Reflections on blogging

They say medical students often go through a period of hypochondriacal illness; thinking they have every disease they read about. I'm beginning to wonder if this might be true of counselors too, but in a different way. It's not that I believe that my own psychopathology includes everything in the DSM. It's just that my daily work includes a lot of thinking about thinking. I pay exhorbitant attention to the mineutia around every interaction and relationship in my life. It's getting to be exhausting!

Ever since high school, I've been a journaler. I thought blogging would feel similar. But the fact that it is semi-public makes me watch my grammar and choose my words more carefully than freelancing on the blank pages of my journal. Interestingly, as a counseling student, I am finding blogging to be more difficult because at the end of a long day of analyzing others and communicating, I'm tired of reflection. After spending three hours in my intense "group counseling" course tonight, all I want to do is stop reflecting, stop summarizing, stop communicating effectively, and put the breaks on appropriate self-disclosure. In every class, I must examine my own beliefs inside and out, discuss the process, pay attention to the interactions and the relationships between myself and the students and teachers with whom I work.

I have always thought of counseling as a healthy break from the daily stresses, a time to sit down and unload. But do counselors need counselors? Of course, best practices would suggest that a counselor needs to understand what it's like to be the one on the couch. That is hard to argue. However, I'm starting to wonder if there is a limit to how much attending, processing and reflecting one can do before it is rendered null and ineffective. I'd pontificate on that a bit more, but I'm all reflected-out. Maybe I should connect with a virtual blogging counselor.