and thus need a box every week or so. I was taking some pride in being the anti-therapist, helping clients as a counselor without making them cry. I do think that I could be significantly more “emotional” with clients, because emotion often overrides cognition or at least greatly motivates behavior. Emotion is thought to be more “primitive” – i.e. animals use emotion to direct behavior without having higher-order processing abilities. It is thought that working with emotions can change behavior by changing the reflexive responses (emotions) that are triggered with everyday stimuli and stresses.
Oh, and the reason I didn’t make my goal of a single tissue year – I have hay fever.
posted by Kletos Sumboulos at 10:08 AM
2 Comments:
Hmmm... Could there be a third variable at work? Such as kind of case referred? Somehow vocational counseling seems much more of a cognitive endeavor. Do you get proportionally more of these kinds of clients? Are you seeing mostly males? Also, how many of those clinicians who go through their boxes so rapidly are doing marital counseling? Is it the counselor making the client cry -- or the spouse? Who has the better client retention? Whose clients end up with successful discharges? Ah, what a ripe area for research with consumption of kleenex as a variable amongst many...
P.S. I notice that many of my clients bring their own... What does that mean? Are my kleenexes subpar?
So what do people in your circles, or what do you, think of Antonio D'Amasio's thesis in Descartes' Error? That emotion is the underpinning of rationality, especially in practical decision making?
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