Isabelle Shonka

Responsibilities

- Provide in-home and community-based support services to individuals with mental health needs. - Focus on skill development, daily living assistance, and community involvement. - Regularly communicates with care team– including therapists, psychiatrists, and coordinators, to confirm and address client treatment plans. - Maintain client confidentiality and professional boundaries. - Shadowed other counselors. - Help assist with client transportation, appointment attendance, socialization, and crisis management. - Participate in supervision, staff meetings, and ongoing mental health education and training.

Accomplishments

In mid July, I was offered the full-time position as a Counselor.

Learning experience

I learned how important communication is. Working at Stepping Stone and collaborating with other co-workers made me realize that without communication you are unable to build rapport and a relationship with your clients along with your co-workers. Another lesson I learned is that working in this field is a huge and unexpected eye opener to what different individuals experience on a daily bases. Overall, I am so glad I chose this internship. It was a great reminder of why I want to be in the field and makes me excited for my future.

What advice would you give?

If you work as a Counselor or anything in the same realm, try not to make your clients problems, your problems. While it is important that you are supporting your clients, it is more important that you prioritize your own mental health. When you make your clients problems, your problems, it can be a lot on your mental health especially when you start seeing a lot of clients. Since this field can be extremely draining, prioritizing your own mental health and figuring out what eases your stress or what puts your mind in a different place other than work, is something that will help burnout. I just started and I have been trying to remember those things as I think most people who are in the field are perfectionist. I feel like it can become very easy for Counselors to fixate on when client's don't make progress right away, and that makes you automatically assume that you haven't done enough for the client. In instances like this, it is important to make sure that you understand that progress isn't going to be visible during the first few sessions. It will take time and that is something that we can't dwell on outside of sessions. If we make it our problem that's what can make this field tricky.