Abnormal Psychology was right up my ally. Considering I want to get my doctorate in Clinical Psychology to eventually go into therapy, I am very interested in abnormal psychology and the disorders that we talked about in class. I have had a strong pull towards anxiety, depression, and PTSD in a sense of the types of populations that I would like to work with in counseling. This class allowed me to learn more about the various potential comorbid disorders as well as many other disorders that therapy can affectively treat.

In this class, we learned that there is a high rate of comorbidity between anxiety, depression, and PTSD. While this makes sense on a basic level, this realization helped me to reassure myself in the decision to want to work in PTSD specifically. When I first decided I wanted to do therapy, I knew I wanted to work with anxiety and depression but I wasn’t sure which population I wanted to work with specifically. The more I have research into various populations, the more I realize how badly PTSD therapy is needed in the military population. In addition to abnormal psychology helping me reassure myself that I can work with PTSD and still help clients with anxiety and depression, my psychology of counseling class helped me to learn specific skills that are needed in order to be an effective therapist.

            The psych of counseling class at TCU has been my favorite class that I have taken in all four years that I have been here. I think that I enjoyed it so much because it was focused on exactly what I want to do and it also allowed me to grow and focus on my strengths. A lot of the class in focused on what it takes to effectively work in the counseling field, but through weekly homework assignments, we were pushed to learn about ourselves on a deeper level. Each week we were instructed to write a short essay about a time that we felt a specific emotion or feeling. For example, we would write essays about times that we felt sad, scared, or lonely. These essays not only made us think about these feelings and how we define them, but it allowed us to think back to hard times in our lives and see how they have allowed us to grow. This class was a very opening experience for me but I have been incredibly grateful for it as it allowed me to see how much I’ve grown since I have been at TCU as well as showing me that even the toughest times in my life have helped lead me to where I am today.