I Was Born to be a Phenomenologist

So this week in our interventions (theory) class, we learned all about existentialism, and next week we'll be talking about person-centered therapy. It's been pretty interesting because they're all focused on the idea of phenomenology, that the person's subjective view of reality is what matters, not some objective idea of how the world really is.

I love the idea behind these theories! As I'm reading through the foundations of the theory, I feel like I was born to be an existentialist, a person-centered therapist, and a phenomenologist. It just makes sense to me that the individual should be the one making the choices about how their lives should be.

Even based on ethical practice and multicultural practice as we've learned here, this whole focus on the client as the expert on his or her own life seems to make logical sense. We're meant to follow the client's lead, not to impose our own beliefs or values on the client, to see things through the client's eyes. I don't even know how you can do all that without the basic assumption from phenomenology...

As you can see and all in all, I swear this program just keeps getting better. It's funny because I went out to dinner with my sorority sisters last weekend. I'm in Theta Nu Xi Multicultural Sorority, Inc and my sorors here are all graduate students or professionals in the Philadelphia area. They all talked about how stressful their graduate school programs were, how much work, how they didn't like the other people in their cohort, or how they spent days thinking, "WHY DID I DO THIS TO MYSELF?? I NEVER SHOULD HAVE GONE TO GRADUATE SCHOOL."

Needless to say, I WAS SHOCKED! LOL I probably sounded like a naive optimist when I said how amazing it is to be here at Penn, how supportive and fun my cohort is, how chill our professors are, and how laid-back the work has been. I don't mean to sound unrealistic, but for real, for anyone thinking about becoming a counselor, Penn is definitely a great choice, in ways that I didn't even realize before I started talking to other people about their grad school experiences...