Discuss why caring for your emotional self is important as a counselor. How do you believe you will achieve this?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

?Your facility at monitoring, managing, and fluidly moving among your feelings is key to your success in work as a counselor. Your ability to track your own feeling state, while simultaneously paying attention to the thoughts and feelings of your client, is a critical skill you will develop with practice.
?Part of this skill involves a studied ability to track your feelings and watch the workings of your internal world.
?There can be no doubt but that your feelings, the tides and currents of your ongoing emotional life, are a critical aspect of how you define yourself. Your life is a constant stream of feeling, of variations of sadness, gladness, anger, and anxiety. Feelings are not bad or good, they simply are.
?One end result of repeatedly submerging your feelings under a tide of self-criticism and sanction is depression. This distinct kind of depression is often the end result of a chain of events that begins with the inability to act between opposing choices. Typically, one of these choices represents freedom and the other represents a more socially appropriate and culturally congruent action. This can be a dramatically unhappy spot in which to find yourself. It is particularly disheartening to see the depression of counselors who feel obliged to stay in the profession because of the extrinsic salary and safety rewards that it affords, despite the fact that they no longer derive satisfaction from the work itself. This situation holds the makings of counselor burnout.