Growing with purpose. Counseling with compassion.

When I began the Counseling Theories course in my first semester at UTSA, my understanding of therapeutic models was limited. I originally gravitated toward Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) because it was the modality I was most familiar with, but I did not yet have a theoretical identity of my own. Completing the Theoretical Orientation Scale was the start of that process that semester. My highest subscale scores landed in Strengths-Based Therapy and an Integrative approach, followed by Multicultural and Person-Centered Therapy. Even before I had experience working with clients, those results confirmed something I already believed from my own experience in getting sober. I believed that people carry the capacity for change, and the counselor's role is to help them access it rather than impose it on them. That early self-assessment became the foundation I built the rest of my theoretical identity on.

In my Integrative Theories paper, I combined Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) with Narrative Therapy, applying it to a case study I developed on Lenae Cortez, a single Latina mother facing family stress, addiction, and systemic barriers. Writing that paper pushed me past simply liking a set of ideas and into defending why SFBT's goal-oriented focus on a client's existing strengths and Narrative Therapy's belief that clients can reauthor their own stories work well together, and how I would use both to help a client separate herself from a problem-saturated narrative without dismissing the barriers she faced.

The next stage of growth was learning to translate theory into a full clinical picture rather than focusing on a single technique. Using the ICANSTART treatment planning model with Donna, a client conceptualized from the show The Bear, I diagnosed co-occurring borderline personality disorder and severe Alcohol Use Disorder and then built a treatment approach integrating Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) for emotional dysregulation, Motivational Interviewing (MI) for her ambivalence, and a strengths-based lens to reinforce her caregiving identity in healthier ways. This was the first assignment that required me to hold multiple theoretical modalities at once and intentionally match each one to a specific part of the clinical picture.

That skill became a reality once I reached Practicum. Working with an actual client experiencing persistent depressive disorder, low self-esteem, and difficulty forgiving herself for past choices, I created a treatment plan using cognitive restructuring (CBT) alongside narrative reauthoring and externalization, including a letter-writing intervention addressed to her younger self. Unlike my earlier coursework, this treatment plan carried real consequences and real accountability to an actual person. This was the moment my theoretical training stopped being an academic exercise and became a working aspect of how I sit across from a living client.

Now, in internship, theory shapes nearly every clinical decision I make, from how I conceptualize a client's presenting concerns to which intervention I choose first. Looking back, from a general orientation scale to an integrative paper to a full diagnostic model and finally a real treatment plan, I can see that my theoretical orientation was never fixed. It is still being shaped, session by session, by every client I work with, and I expect it will keep evolving for the rest of my career.

My growth as a group facilitator began in my Group Counseling course, where Module 1 asked me to lead a mock group session with my peers while they observed and evaluated me. My focus in the first session was mastering the fundamentals of welcoming the group, outlining confidentiality and expectations, structuring a round, and using accurate reflections of feeling and linking to point out common themes among members. My peer noted that I welcomed the group with warmth and confidence and that my reflections and linking were on point. In my own self-reflection I recognized the same strengths as my peer. It was affirming to know that what felt intentional in the moment came across the way I hoped, even while I was still nervous leading a group session for the first time.

Module two pushed me into a more difficult set of skills with blocking a harmful interpersonal process. In that session, a peer role-playing an attacking group member used harmful language toward another member, and I had to intervene in real time, addressing the behavior directly while keeping the group safe and calm. My peer described my tone as calm, authoritative, and in control, noting that I successfully used “we” statements to reinforce group norms and restored the group as a safe space after conflict. In my own reflection, I recognized that moment as a turning point for me. Blocking is something you must be able to do under pressure without losing the group's trust.

The skill of blocking became essential during Practicum when I served as lead facilitator for a Breaking Barriers group with teens who were court-mandated to attend for truancy. They came in miserable and visibly resentful of being there, and I ran the curriculum built for the group while managing resistance and, at points, harmful language between members. More than once I had to block hurtful comments the same way I first practiced in my Group Therapy course, staying calm and authoritative while making sure no one felt dismissed. By the end of our three-hour session, the same teens who walked in angry were thanking us for listening to them, telling us it was a space where they felt comfortable, and saying they did not want to leave.

Group therapy in Practicum remains one of the most rewarding experiences I have had in this program. Looking back, my growth in this area is measurable in a very literal sense. I moved from being evaluated on whether I could welcome a mock group of peers to leading a real group of resistant, court-mandated teens and parents through a genuine shift over the course of a single session. What began as textbook skills, welcoming, reflecting, linking, and blocking, are the exact tools I now rely on with real clients, and this experience confirmed for me that group work is where I do some of my most effective and meaningful clinical work.

Crisis intervention, specifically working with clients experiencing suicidal ideation and self-harm, was the area of this program I began most nervous about. I worried I would say the wrong thing to someone in real danger, freeze in the moment, or not feel equipped to hold that type of responsibility as a counselor-in-training. It was the one clinical area I could not fully picture myself doing confidently before I had to face it.

That changed largely because of my internship site, which sees a high volume of clients presenting with self-harm and suicidal ideation and offers a walk-in or call-in service called the Living Room. Clients in crisis can come in without an appointment to learn or practice a DBT skill, or to receive a shortened talk therapy visit. Before I was allowed to run Living Room shifts independently, I completed eight one-hour trainings that included three separate role plays, on top of shadowing other clinicians. By the time I saw my first client, I had already practiced the process repeatedly in a lower-stakes setting, which made the actual work far less intimidating than I anticipated.

Since completing that training, I have taken multiple Living Room clients using our LR Checklist to structure the visit. I regularly help build Crisis Response Plans (CRP), which our site uses in place of traditional safety plans, for clients both in and out of Living Room services. The LR checklist and CRP examples included here are not real client cases. I created mock versions using fictional information to show the structure and content of the actual tools used in practice due to client confidentiality.

I also attended a Chi Sigma Iota training at UTSA focused on working with clients experiencing suicidal and homicidal ideation, which added another layer of formal instruction on top of what I have learned through my site's training and hands-on experience. Crisis intervention is now one of the areas of clinical work I feel most confident in, which is a real shift from where I started. Between my site's structured training, running Living Room shifts, building CRPs, and the additional CSI training, I have moved from being afraid of getting it wrong to trusting that I know how to sit with a client in crisis and help them regulate in the moment.

My connection to advocacy did not just start in the classroom. It started with a specific person I met in Seattle, Washington. I spent hours talking with a young woman who had lost her home and her children and was living on the streets addicted to drugs. What stayed with me most was learning that it was easier for her to access clean needles than it was to get into a treatment facility. That imbalance, a system that made harm-reduction supplies more accessible than an actual pathway to recovery and stable housing, was the moment advocacy stopped being a professional buzzword and became something I felt obligated to act on.

That encounter is the reason I chose Seattle's unhoused population as the focus of my first semester advocacy project rather than a more general topic. In my Stability First poster, I researched the Housing First model and the way sobriety requirements and fragmented care keep dual-diagnosis individuals cycling in and out of homelessness. I paired the poster with a social media graphic, You Can't Heal Without a Home, to make the same argument accessible outside of an academic audience. Both pieces advocate for the same thing I wished already existed for the woman I met. Low-barrier housing that treats stability as the starting point for recovery, not something she had to earn first.

That project pushed me toward more active involvement in the profession itself. I joined TCA and Chi Sigma Iota, staying engaged in workshops since, which is what led me to a training I felt was directly relevant to everything above. Advocacy Identity in Professional Counseling gave me language and a framework for something I had already been doing instinctively since Seattle. This offered distinctions between client-level, systems-level, professional advocacy, and the ACA's ethical expectation that counselors advocate at the individual, group, institutional, and societal levels whenever barriers get in the way of a client's access.

From a single conversation on the street of Seattle, to a first-semester project built on that memory, to ongoing involvement in CSI trainings, I can see that my advocacy has not been a one-time assignment. It grew out of a personal reaction and has since taken on real professional language and structure. I expect my advocacy efforts to keep showing up in how I think about access to care, not just individual counseling, as part of the job.