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This picture was taken before my very first clinical hour, at the start of practicum. I had attached a little card at the top of my clipboard reminding myself to "SLOW DOWN!! Empathise... make them feel heard." 6 months on, I look back at this with some fondness and amusem*nt. While I could talk about my journey in terms of practical skills sharpened and theoretical knowledge gained, I would like to instead share my experience from the lens of a fledgling practitioner.Prior to this, I thought I had a decent understanding of pain and suffering. I knew that life was difficult for many, and that struggles were part and parcel of existence. But being with my clients, all diverse individuals each occupied with myriad and unique problems, helped me to realise what it truly meant to sit with someone’s pain. While our differences are apparent at first glance, we are all united by our preference for happy experiences and our difficulties in dealing with the bad stuff. Being a witness to the private pain of others has reinforced an understanding within me that we are more alike than we are dissimilar. The faces and stories may be different, but the overarching theme is the same - "Life is difficult.Can you help?"And that's a scary question. Sometimes sessions are highly productive and you know you've made an impact. Other times you leave feeling confused and worried, unsure if you're making a difference. It's also a curious feeling - knowing that for an unknown amount of time, you'll travel with this stranger towards some imagined destination. And when the time comes, you'll unhitch your wagon from this person who's grown to be very vulnerable with you, who has granted you access to their innermost world. There's a bittersweet, almost poetic quality in knowing that if we do the good work, clients won't need us anymore. We learn to let them go, almost certain to never meet again.I find myself developing a reverence for the therapeutic hour, and a deep compassion for anyone who is willing to step in and bare their soul to a complete stranger in the hopes of being heard. This multifaceted, complex, chaotic, but ultimately beautiful symphony of life – two gardeners working together to build some hope and goodness in the roots and mud of pain. Perhaps Irvin Yalom puts it best: "When I turn to others with the knowledge that we are all (therapist and patient alike) burdened with painful secrets—guilt for acts committed, shame for actions not taken, yearnings to be loved and cherished, deep vulnerabilities, insecurities, and fears—I draw closer to them. Being a cradler of secrets has, as the years have passed, made me gentler and more accepting. When I encounter individuals inflated with vanity or self-importance, or distracted by any of a myriad of consuming passions, I intuit the pain of their underlying secrets and feel not judgment but compassion and, above all, connectedness." #counselling #therapy #mentalhealth
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Leon Han
Counsellor | Psychotherapist | Mental Health Educator | Trauma-Informed Therapist
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"Why can't my life be free from all this pain?"This is a sentiment that, in one way or another, I've encountered repeatedly in session. We humans instinctively know that pain is a part of our existence. Sadness, loss, anger, rejection, and betrayal make up a seemingly inexhaustible list of experiences that cause us much suffering. Sometimes life seems intent on making us miserable - a bad day becomes worse, a health condition complicates, a dream dies. In response to this, I'd like to share the concept of clean and dirty pain. From an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy lens, clean pain is the unavoidable part of life that hurt. Whether we wish it to or not, we get sick, we fail, we get rejected, we experience anxiety, sadness, and a host of other uncomfortable emotions. Clean pain is the price we pay for living - and it is pain that we must accept as a natural part of human existence. Thus, living necessitates a certain degree of clean pain. However, what many of us might not realise is that we often exacerbate this clean pain through the addition of 𝐝𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐲 pain. Dirty pain is resistance, avoidance, stubborn refusal, self-denial, maladaptive coping mechanisms - what we do and tell ourselves in an effort to avoid feeling the full impact of what we experience in life. If clean pain is the hurt we feel from the loss of a long-term relationship, then dirty pain is refusing to acknowledge what we lost, shutting down our emotions, turning to substances or unhealthy distractions to numb ourselves. Dirty pain unnecessarily intensifies our suffering, and makes us feel that an experience is horrifyingly unbearable.The solution, then, is to first cultivate an attitude of willingness - being willing to accept that life is never rosy all the time, that loss will be everyone's companion sooner later, and that clean pain is a guest we must always be willing to accommodate into our homes. Once we're open to idea of pain that comes from simply living, it's less likely that we'll resort to ways to deny, avoid or resist it - hence decreasing our dirty pain, and our overall suffering. Life sucks sometimes! That is the experience that all of us have. But it's also worth recognizing when we worsen our own situation by refusing to accept the universal truth that pain is inevitable, but suffering is ultimately optional.#mentalhealth #counselling #therapy Image Credit: wiserhumans.com
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Leon Han
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Last week, I had the privilege of designing and running a mental health workshop at James Cook University Singapore. The topic in question was worry - and as a frequent worrier myself, it was an opportunity to dig deep into the research behind worry, as well as practise useful interventions that can help to assuage our worrying minds. I want to share the most useful bits I gathered from this experience:•Worrying is a normal psychological process that all humans experience. As much as worry can feel maladaptive at times, it has a positive function in helping us to problem solve and to highlight the importance of a situation, which can increase our motivation.•Worry becomes harmful when it develops into excessive over-thinking; when we are able to only focus on the worst-case scenarios without taking action, and when worrisome thoughts feel like intruders that we are unable to stop obsessing over.•Many of us hold conflicting thoughts about worrying. We know on a logical level that worrying is pointless and doesn't help us effect change, but we engage in it anyway because of erroneous beliefs that worrying gives us a sense of control and that not worrying might make things worse.• One of the most effective (but difficult to implement!) antidotes to worrying is to accept that uncertainty is a fact of life, that many things are out of our control, and that we can be a lot more powerless than we think we actually are.A common theme arises when we reframe worrying as the mind's way to handle a difficult situation with an unknown outcome - that it is our mind's best attempt to control something it cannot currently affect. Sitting with uncertainty is unbearable for many people, and so worrying becomes a tool to give us a handle on a situation, even if we know deep down that tool is functionally useless. However, the paradox of control is that the more we attempt to control our inner experiences, the more we 𝑙𝑜𝑠𝑒 that very same control we crave. Ultimately, the key to beating worry is learning how to surrender to uncertainty while trusting that you have the skills, strengths, and abilities to handle the outcome of any situation. A useful mantra comes to mind - "There is nothing I can do at this moment to tackle this issue. When I am ready, I will figure it out and tackle it then...I don't need to figure everything out ahead of time, and it's okay not to have it all figured out."
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Leon Han
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I’m excited to share that I’ll be starting a new position as a Practicum Counsellor at James Cook University Singapore - looking forward to the fruitful journey ahead!
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Leon Han
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What I Learned From Using ChatGPT as a Free Therapist https://www.ricemedia.coThis was such a fascinating article. The role of AI in mental health is clearly a complex topic but in my opinion:•ChatGPT is an excellent tool if you need non-judgement, if you want general mental health advice, or just to vent.•ChatGPT is inadequate if you're looking for the kind of environment that only a proper therapeutic alliance can provide, if you need an intervention plan that adapts to your needs, or if you've been struggling for a moderate/long period of time.•ChatGPT is absolutely out of its depth and can even be harmful if you have severe psychopathology, if you have extensive and sustained trauma that needs long-term treatment, and if you require specialised, uniquely tailored interventions. One of the ultimate goals of therapy is for you to develop your own self-efficacy so that you're eventually able to be your own problem-solver and change-maker. My main gripe with ChatGPT is that it gives advice and dishes out a laundry list of tools, feeding information wholesale without tailoring to the user's needs. In doing so, it prevents users from realising their own competence and hinders them from building their self-capacity, which ultimately limits their growth as individuals. It's one thing to be given 10 things to do to help your depression - it's another thing to come to the realisation on your own that you are able to take control of your depression, and bettering your mental health is within your grasp. Realisation drives change, interventions alone don't.Nonetheless, the many factors that discourage people from seeing real-life therapists are very real indeed. Cost, convenience, availability, and legitimacy definitely need to be addressed. I'm hoping that the emergence of such AI tech will incentivise positive change within the mental health industry, and that perhaps one day AI can be a complementary tool to our work. #mentalhealth #chatgpt #therapy
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Leon Han
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I'd like to share one of my favourite analogies in therapy - the Chessboard Metaphor. It's a useful way to reframe how we view difficult inner experiences, and provides a new perspective on how we can begin changing our relationship with them. We often struggle with difficult thoughts and feelings that seem to crop up out of nowhere - a negative thought or emotion emerges, and we either let it drag us along or we do our best to combat it with a positive thought. This struggle can be likened to chess, where the black and white pieces are enmeshed in a constant battle, with our minds transforming into a persistent war zone. While this war rages on in our heads, we may feel dragged along for the ride; a helpless casualty who's entirely at the mercy of our inner experiences. Sometimes, it can even feel like we're the chess pieces themselves, duking it out battle after battle till we're exhausted and spent.But there is no end to this war - unlike real life chess, our mind is capable of generating an infinite amount of positive and negative thoughts/emotions. Furthermore, black pieces tend to attract white pieces, and vice versa. Just as we think we've batted down a negative cognition, another one arises to take its place. The fight is eternal, and getting swept up in this neverending war is a sure-fire way to get stuck. The Chessboard Metaphor proposes that, instead of viewing ourselves as a chess piece or as a combatant in this war, we see ourselves as the chessboard instead. While it is the staging ground for this eternal conflict, it is relatively unaffected at the end of the day. It has seen a thousand battles - and it will see a thousand more, no doubt - but it simply observes them without rooting for either side or having a stake in the conflict. It quietly exists, watching the pieces battle, without getting involved. Just like the chessboard, we can learn to accept the existence of our negative experiences (the chess pieces) while choosing not to enlist in the eternal war they wage. We can see the chess pieces for what they are - thoughts and feelings that are ultimately transient words and pictures that will come and go. We can simply observe them, while taking steps to live our lives in a way that aligns with our values.Naturally, this is easier said than done! Too often we feel like we have no choice but to fight, or to see ourselves as a player in our mind's conflict zone. Learning how to take a step back takes patience and lots of practice. But it's important to recognise the availability of this choice that we have, and that crucially, you are not your thoughts or feelings. We don't have to play this game of eternal chess if we don't want to - ironically, in accepting the game, we free ourselves from it. #therapy #counselling #mentalhealth
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Leon Han
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"In this field, you never stop learning." Early on in my Master's programme, a professor uttered these words to the class. I've kept them to heart since then, and I'm so glad to say that the past few days have been incredibly fulfilling for my educational journey. On Sunday, I officially completed Stage 2 Supervised Practicum Training for Choice Theory Reality Therapy. Many thanks toAnthony Wongfor his insight and peerless guidance for navigating the road ahead, and to my fellow coursematesBryan Koh,Nicole Tang, Soe Myat Myo Shwe, Annabelle and Charmaine for demonstrating their unique approaches to therapy - I learned so much just watching all of you during training! Accompanying this is my completion of and certification in Level 1 Gottman Method Couples Therapy by The Gottman Institute, which has also been a splendid exploration into the art and science of relationship repair. I'm truly grateful for the opportunities I've had to build upon my knowledge and skills, and I'm excited for the (eternal) learning that lies ahead!#realitytherapy#gottman
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Leon Han
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I'm currently training in Gottman Method Couples Therapy, one of the more popular evidence-based interventions used in the therapy room for couples counselling. The learning has been truly fascinating, and I thought to share some insights. Based on 40 years of research conducted by Drs. John and Julie Gottman (married for 35 years too, talk about walking the talk), they were able to predict with up to a 94% accuracy rate if a married couple would eventually divorce or not. Our contemporary ideas of handling relationships may be pretty flawed too - most conflict in a relationship (69%) is perpetual and cannot be resolved satisfactorily, only managed. One of the most illuminating models the Gottmans propose is the Four Horsem*n of the Apocalypse - as the name suggests, these are the four biggest indicators that a relationship (heterosexual or otherwise, married or not) is headed for an untimely end. In nutshell, they are:• Criticism: Attacking your partner's character instead of their actions. Putting negative labels, targeting personality traits and aspects of who they are.• Contempt: Being condescending, insulting, and morally superior. Using words that aim to diminish, demean, and deflate - to make your partner feel inferior and worthless.• Defensiveness: Reacting aggressively and confrontationally against any perceived call-out. Refusing to take accountability for one's role in a situation gone wrong.• Stonewalling: Shutting down verbally or physically. Ignoring your partner in times of conflict. Closing the door and avoiding all conversation or discussion.Out of the Four Horsem*n, contempt emerges as the single greatest predictor of relationship breakdown and divorce. Unsurprisingly, putting someone down and making them feel less than they are is a big factor for relationship apocalypse. All is not lost, though. The Gottmans also highlight four antidotes to these destructive behaviours that can help to save relationships and marriages. I found some time to cobble together an infographic below, which I think succinctly summarises them.All of the antidotes may seem quite obvious at first glance, but the research has shown that time and again, a lot of couples don't immediately fall back on healthy communication and conflict-management mechanisms when bad times arise. It's all too easy to get lost in the heat of the moment and say things we don't mean. The Gottmans' research is proof that almost anything can be repaired, even when hope seems to be snuffed out. This is not to say that *every* couple can come back from the brink, but there is enough evidence to show that with mutual determination and openness to change (plus the help of a skilled therapist!), the Four Horsem*n can be driven away. #gottmanmethod #therapy #couples #counselling #mentalhealth
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Leon Han
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Pleased to announce that I've completed the Certified Clinical Trauma Specialist - Individual (CCTSI) course by Arizona Trauma Institute. I found this training to be a revolutionary and eye-opening part of my postgraduate education. The salutogenic, competence-based approach to trauma is a truly amazing way to empower clients, and I hope to utilise the many skills I've acquired in the course when I begin practising. A big thank you to Dr. Robert Rhoton, Psy D., LPC, F.A.A.E.T.S. for his clear explanations, witty humour, and ceaseless dedication to improving the lives of his clients!
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