Today, after several meetings, we did our first teaching!
We were privileged to lead a session on ‘endings’ with the current MPhil Clinical Psychology students at the University of Colombo. They are coming to the end of two years’ hard-work having trained as some of the very first psychologists in Sri Lanka.
We began by delivering a one-hour lecture on the meaning and importance of endings, how we might facilitate endings in therapy, barriers to discussing endings, and questions we might ask about endings, and by providing our own examples of endings that we felt went well and those we wish had gone ‘better’. We then opened up the session to allow the trainees to reflect on their own training experiences, and how they felt about ending the course and moving forwards in their careers. We were struck by how similar many of their experiences were to our own as recently-qualified clinical psychologists. We were also humbled by the students’ resilience in completing the course despite receiving no funding, not being provided any extra time for research, not having a team of psychologists to offer guidance or supervision, and training in a country where Clinical Psychology does not exist within government services and has little, if any, recognition. Despite all of these challenges, we were impressed by the level of reflection shown by the students and felt grateful to be able to share in this transitional period with them. We also felt extremely thankful for all the support we received in our own training experiences.
The feedback from the trainees was very positive and we feel excited about our next teaching session later this week.
Jen and Verity in Sri Lanka 