Introduction to Counseling

Canvas is still official

This page is for orientation, weekly lecture videos, and a look into the learning process. Assignment submissions, grades, and official course communication all happen through Canvas.

Assignment Details

I have a personal pet peeve about icebreakers. I really don’t want to start out the class on a negative note, but I really just don’t like them and want to be honest about that. I want to get to know people, who they really are, not just who they want to be presented as. I have a bias against superficial relationships and tend to want depth in relationships with people. That’s a pretty helpful thing as a counselor, but one thing I’ve learned about counseling is that people only go deep about themselves if they trust others... or have poor boundaries. To have depth in a relationship, to really know someone’s sensitive and vulnerable details about who they are, you have to prove you are trustworthy. So, it’s important to start on the surface and show people that you are to be trusted.

One more thing to set the stage for discussions in this class: it’s really hard to get to know someone by just what they write about themselves. AI can just make that crap up anyway. So, we’re going to show up for each other visually by posting short video responses. It’s uncomfortable and awkward at first, but when I’ve done this in the past, the first ones generally show nervous people, but they get much easier and people really start to enjoy them… not making them, but seeing others. While we might not like showing ourselves (being vulnerable for others), remember, giving others the gift of knowing you is something to be valued even when we are scared about it.

So, now to the actual assignment. Point a camera at yourself and answer one simple question and two hard ones.

• What is your name?
• If someone was looking for a friend, what would you tell them about you to encourage them to be friends with you? (Think about either the kinds of hobbies you like that you might share, or maybe go deeper and tell about the kind of person that you try to be, i.e., fun, quiet, loyal, crafty, outdoorsy, etc.)
• What is your interest in this class or what do you hope to get out of it? (Are you looking for a future job as a counselor, want to learn how to be a better friend/daughter/partner/etc., or maybe just learn about the meaning of life?)

I won’t be grading on camera skills, but please make sure the lighting and sound are good enough to actually see and hear you. (If there are any accommodation needs for captioning or transcription, let me know ASAP so I can adjust how we do this. If you hear or see differently, we want you here too and will adjust the process to work with you. That’s how good relationships work.)

Also due this week: the Syllabus Quiz, completed in Canvas.

Assignment Details

I love counseling, not because it’s always fun. It’s hard work sometimes. But I love it because I believe in the value of human connection. Counseling isn’t everything a person needs and there are limitations to what it can do for people, but I love it for what it is and for what it isn’t. Part of human connection is sharing in things we love with people we love. If you will indulge me, I would love to share counseling with you.

Winther Counseling Services (WCS) and University Health & Counseling Services (UHCS) both provide free counseling to UWW students. For this activity, I would love for you to experience counseling with them. There are a few caveats to this though.

• You don’t have to be “sick” with mental illness to engage with them. If you go, you are welcome to tell them you are just hoping to have an experience with a counselor for a class assignment. I did this when I was in grad school and it confused the counselors I saw, but it did help me understand a bit about what I was good at (coping and looking functional on the outside), but also what needed work (a deeper honesty and vulnerability with myself and my flaws). You can also just tell them you are thinking about becoming a counselor and want to learn from them what it is all about. You can also ask to talk about your future career and explore other options. You can also just talk about general stressors in your life. You can also ask them to help you think about areas of your life you would like to explore more if you aren’t sure. All are appropriate options for what counseling can be.
• You only have to go once. If you like the experience, you can go as much as you want or are allowed, but WCS schedules first an evaluation with a person who may not be your counselor, so your first meeting would be just an intake assessment. That’s ok.
• Selfishly, I teach those people becoming graduate counselors, so if you aren’t feeling like you are needing a counselor right now, I would recommend going to WCS to help those students too.
• If you see an outside counselor currently or have in the past, you don’t need to do the extra work to experience it again, although I highly recommend getting a fresh experience with a new person to see how things can be different.

Now for the assignment. I don’t want you sharing the personal details about what you discussed in counseling. That is private and for you to learn what you want to be public. I do, however, want you to talk about your experience of the process. This will be in a class discussion, so use your own comfort level to decide what to discuss. I’ll help moderate what is appropriate and what isn’t, however most people default to not sharing things that are totally fine, so, as our Chancellor Dr. Cory King would say, “be Warhawk bold.” Some of us are anxious about what others might think of us and find it freeing to not hold onto burdensome details, find it freeing to be accepted even with our embarrassing traits. Others have little filter and don’t understand how we can be overwhelming and actually cause others to move away from us by disclosing too much. This is not part of the assignment, but something you can think about — how your way of communicating who you are brings people closer to you or further away.

Ok, now to the assignment for real. These can be maybe the equivalent of 2 paragraphs. I want them to be insightful, but if you want to connect with classmates about these, you don’t want to write a novel because nobody will read it.

• Post where you went. You don’t have to use names of agencies or people if you don’t want to, but you are welcome to, especially if the experience was positive. Others like good referrals.
• Discuss your experience. You can say things like, “I was nervous to go in and the room smelled funny, but the counselor made me feel comfortable. After a while I found myself relaxing a bit.” Or, “the environment was great, but the counselor seemed nervous and it made me nervous.” Or, “I wanted to talk about nervousness about changing my major. We talked about that a bit and I didn’t have any big insights, but I got an idea of how counselors can help when the counselor said, ‘we’re here to learn what makes you the most happy.’” All of these are examples, but the idea is to keep it as light or deep as you want.

Assignment Details

When you learned in the lecture about the brain and its attachment needs throughout the lifespan, you also saw the associated assessment tool that can help you identify areas of strength and opportunity in your life. In the video I explained how this might be used to better understand what “personal growth work” might look like. For this assignment I’m not going to ask you to publicly discuss such personal details, but I will ask you to share them with me.

• Take the assessment and submit a scanned or photo of the completed assessment to Canvas (if you photo it, please send it in one complete file — you can paste your photos into a .docx file to make it easier).
• Write a 1–2 page reflection on the most meaningful parts or greatest insights into your life experiences. If you’re struggling with what to write, just write the things that are going through your mind without thinking too hard about it. Sometimes these can lead to insights that are painful and emotionally overwhelming, and often those places of emotion indicate “pain points” that may be worth exploring, however they can be confusing to think about when we are so busy feeling about them. Just do your best to describe your experience.

Obviously this is something that is in place of our “relational” activity for the week. If you want to have a more relational experience, print an extra copy and give it to a person close to you and have them fill it out. You can give them the same instructions I gave you (don’t think too much about them, answer in any way that makes sense to you, there are no right or wrong answers — the “results” come from a person’s insights, not what you or I think they mean). Only do this if you are close to someone and they actually want to go through the experience with you. If at any point they don’t want to do it, let them stop and don’t push it. They can be done whenever they want and you can just report that in the reflection. That’s good information, not a failure on your or their part.

Assignment Details

You spend a lot of time on your screens. (Yes, I’m aware of the irony of you reading this in an online class!) In this assignment we’re going to practice some of that awareness by doing some mindfulness activities of your choosing. There are several ways you can do this. As you learned in the lecture, mindfulness is not about emptying your mind, sitting in silent vigil for hours, or doing hot yoga in cute tights… at least not the kind I’m suggesting. What we are trying to do is be more aware of our physical and mental experiences so it sounds less like a cacophony (chaos of sound) of sensory experience and more like meaningful understanding. It also means you experience both good and bad thoughts and feelings and try not to judge them as good or bad — they just are.

People from various cultural traditions do this very differently, so here are a few options.

• You are welcome to download an app or find a YouTube video that can walk you through a meditation. Some play music, some provide a visual to help your breathing, and others guide you through while talking. Some people like to sit far away from others in nature while others can do it on their bed, in a library, or in the shade at a park. Just start exploring and try out what it is like. (I find some to be outrageously annoying, while others are very soothing. You find yours.)
• For some, prayer is similar to mindful awareness in that it is a quiet moment where we shut out the external world to share a conversation with God. Some of my close friends and family are devout Christians and talk about prayer much like my more secular friends, in that it is a period of rest and reprieve from the sinful world. Praying, for some, can be restorative and life-giving.
• Modern therapy most often refers to meditation as an opportunity to minimize internal chatter. Imagine you were sitting at a gentle stream and you see an autumn leaf floating down the water like a small boat. As it swirls in the current and bounces off of rocks and sticks, it is on a journey. While we experience bumps against things, it often brings pain we don’t like, and when we are swirling in confusing people in our life, we often try to increase comfort by fighting or fleeing from or against them. The idea for mindfulness is first awareness, then non-judgement. Let your thoughts and experiences of self and others just swirl and bounce without experiencing them as good or bad. They are just events on your journey downstream. The key to this kind of practice is not about sitting right or not thinking, but experiencing your senses, noticing cognitive and emotional reactions, then not being “activated” by them — often referred to as non-judgement.
• If you aren’t into any of that, shut your phone off for a day or a couple hours, go for a quiet walk without headphones in, walk to classes without headphones in, or just do something to minimize the sensations that bombard us daily so that you can have some moments just for you. I highly recommend challenging yourself to get off social media for a day or at least a couple hours, preferably before bed. Sleep is king/queen and a busy mind doesn’t rest well.

For the assignment, 1.) tell us what you did and 2.) tell us about your experience of it. How hard was it? What was it like while you were doing it? What was it like afterwards? Have you practiced this or was it your first time? Honesty and authenticity are the rewards here, not the points. As with most assignments in this class, you’ll find that you score points for trying hard, taking it seriously, and challenging yourself to think deeply, gain awareness, and communicate your experiences. If you don’t try to challenge yourself, you don’t grow and your points will reflect that. I won’t always know, but you have to live with your conscience and the results in your life. The choice is yours.

Assignment Details

This one will be pretty straightforward. Find someone you trust and you know, or more importantly who knows you. It can be family, a friend, your counselor, or a professor. Ask them to tell you what they think about what will make you good at your future career. If you are here for counseling, psychology, or social work, ask them what it is about you that will make you good at any one of those things. If you are not a part of any of those professions and are planning on doing something else, ask them about what it is that makes you a good fit for whatever you are planning.

For the assignment, 1.) report who you asked and a little context about what you asked them (1–2 sentences), 2.) what their response was (1 paragraph), and 3.) what it was like to receive that feedback.

Some of you are very uncomfortable receiving positive feedback about yourself, sometimes indicating a confused self-concept or low self-esteem. For you, you might consider talking about how or why you don’t like receiving positive feedback. For others, you have a strong self-esteem and you can talk about how hard it is to practice humility and challenge your ego. If you want to practice getting good at responding, all you need to do is say “thank you” to others and share with us about how they know you, how you know you, and how it just seems very normal because your bonds are strong. For those of you who have strong attachments, others talking about how wonderful you are might just be a normal thing and not seem like a big deal. They are. Again, we are not here to judge, but for you to understand where your own work can happen. (In counseling, part of doing an assessment is identifying these kinds of things in others as they talk, and helping them identify areas of growth they might explore. I write these kinds of long paragraphs to help you decide what your areas of growth might be, not to tell you how bad you are. I love you and you’re doing great things.)

Assignment Details

It’s so easy to put our head down, get focused on meeting our own needs, and forget to connect with others. The “stop and smell the roses” moments aren’t just about building gratitude into our lives to appreciate the gifts among the hardships — so often our gifts are what we get from connecting with others. It can be moments of joy and appreciation with others, or sharing in challenges.

For this assignment, I want you to go somewhere public that you would normally go in your daily life. It could be a grocery store, shopping for toothpaste, a restaurant, or anything really. When you do, I want you to not only accomplish what you would normally do, but also make an extra effort to connect with others. It could be that you make eye contact for just a little longer than you normally would and smile. It could be that as you’re checking out with your items, you ask the person at the register how they are doing… not just “how are you?”, but “how are you really?” There is a difference between passing phrases that we ask and respond to automatically and those that we seek a deeper response for. It’s still small talk, but the idea is that we show others that we are actually interested in the real person behind just the body in front of us. The examples above are just examples and you can explore other ways to do this. You might ask a person in class what they really think about the class to hear their feedback. You might ask your server at a restaurant to tell you if they actually like their job. You might ask a person in an aisle at a store what they would recommend you consider when buying an item. (People love to share their opinions generally.) Get creative and have fun with this, but don’t ask someone you already know about something you typically ask. Dr. John Gottman calls these “bids for connection,” and the idea is to connect with someone you wouldn’t normally do this with. Counseling is often about initiating bids for connection because it helps people feel seen and like they and their ideas matter to someone. Your job is to initiate this with someone you don’t know well.

For the assignment, I want you to write a reflection in the discussion on the context (who, what, where, etc.) — just the details of what you did (1 paragraph). I want to know what you asked them and what their response was (1 paragraph). I then want to know what it was like for you: uncomfortable, anxiety-provoking, energizing, personally meaningful, etc. Your reflection should be personal, and it doesn’t matter what it was like for you, as long as you are being honest with your true feelings and thoughts. It’s ok to hate it or love it. Just be authentic in your response. Include something you learned in class this week, from the emotional content of the book or the topic we discussed in the lecture. You can also include something from a past lecture or book chapter. The point is not to link it specifically to this week, but just to show you are learning from what we are covering.

Assignment Details

In the lecture we talked about how to think about psychological trauma. We live in a world in which it has become popular to talk about trauma, however we’re collectively still working out how to understand it. Some think we need to stop talking about it while others think we need to talk about it more openly. We have different definitions of what we think it is. I’ve given you my way of thinking through it, but my way is not necessarily right, just reflective of how counseling thinks about it… at least some of us.

What I want you to do is find an example of someone discussing trauma and share your thoughts about it. It could be a social media post where someone is discussing their personal traumatic experience and being vulnerable and it’s building a community of people who find comfort in shared experience. Others might find another social media experience where a group seems to be using it as an excuse to show how they’ve been victimized and lash out publicly at others, to defend their aggression. You might find a scholarly definition that is similar to or different from mine. You might find some data on rates of trauma in families, kids, churches, addiction communities, workplaces, or whatever topic area interests you. You might also find an example from a movie or art that depicts a traumatic event that you want to talk about.

For the assignment, 1.) share that video, article, or clip (you must have something tangible to share) and 2.) talk about what it means to you. Is it a good or helpful thing, or does it get it wrong somehow and lead to more problems? This is meant to be a public discussion just for us to process what trauma is and how we understand it.

Assignment Details

For this activity, you have the opportunity to think through your future career a little more. A few weeks ago we talked about the qualities that others see in you that might make you good at your work. This week I want you to explore not just who you are, but the qualities of other people who are good at the work you want to do.

For the assignment, I want you to find an example of someone describing what makes a good counselor, social worker, psychologist, or whatever your field is, and tell us what you find.

• If you found a video, article, or talked to someone who is actually in that profession, give us a link or tell us who they are.
• Tell us what you learned. What does that profession do, and what is one thing a person would have to do uniquely well to be successful at it?
• Tell us any insights you have about what you are good at, or what you can do to grow in your ability to thrive in that work.

I imagine this could be done in 2–3 paragraphs in the discussion.

Assignment Details

Leadership is a buzzword these days. There are all kinds of books, videos, and opportunities to learn to be better leaders. Maybe this is just a me thing, but I’m still a little confused about what “leadership” even means. On one hand it means holding a formal position in a community of people that gives you responsibility and control over others. On another hand, it is a group of qualities that make people want to take your guidance and follow you. It is the formal structure of authority balanced with a position in the community based on earned respect. Those can be the same thing, or two very different things. What I want us to do is think about “company culture” and what makes a good workplace leader.

For the assignment, I want you to tell us a story in a discussion. Here are some options.

• Tell us an experience you’ve had where someone exemplified what good leadership is. It could be a boss at work who helped others work through a crisis moment, deescalated a customer, or managed staff during a busy period. It could be a parent who handled an emergency with grace, restoration, and accountability — like when you got caught vaping with your friends. Whatever it is, tell us the story and what qualities made them a good leader.
• Find an artifact, like a video, article, or book, that talks about what a good leader is, then tell us what a good leader is. (FYI, Brené Brown has a great book, Dare to Lead, and one of the recommended texts we talked about a few weeks ago, Crucial Conversations, deals with this very topic.) Just explain the best you can what you understand leadership to be, in your own words, based on what you learn.

P.S. Again, this might be my own bias, but I suspect that when people say leadership, what they often mean is how we grow the maturity to handle the responsibilities of adulthood in ways that manage emotions and maintain the ability to make important decisions — and this is the part relevant to us in this class — who can do all of that while also maintaining relationship, i.e., company/family culture of inclusion. We want to keep people and help them come back into functioning within the group, not excommunicate people when they mess up. Sometimes that’s necessary, but most often good leaders want to restore people back to functioning within relationships, not just send them away. That means character maturity, so I’m specifically interested in the character traits of a good leader, which can show up as behaviors in your story. So, focus on what “kind of person” they are and we’ll all get more out of this from a counseling perspective.

Assignment Details

The term “Miracle Question” comes from a kind of therapy called Solution-Focused Therapy. There are a lot of different ways to ask the miracle question, but basically it is something like this: “Suppose tonight, while you’re asleep, a miracle happens and the problem that brought you here is solved. But because you were asleep, you don’t know the miracle happened. When you wake up tomorrow, what will be the first small signs that tell you things are different?” If you google this or ask AI to give you a different version, there are countless other ones, but the idea is the same. The reason this can be helpful is that it can help people imagine what life might look like if they weren’t so “stuck.” It also can help you and others operationalize goals — give more specifics to our abstract expectations.

So, here is what I want you to do. (1.) Find a friend or ask a random stranger to answer two quick questions. [This is a great excuse to talk to that cute girl/guy in a way that shows you are a good listener.] The first question is something very broad or abstract, like “Who in your life loves you the most?” People usually give quick answers to this, so the second question is to adapt their answer into a miracle question. Here is an example:

Student: “Excuse me, do you mind if I ask you two quick questions for a class assignment?”

Participant: “Sure, as long as they are quick. I’m on my way to the UC to crush some chicken tenders.”

Student: “Great, thank you. There are no wrong answers to either of these questions, so whatever you say is fine. Who in your life loves you the most?”

Participant: “I would say it is probably my family.”

Student: “Ok, second question. If you were to wake up tomorrow and something happened to show you how much they loved you, how would you know?” [You are welcome to elaborate briefly, like who would be there, what would they say, how would it feel, what evidence do you have that they love you, etc. Sometimes we as counselors ask questions relating to our five senses — smell, sight, hearing, taste, touch — to help people prepare for more emotional awareness.]

Participant: “My dad calls me almost every day and asks me how my day is going, and it shows me he cares about me by just taking interest in my life.”

Student: [You can just say thank you and tell them that’s all you were wondering, or you are welcome to ask follow-up questions like this — the idea is just to get more concrete details.] “That is beautiful. I don’t need to know about your conversations, but when you are talking with him, are there specific things that you feel, or things that he does, that show you that he specifically cares?”

The actual assignment is to ask these questions and report back what you found.

• If you want to record a video and have the consent of the person (verbally is ok), then you can post your video. If you want to just write the questions you asked and their response, that is ok too.
• After you describe your conversation, tell us what you learned. Did you notice a difference between question 1 and 2? Did their expression change? Did anything unique happen with you or them that changed the dynamic of your interaction?

Assignment Details

This has become such a political thing to discuss, especially coming from a university professor. (Fun fact: when this was a big thing in American national politics, as professors we were supposed to report to the state government when we were talking about it in classes. That might still be true, but instead of avoiding the hard things, I’m bringing it in here to deal with it.)

With that fun fact out of the way — we clarified this a bit in the lecture video, but let’s all explore this a little more. If working with the public, part of the spirit of equity is meeting the needs of others. In order to do that, we need to try to understand them. In order to understand them and their needs, we need to be in relationship with them. That takes time and energy.

I’m not going to make you have a full cultural immersion experience, but I am going to ask you to learn about somebody different than you. Part of why that can be hard is because we have to bring up “elephants in rooms” — what makes us separate. In counseling, as we’ve been learning about all semester, we’re often trying to connect based on shared experiences, like similar values or character traits. However, in order to accept others with non-judgmental positive regard, we have to see what makes others different and respect that. We don’t need to like it or even celebrate it in the same way, but we need to respect it. I don’t have to celebrate the Chinese New Year with my Chinese friends the way they do, but if I want to be friends I probably want to be around them and learn a little. I don’t have to snort cocaine to respect the experience of an addict, but I probably want to talk about it with them. If I want to treat the mental health needs of people in prisons, I don’t have to like their crimes, but I do have to treat them with human dignity if I want them to rehabilitate. What I’m saying by all of this is that in order to provide positive therapeutic services requiring relationship, I have to find a way to accept a person without condoning all of their choices. (For those who wish to become parents, I can tell you that this is a skill all parents work on — accepting their children as part of the family even though some of the decisions they make are monumentally stupid. In my house right now with my 8-year-old son, he still loves to talk about butt cheeks and make farting noises at the dinner table. Sometimes I dislike that behavior and I hold him accountable by asking him to step away if he can’t stop, but I want him back, and I make sure he hears that.)

For this assignment, I want you to go out and find someone who is in some way different than you. It could be a difference in identity or in behavior. We tend to look for differences in identity based on age, race, gender, religion, etc., but you can expand your understanding of difference by finding someone who just experiences things differently than you. If someone in class is an introvert and you want to understand what it is like to not want to speak out in class, talk to them about it. If you want to understand what it is like to grow up in a giant house or a trailer park, talk to someone about that. If you need to talk to someone for a bit to find something different about them, that’s fine. Just 1.) tell us about what that difference is and 2.) what it was like for you to address those differences. Did you find it uncomfortable, enlightening to learn new things about them, frustrating because it seemed like it was distracting you both from things that matter more? Whatever your experience of them and the process, tell us about that. This can be done in 2–3 paragraphs.

Assignment Details

For this assignment, we are going to do something much more challenging. We all have those people in our lives that we wish we connected with more, or have lost touch with. For this assignment, I want you to take a little extra time to reestablish those connections. This could be an old friend that you haven’t talked to in a while, or a sibling that you are normally estranged with. In the past when I’ve done this assignment, I’ve had people call people from high school that they lost touch with, or even fathers that they haven’t talked to in 10 years. You get to choose who and how you do this. You choose the level of challenge and complexity.

A couple words of caution/advice. If you are calling someone who involves a lot of baggage, the goal is not to get into the drama, bring up hard conversations, or get really serious. The goal is to just make that connection and make it meaningful. It can be helpful to just tell them that you are doing this for a class assignment, that you miss talking to them, and that you just want to make an extra effort to not lose touch. Keep it light if you want — ask about their day, ask about what is going on in their lives, or whatever, just take interest in them. If you want to go deep, share how you’ve missed them and why. Share a story about what you loved about being around them.

I recently did this with my sister. We have our own family drama that makes it harder for me to call her, because I don’t think either of us really want to deal with it. Of course, some day I think both of us would love to really work on that, but that process doesn’t start with deep conversations. In counseling and life, relationship and trust must come first, and that begins with shared experiences — and shared experiences come from just being together in a positive way. So, I called and asked her about her new cows that she just bought and her recent garage sale finds (because those are important to her). I was nervous to call because my own anxiety built up fear about the awkwardness that might be, but we actually had a lovely conversation because it stayed on the surface of all of that, to just build connection. I think the next time I do this I’ll take a bigger risk and acknowledge that there are hard things we might someday want to address, but until we are both ready and have the time, I just want to make a bigger effort to check in more often to stay in touch. See, it doesn’t need to be big and heavy to have relationships that are so easy to lose track of. Small connections matter as much as deep ones.

For the assignment, I want you to write a reflection in the discussion on the context (who, what, where, etc.) — just the details of what you did (1 paragraph). I want to know what you asked them and what their response was (1 paragraph). I then want to know what it was like for you: uncomfortable, anxiety-provoking, energizing, personally meaningful, etc. Your reflection should be personal, and it doesn’t matter what it was like for you, as long as you are being honest with your true feelings and thoughts. It’s ok to hate it or love it. Just be authentic in your response. Include something you learned in class this week, from the emotional content of the book or the topic we discussed in the lecture. You can also include something from a past lecture or book chapter. The point is not to link it specifically to this week, but just to show you are learning from what we are covering.

Assignment Details

Fall Break — no assignments this week. Enjoy the rest.

Assignment Details

This could be your easiest or hardest assignment yet. I don’t know how much you guys hear about self-care, but we talk about it ALL THE TIME in counseling, almost to an annoying degree. Yet, I think we get it wrong so often, and we’ve likely talked about it in this class quite a bit, i.e., ad nauseum. Part of why I have a pet peeve about this is because often we talk about it as if it is something additional that we do to restore our wellness. However, it is much harder for us gritty, ambitious, and independent Americans and college students to reduce our performance or productivity. It is hard to rest. Don’t get me wrong, some of us are prone to laziness, sloth, doomscrolling, or Netflix binges. For us, self-care is getting out and filling up a social cup, managing our finances, or getting some exercise. For others though, it’s setting boundaries and limits for self and others. Both are true for the general population, but for most counselors and many clients I meet, the bigger challenge is setting relational boundaries with others that lead to less psychological stress, relational pressure, attachment anxiety, and more mental health.

What I want you to do for this assignment is not go out and have a conversation this week, but put some thought into an area of relationship in your life. If you hang around some toxic people, make a choice to spend less time with them. If you have friends you love, but they drain your energy, avoid them for a short period (or long period, you choose). If you love your family but it’s exhausting to travel home to see them, tell them you need to not see them in order to get some rest. If you need to tell your professor that you are exhausted and would rather not do another assignment because you need a mental break to let your brain rest, tell them (me) that. (PS, next week I’m building in a “no assignment week” to help you with self-care and reward you for a job well done, but that is my choice. This week is an opportunity for you to choose that, though not all of you need it and will want to explore this by doing the assignment.) The goal here is to set some boundaries with self or others that give you real rest, restoration of health, and bring out the best you.

If it’s hard to understand what this looks like: you’ll know when you are ready to be with people again when you start to miss them or think about them without guilt or obligation. You’ll be ready to work again when you experience being excited to learn and it doesn’t feel like something you have to do to please someone else. You’ll be ready to exercise when your body stops aching and feels sluggish. You’ll know when church or work is restorative to you when you leave feeling more hopeful about your future. These are some of the ways in which we learn what is healthy for us in a sustainable way. Self-care is the practice of achieving wellness, constantly rebalancing the scales of which areas of our needs in life need our attention. The more you become mindfully aware of these, the more you can do the work to avoid bad habits and spend more time in restorative activities.

For the assignment, 1.) tell us your choice and 2.) what your experience was, i.e., how you knew it was good for you.

Assignment Details

No new activity this week — just the course evaluation reflection in Canvas. If you’ve made it this far, you’ve worked hard and you deserve a break.

Assignment Details

Final exam, submitted through Canvas.

A note on privacy

Nothing here identifies a specific student. These are anonymized summaries and thematic reflections drawn from graded feedback, not reproductions of student writing.