Specific Details on Concluding Counseling

A comment about concluding counseling was posted, so I'm putting up an additional piece. I hope this piece can resolve curiosity about the method.

This was the first time I had 'officially' concluded counseling like this. To start with, basically a 'self-evaluation' and a 'mutual evaluation' were carried out.

I don't remember all of them, but the questions presented on a 5-point scale included things like these.

1. Has the counseling problem as I see it been resolved?

2. Did I (the client and the counselor each) approach the counseling thinking that this problem would be resolved?

3. What was the counselor's attitude like?

4. Would I positively consider counseling again next time?

5. Would I recommend this institution to others? - I conducted my counseling at the counseling room in my school's teacher-training education center. The counselors who come out are people who have entered doctoral programs, and well, in many cases it was their first time too.. Come to think of it, of the 4 counseling teachers I saw during my university life, 2 directly told me it was their first time, and 2 didn't bring up such talk at all, so a definite description is impossible. But I was satisfied.

I don't remember everything, but this is about it. The self-evaluation consists of the evaluation of the 'counseling problem' as I feel it and the evaluation of the 'counseling problem' as the counselor feels it, and the mutual evaluation was, literally, an evaluation of each other. I was extremely satisfied. Over a period of more than 10 weeks, exchanging all sorts of stories with that teacher, I confirmed again that all my problems come back to the 'story of family,' and I realized once more that I am quite a 'person with strong values.' If I were to pick one progressive thing, I'd choose the fact that I came to hold the attitude that 'it's okay even if it isn't necessarily resolved.' As an example, there's the problem of my relationship with my parents. Before, when I had conflicts with my parents it was extremely hard, but as graduation approached, at some point I got the feeling that the problems were all getting resolved, and I was full of the feeling and thoughts that my relationship with my parents had improved a lot too. This can be accepted as part of a 'success experience.' So I was glad. And I was also glad that I came back in a much more positive state with heightened self-efficacy. As if the confidence I'd had right after returning from England had revived again.

The biggest issue of the topic I counseled about this session was a romantic relationship. While I was in England, I broke up with the person I was dating at the time, and after that, as I came to reflect on myself, I felt sorry toward that person and fell into considerable self-reproach. I came to recall the things I hadn't done, the things I was sorry for. This was actually possible because there had been various changes. My previously pessimistic way of thinking, after going to England, came to add in large part a positive and optimistic way of thinking. Once I started looking at the world that way, the bad reactions and things I'd said while being pessimistic during my time with that person became quite regretful—thinking I could have given better reactions, could have said more hopeful and ideal things. What allowed me to realize that was life in England, so in the end England became a fine place. Regretting things not done in the past is something many people do. But in fact, that wasn't something that happened only in a 'romantic relationship.' If I think of it as a series of processes that occurred through repeated reflection and personality change after breaking up in December—a behavioral pattern of looking at others through my own values and, when finding aspects that didn't fit those values, becoming disappointed and hurt, beginning to be corrected—then this counseling became a period of organizing and refining anew the thoughts that had been arising that way. In the words of a close friend of mine, I'm the type who, being complex, falls hard once I fall, and it takes a long time to get up, but once I get up again I get up firmly. A friend who was talking about suicide when we met in May told me yesterday that when we met again in June I was overflowing with energy and confident.

People cannot be free from family. Before one's twenties it's more severe, and even after one's twenties those traces continuously remain. But it's no exaggeration to say that the future of one's life depends on how well one fathoms, cares for, and embraces that. For me, who agonized a lot over conflicts of values in childhood and whose 'desire to be understood' was as strong as my 'understanding of others' thoughts,' all 6 years of university life were a continuous string of conflict, but at the end of it, after going to England, at some point that all turned into something I could understand, and counseling played an enormous role in that.

I don't remember whether the evaluation I gave the counselor was the highest one or one step lower, but at any rate I wanted to give a high one. I prepared a separate poetry collection as a gift and gave it to her; I'm not sure whether she'll be satisfied, but I gave it anyway. I can only say she's a truly grateful person. That's all. The content I felt and the things I evaluated while concluding are about this much.

This counseling, probably because it was counseling I did at the point of finishing my university life, likely made me think more. Taking the content I counseled about once a week, I thought about it this way and that, talked with friends and saw it this way and that, and tried in various ways to understand and look at myself—and the teacher also approached it with a positive attitude—so it seems a good result came about..

I hope this was helpful.