One of the most widely-read posts on School Counseling by Heart is Post-It Note Counseling, which outlines a technique that I use in individual counseling sessions to help kids who are reluctant to talk about how they are feeling. I use Post-It Note counseling all the time, to great effect. I think others must be using it too, because fairly frequently it pops up on my Pinterest page, so far removed from the original pin that I think it must have circumnavigated the globe before arriving back here! (Luckily, it still links back to School Counseling by Heart!). Since my last two posts, Teaching Kids to Tell About Sexual Abuse and Using Data to Teach About Sexual Abuse Prevention, are part of a series focused on a heavy, difficult subject, I thought it would be nice to take a little happier-topic break and update you about how my sessions with the student featured in Post-It Note Counseling progressed.
Although she was initially too shut down to talk about her feelings, using the Post-It notes helped this student identify thirteen uncomfortable feelings. No wonder she was having such a hard time!
The student chose to arrange her feelings from left to right: “gigantic” to “huge” to “big” to “medium-large” to “medium.”
She also chose to label the intensity of the feelings with smaller post-it notes.
In our following sessions, we pulled out her Post-It notes to check in and assess how things were going, and went through them one by one to come up with strategies she could use to address them. Eight weeks later, she was doing really well. Her family was very supportive and had gotten additional help for her. I asked her if she wanted to put her feelings on Post-It notes, and she grinned and nodded. Here’s how she was feeling:
Happy. Proud. Successful. Satisfied. Brave. Confident. This was a moment to treasure! I was feeling all of those feelings too!
Post-It note counseling works just as well when you want your student to look at their successes and how far they’ve come as it does when you need to help them talk about difficult feelings. This girl felt pretty good when we started the session, but she was positively beaming when she could see and touch and move her new feelings. She decided to throw the original set of uncomfortable feeling Post-It notes into the recycle bin, turned back and hugged me, and proudly took the new ones with her. She wanted to keep them in her desk, to remind herself of how hard she had worked and how brave she is.
It was a very good day.
Have you used Post-It note counseling? What techniques do you use to help kids identify their successes?
You might also be interested in:
Trackbacks/Pingbacks