Reflecting Team Experiences of Clients During the Counseling Process: A Post-Modernist Study


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Yalnızca Yıldırım S., Saraç A., Çağlayan E.

JOURNAL OF TURKISH STUDIES, vol.15, no.2, pp.1499-1514, 2020 (Peer-Reviewed Journal)

Abstract

Reflecting team practice first emerged as a technique that was used to strengthen the therapeutic process in family and couple therapies but later, it began to be used as a supervision method. This practice, which is nowadays used in both forms, is applied in the form of an inclusion of one or more therapists except for the therapist in the counseling process and a conversation of those people about the dialogue between the client/family and the therapist in a therapeutic setting the effects of reflecting team practice in the supervision process and in the therapeutic process have been discussed in many studies. However, there are few empirical studies on the effectiveness of the reflecting team in the counseling process. It is considered that this study examining the effect of reflecting team practice on the counseling process from the client's perspective will pave the way other studies. In this study, the opinions of clients, who were attending the counseling process, were obtained regarding how they experienced the reflecting team method applied during the process. The study was conducted using the interview method, one of the qualitative research methods, with 7 clients who were already attending the counseling process. Most of the clients stated that they had positive feelings about the presence of a reflecting team during the counseling process. The clients expressed that the presence of the reflecting team in the process provided them with multiple perspectives, contributed to their plans for the future and enabled the process to focus on ‘now and here.’ Most of the clients gave a high score to the question ‘How effective was the presence of the reflecting team in the counseling session?’; only one client gave it a low score. These findings were discussed in the light of the literature.