Speaker 1: My name is Arielle. If we haven't already met, I'm the founder of Grad Life Grind. And today I'm going to be answering questions about my clinical practicum site. A few, I think last week, I submitted a story poll asking if you would like to learn more about my clinical practicum site. And then I also submitted a question sticker and I got a bunch of questions about my current site. and I printed them out so I would have them here while my phone is recording live the first question that I got is what is it what is my clinical practicum so I have a whole video sorry that's my dog I have a whole video about what is practicum what does clinical practicum mean but essentially it's part of my clinical training as a future psychologist and it's where I need to to see sorry to see clients for therapy under the supervision of a licensed psychologist and this is my third year in my PhD program so I'm doing my second clinical rotation now and basically what it is is me seeing clients and getting trained in in therapy so the second question is what kind of site so I did get matched to my site in April I believe of this year and I started over this summer but I did not and I will not name the site that I'm at. What I can share with you is that it is a domestic violence agency so the type of clients that I work with which is another question that I got is survivors current uh current survivors or past survivors of domestic violence are the clients that I'm serving and i see clients in english and spanish i am the only spanish-speaking clinician at my site which is a conversation for another day um so yeah so that's my site i'm at a db um agency they have lots of different programs within they have a shelter and they have other programs where they provide resources to people who are experiencing or have experienced intimate partner violence or domestic violence but that's where I'm at um the third question was how many hours is it per week so my school has a contract with this site and that's how I got my clinical practicum and my contract is for 16 to 24 hours per week and I'm usually on the higher side because like I said I'm the only Spanish speaker and so I do have my own kind of work boundaries but I normally get a lot of work and a lot of clients who are wanting to get services so I'm leaning more towards like the 20 hour mark I think and that accounts for not just the time that I'm seeing clients for therapy but it accounts for my supervision which I have three three hours of group supervision per week one hour of individual supervision per week it also accounts for the time that I spend doing assessments with my clients to track their progress and and also figure out what their most likely diagnosis is. It also accounts for the time that I spent doing treatment planning and writing my progress notes so all of that falls within the 16 to 24 hours. The other question is how many days per week so it varies right so 16 to 24 hours can be distributed across however many days I want. Normally there are required a required day or two required days depending on the practicum site. My program requires Thursdays because that's the day that we meet as a group for supervision and then the rest is like up to me to make my schedule. So I spend Wednesdays and Thursdays seeing clients and doing most of my practicum related stuff. I do have individual supervision on a separate day so I think I'm between two to three days per week doing clinical stuff um the other question is why so many hours in a day so when I posted the question sticker asking for your questions about my practicum site it was a day that I was spending 11 hours at the agency the reason why it's so many hours in one day was mainly because of just the way that I organized my schedule I spent the first two months at the site going in two days a week and going in person two days a week and it was just um it wasn't bad but I was finding that I was going one of those days just to see one client and then having to drive back and page holes and all that so I've restructured my schedule so that I only have to go in one day per week and that means that I'm there for a long time so it's not always so many hours in a day and thankfully at my site I make my schedule so I kind of signed up to have a really long day and I'm trying to figure out how to navigate that right now. But type of clients that you're working with is an additional question. I already stated that it's domestic violence clients. So our program does take youth also and they don't have to be experiencing any past or present domestic violence. We take all youth that want to be seen for free. So that's one piece of The other is that if anyone who has experienced domestic violence, past or present, can receive services, and they have a range of presenting problems, things that they want help with. Some people are actually still in the situation, some people are leaving the situation, and some people are many years removed. So that kind of explains that. One thing that isn't covered, I think, on any of the questions that I think would be important is that I see clients for therapy individually but I also run a group so it's a domestic violence support group that I run in Spanish again I'm the only one doing that so that's part of my practicum as well I'm also responsible for doing a crisis line shift so we have a 24-hour domestic violence hotline and so the clinical trainees including me have to sign up for four hours of the crisis line and that's remote. Um, right now my client, like my caseload is mixed virtual and in person. So even though I spend two to three days a week doing practicum stuff, I only actually go in one day. So I kind of load all my clients that are in person on that day. Um, and then I, um, see the rest at home. So the other question is what age types of patients do you see I think I covered that they're mostly adults but there is some youth does your site require you to use a specific orientation no but that's a thing so there are some sites or some supervisors who want you to use an orientation that they prefer at my site I'm it's pretty open I know that my supervisor leans towards CBT but I'm kind of doing my own thing and they're providing support about what they think I should be doing or what they suggest that I ask about things like that um number I think we're at number six okay there's nine questions and I'm trying to get all of this out before my next meeting so the next question is please share more I guess it's not a question please share more about what a day is like for you your likes struggles dislikes um so it depends um one day a week I have all virtual clients so most of them are back to back in the afternoon so I'll have like a two o'clock three o'clock four o'clock, 5 o'clock, 6 o'clock. Last week I worked till 8 o'clock. So that's something new. I'll probably do a different video about my first clinical site last year and how I didn't have that many clients on my caseload and it was my first clinical experience. If you were talking to me last year, I would never have said that I could do multiple clients back-to-back or have so many in a day, but I'm finding that I'm able to handle it. The therapy hour is 45 to 50 minutes, so I try to end within that time to give myself a buffer between the next client and I will kind of get up get water get a snack like do things that I can um to take care of myself and also to disconnect my dog is taking this opportunity to shake like a million times um anyways so yeah so I kind of have those bunched together so I'll do school work during the morning and then transition to my therapy hat in the afternoon into the evening and then the day that I go on site is the day that's the craziest for me so I have two to three clients in the morning on site and then I have a couple of hour a couple of hours to myself to do either progress notes or work on other school stuff answer emails things like that and then I see then I have supervision which is two hours in group and then we have a one hour didactic which just means we're learning things so we might watch videos or we might get training on assessments from our supervisor. And then after supervision, I have a client and I have a group. So like I said, my group is a Spanish speaking domestic violence support group, and it's pretty open to us as student therapists, how we want to run the group. These are not really therapy groups, but I find that I am delivering and like teaching things that I might teach my individual clients. And it's a lot more of a just a supportive space and a safe space for survivors to talk about their experience regardless of where they are in their journey and um so that's that's probably one of my favorite things um the question asked what my likes are I think that's my favorite thing is running the group I'd never had a group experience before and I really hold the group like near and dear even though it's only been two months I think that just the the space and the like the support and the safety there is really powerful and I think that that's that has nothing to do with me like that's just this bond that they have from having similar experiences um my struggle slash dislikes is just like how heavy this stuff is I do I have wanted to work with domestic violence pretty much forever so I'm really excited to be working with this population at the same time it's some really hard stuff so I've had to implement my own self-care strategies in between clients and especially after group because it is a space where like therapy and support group are safe spaces where people can share the things that have happened to them and their thoughts about the things that have happened to them and there's some really challenging stories that people are sharing with me and it's an honor to hear those things and it's an honor to be one of the only people that hears these stories because clients may not have anyone else that they can talk to about them at the same time I'm finding that it does affect me like it and I don't think that that has anything to do with like just me I think it's something that all therapists grapple with is how do I hold the stories and how do I hold what my client is experiencing and also have one foot in my own experience and be aware of what's going on for me physically emotionally and I think it's been a challenge but a good one like this is pushing me as a as a student therapist to figure out what are the things I need to put in place so usually the day that I spend on site like afterwards I'm wiped out I don't want to see anyone I don't want to talk to anyone um even if group has gone really well and I think that like everything's doing everyone's doing great it's not really about that it's just draining um so I spend my ride home usually like trying to disconnect and at first I would like call my mom or like call a friend and see if that was helpful and it actually was I think I just shouldn't be socializing with anyone on those days so honestly what has been helping me is um blasting music my entire way home I have a like semi-long commute and I just like I refuse to listen to a podcast or an audiobook or anything because I don't want to learn I don't want to be like taking in any information I just want to jam so I just like blast bad bunny the whole way home and that's actually really helped me like separate from my work life as I'm getting home um so that's that the next question is how do you mentally prepare for each client um so I think I've kind of alluded to that a little bit in that I prepare by doing like doing something in between each session to kind of separate myself so I'll get out of my chair I might go out on my balcony I'll drink water I'll do like a bio break go to bathroom get a snack um something that I don't do always but something that helps me at the beginning of the day like if I know I'm going to see clients is sometimes I'll just like um I really never talk about this on my platform but I'll pray because that's something that's important for me so regardless of what you believe in like it it is a source of strength for me to ask for just guidance and I don't think of myself as a healer I think of myself as someone who's in helping profession and so I kind of pray for like the strength and the guidance to like give all of my clients whatever it is that they're needing that day um so that's something I exercise um that's starting to be a little bit of a struggle because of how jam-packed my schedule is but I notice a difference when I when I work out the morning of a clinical day and when I don't um and I also kind of will pull up maybe my progress note from the last session or my notes from my supervision before I see each client so I can remember like okay this is what we touched on last week this is the direction that I want to go in for for some sessions but not all I'll write like a quick agenda or things that I want to follow up with them about um so that's how I prepare just like from the clinical side but also from the like personal side um how do they evaluate your progress. So every quarter, my supervisor receives my hours, like how many therapy hours and how many assessment hours I did. And they approve those because we have to track all of this. And they are looking at my progress notes throughout, like every week when I submit progress notes, they can comment and stuff and give feedback that way. And they can give feedback and individual or group supervision but at the end of each quarter we have like a formal evaluation and it's it's pretty intense and they score us on different areas and then they're supposed to provide feedback about those scores and ways that we can improve so that's kind of how we're evaluated in terms of clients they don't really evaluate us we kind of evaluate their progress and I wouldn't say I wouldn't always say that like a client's progress is indicative of the therapist's effectiveness it varies um but one of the ways that we know if what we're doing is working or whether we're being effective is if the clients are doing better right so that's a really broad way to explain it because there's a lot that goes into that but that's i think a piece of it um the last question that was submitted in advance is do you feel like you actually know what you're doing making a difference yeah so um sometimes i have days where i don't feel like i know what I'm doing or I've heard stories that are so challenging and hard that I'm like oh like little me like what am I gonna do um but I do have a lot of days now as a third year way more than when I was a second year where I'm like okay this is what I'm gonna do and I'm excited to bring things to group or I'm excited to do an intervention with my client I'm excited to tell my supervisor what what direction I'm thinking of going in so yeah I do feel like I know what I'm doing but I still have days when I feel like I don't um I do have days where I feel like I'm like I think every therapist has days where they're seeing a client they're like damn I don't know if what I'm doing is working for them and that's just an indicator to shift to do something different to elicit feedback from the from the client and figure out like is what we're doing working for you or not because if it's not let's figure out how to make this time useful for you um and how to make this space safer for you. So yeah, I actually am pleasantly surprised, I think, to say that I do feel like I know what I'm doing. I do feel like I'm making a difference. That's mainly because I don't think about it relative to other people. I think about it relative to me. So I feel way more effective than I did a year ago. I don't know how my clients would do if they were seeing somebody who has way more experience than them. Probably better, but this is part of the process and I feel grateful to be able to work for this population and also get the training and offer them a service that they might not otherwise be able to get. So that's that. There are a couple, I only have a few more minutes and there are a couple of questions here. Were you trained in this? It seems stressful. How do you do it and how do you translate things into Spanish? Things don't translate well. Yes, I am trained in this. Part of my PhD program is learning about different modalities of therapy, doing clinical training, and getting evaluated by my supervisor so that I can provide the best service possible. I've taken courses on this, and then I've actually practiced as a student therapist last year at my program's clinic. So yeah, I was trained. I think that part of the way that you're able to advance in the program is hitting the benchmark on these evaluations because you can't just send anyone to to be seeing clients and and working with them so let me see what else is part of that question how do you do it i mean i do my best it is very stressful um how do you translate things into spanish um there are a lot of assessments that are already translated into spanish some things really don't translate well but i um am fluent in spanish and so i feel pretty comfortable speaking to my clients in spanish it seems like you know obviously there are different dialects and sometimes we won't understand each other perfectly but there's ways to work around that and you kind of learn how to ask questions to get out what the client really means if you don't understand or if they're using a word that you don't know I was also lucky enough to take a class in Spanish at my program it was a Spanish for clinicians course and it taught us how to do clinical interviewing how to use like what the terminology is in Spanish for different disorders or different symptoms, different experiences, so that we would know, like, what the common terms are. At the same time, like, understanding special terminology isn't as important as knowing Spanish and knowing the culture, because people don't use, like, fancy terminology in their regular speech. Academics do. So I found that course to be super helpful. I learned a lot about the cultural factors and the cultural influences that affect clients in therapy. I learned a lot about, like, biculturalism and and I um had really great experiences working with Latinx identified clients last year some of them were English speaking but they were Latinx and some of them were Spanish speaking Latinx um some of them were first gen some of them were immigrants so all of that really helped prepare me for what I'm doing now and then part of my training at my current site is getting trained on how to work with this population so what are the things that affect people who have domestic who have experience with domestic violence it's also part of my research interest so my dissertation is going to be related to domestic violence so part of my understanding is is coming from like all the reading that I do in this area and taking like a trauma-informed perspective I had an extensive 40-hour training on domestic violence that is required by the state of California so that also helped so all this helped to prepare me for the work that I'm doing now I'm gonna have to wrap up this live now so that's everything on my practicum site. I want to thank you so much for tuning into this whether it was live or the replay. It was really fun to reflect on this and I hope that I'll be able to share more about it as I move along in the year. Thank you again and I hope you'll tune in to my next live. Take care.