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Old Jan 07, 2006, 11:43 PM
Hopefull Hopefull is offline
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Member Since: Nov 2005
Posts: 732
I can see that labeling a thought or belief as irrational is a bad idea. I think a T could teach a client to replace unuseful thoughts or negative thoughts with postive thoughts. Also, I think the client should be the main one who chooses what beliefs are changed with the T pointing out some possible candidates.
As for becoming an addiction counselor, I feel that I have the smarts and empathy. However, I am uncertain as to whether or not I would be mentally healthy enough. When my teacher mentioned that, I found myself concerned because I have never really seen myself as mentally healthy or mentally ill. I have always just seen myself as slightly dysfunctional. So the idea of being mentally ill confuses me (my insurance thinks I am). I found myself in class being the odd one out because they were claiming crazy to be this obvious thing. But I was claiming that it is just a matter of degrees. Everyone has "irrational" thoughts and are dysfunctional in some area. The "mentally ill" are just the people with higher distress levels and probably (maybe not always) higher degrees of dysfunction. This odd claim of degrees made me feel very odd but I felt that I had to say it because my fellow classmates might be future addiction counselors, SWs, psychologists etc.