The Purpose: The purpose of this assignment is to provide an opportunity for you to evaluate your journey through the developmental stages and transitions of your life and to reflect how the impact of these transitions may help or hinder your work as a counselor.
Basic Description: In Part A of this assignment, you will evaluate your life in 10 year segments up through your present age. In Part B of this assignment, you will provide a reflection on what you discovered and how you think it may impact you and your clients in your future counseling profession.
Part A:
•Compose a brief paragraph (approximately 100-150 words) about each 10-year segment of your life explaining the major events or transitions that have impacted you during each of those 10 years. Integrate Erikson's eight stages of development as you write about your life. Was there a developmental task that was not successfully resolved at the appropriate age? The older you are, the longer this section will be as you will have a greater number of 10 year segments. This section will be approximately 1-3 pages in length.
•Determine what specific transition was the most difficult for you.
•Find and read a professional journal article or a chapter from a scholarly book that discusses that transition (marriage, divorce, eating disorder, empty nest, etc.).
Part B: Upon completing Part A, compose a 3-5-page paper. First of all, summarize the journal or chapter you read in Part A in 1 paragraph, then describe the most influential transitions that you have experienced in your life. You are required to integrate concepts and discoveries from your class readings, the research you did (journal article or chapter), and presentations during Module/Week 3. Discuss strengths and weaknesses that may have developed from your transitions that may hinder or help you in your counseling and future burnout vulnerability.
The following questions may be considered while preparing your paper:
(You may elaborate on these meaningful questions in reference to your life's transitions. The purpose of these questions is to stimulate your thinking by writing your paper; do not copy and answer each question.)
1.How did your developmental transitions impact you spiritually, emotionally, and physically?
2.How did your developmental years impact your biblical worldview?
3.Did anything specifically stand out in your development that may have impacted your decision to go into the counseling profession?
4.What was your role in your family when you were growing up, and what impact does it have on this attraction to counseling?
5.Who are you as a person?
6.What wounds or unfinished business do you carry with you into the counseling room?
7.How are you healing these wounds?
8.What do you notice or what do you think your work with clients will (does) trigger in you?
9.Whom do you have unfinished business with?
10.How do you handle being in conflict? Being confronted? Being evaluated? What defenses do you use in these situations?
11.What are repetitive or chronic issues for you? How might these affect your work with clients?
12.What do you see in other people that you consistently do not like? Reflect upon whether you can find these same qualities in yourself, and "own" them as also belonging to you.
Submission Instructions:
1.Submit both Part A and Part B as one continuous document by 11:59 p.m. (ET) on Sunday of Module/Week 3.
2.The assignment must be double-spaced and in current APA format. The assignment must also include a Title Page and Reference Page.
3.Both Part A and Part B of this assignment should total between 4-8 pages in length not including the Title Page or Reference Page.
Depending on your age, the older you are, the longer it will be.
4.Integrate at least 2 concepts or illustrations from your course materials from Module/Week 3, and reference/cite them according to current APA format.
5.You may incorporate outside materials as well; be sure to properly cite and reference.
6.This paper may be written in first-person point-of-view since you are reflecting on your own life and experiences.