If you followed the guidelines in the last issue of this newsletter, your autobiographical statement has already set the stage for your application packet by showing how you became who you are. In this essay, you are now ready to begin describing, more specifically, the emerging psychologist inside of you. A central component of your professional self is your theoretical orientation. It determines which psychological perspective(s) naturally guide(s) you as you attempt to understand your clients and how they became who they are.

Together, the three components listed in this essay above form the basis of your work as a therapist. This is one reason I believe selection committees value this question. Thus, your response to it provides selection committees with it first full glimpse of what it would be like to train you.  I hope you will make sure they get a good one.

Specifically, this question asks you to consider three different elements in your clinical approach (your theoretical orientation, how you conceptualize cases, and how you use these to plan your treatment) and to synthesize them in a single answer.  That is, it asks you to show how they are linked to one another.  To write a coherent and thorough, but concise, response to this question, you might want to begin by writing about each element separately before describing how they influence one another.   How can this strategy help you?

Taking this approach enables you to tease apart this rather complex question and make to sure that you answer it completely. It also ensures that you do not gloss over the last part of the question as you might if you did not take enough time. I am amazed at how often applicants fail to answer an essay question because they did not read it carefully before responding. Never simply answer to the question you think they are asking (or wish they were asking). Always read what they actually want to know. (Readers become very unforgiving when they do not find what they are looking for and often give up on the writer very quickly.).  The risk of alienating them are too grave.

Your first task in preparing for this essay is describing your theoretical orientation. Many applicants feel somewhat embarrassed about admitting that they have not yet arrived at a definitive answer to this question. Ironically, most of them have just started their therapy practicum year so they have only recently begun testing applications of their theoretical knowledge. Yet, they feel as though they ought to have already formulated a coherent overall approach to treatment.

If you are like these applicants, you owe yourself a break. In fact, regardless of how coherent or fragmented your approach feels, you already possessed a budding theoretical orientation when you entered graduate school, or at least when you started reading your first few psychology books. I believe we are born with a theoretical orientation. We simply expand it as we develop our competence. To uncover your own, simply step back and think about which of your textbooks have absorbed your attention so fully that you could not put them down or which lectures you found completely captivating . The truth is, no one expects you to have a fully-developed orientation at this point - only the foundation for one.

After outlining your perspective start identifying what kind(s) of case material you pick up most readily during a clinical interview: Are you drawn to the interaction patterns a client shows in relationships?  Do you notice the distorted beliefs people have about themselves, others, and life itself and the habitual ways they talk to themselves? Are you fascinated by what reinforces or extinguishes people’s usual behavior patterns? Or do you wonder how people assign meaning and significance to what they experience? Do you look more at the intrapsychic workings of an individual or always consider that individual in the context of larger systems?  All of these have equal value in your work. The secret is knowing which one(s) you normally rely on first

As suggested in the essay question above, you have a much better chance of writing a clear, coherent essay if you use a real case or two from your training to illustrate your points. Choose those that explain your points most clearly. Examples show your readers exactly how you apply these components to your individual cases. Describing actual clients (with personally-identifiable information concealed) enables you to illustrate these relationships between your theoretical orientation and your ways of conceptualizing and intervening as a clinician. 

This approach ensures that you will not wind up writing vague generalities about how they interact that your readers find difficult to understand.  It also ensures that you will incorporate yourself into your essays. (Remember that these are not academic essays; they are personal essays about you.) Without using a concrete example or two, you risk staying in the theoretical realm, describing some abstract academic (and very wordy) principles that your reader finds difficult to follow. Given how much you are already competing for their attention (as they slog through piles of essays and fight overwhelming fatigue), you cannot afford to lose them by writing in abstraction.

Are you still with me?   I will now show you the difference by shifting my own writing style. The sentences in the previous paragraph included many large (what I call "25¢") words. They show that I have a doctorate and know how to use a thesaurus.  This paragraph focuses on 5¢ and 10¢ words. Notice how much easier it is for you to understand my thoughts quickly and stay motivated to continue paying attention to me. Check your own rough drafts: Do your eyes glaze over as you read them aloud? Stop and look at the price of the words you have used and the resulting cost of losing your reader’s comprehension. Then, give your readers a better deal.  Try writing more in the ways you talk.  See what happens.  Do not forget to solicit comments and suggestions from a variety of readers.

After choosing a case or two, lay out explicitly what material you chose to focus on after completing your clinical interview. Describe freely what made you choose that particular information and what made you believe it was relevant in helping you to understand this client. Connect each piece of information directly to the part of your theoretical orientation that led you to focus on it. Then, pull together an overall explanation of how these elements fit together. While writing this rough draft, notice your unconscious tendency to continue using big words in order to prove your competence to your readers.  Then, remember what I said above and give yourself permission to express it more simply.

Notice also how you have felt while reading this article. Which of my word choices lead you to appreciate my writing style more? Probably, the smaller ones. Many years ago, a close friend told me that "the sign of genius is the ability to express complex ideas in the simplest of terms". As a writer, I continually strive to achieve this so everyone easily understands what I am saying. This reduces the chance that I will lose a reader just when I need him or her most. I hope you will adopt a similar philosophy, especially when the stakes are as high as your own professional training.

After describing how you conceptualize (think about or understand) a particular case, think about how this way of arranging the information determines the focus of your treatment.  Show what you chose to focus on first, how you chose it, and what other elements of the case you chose to set aside to deal with at a later time.  Even think about how you use different theories (cognitive, behavioral, systemic, dynamic, interpersonal, etc) to help you identify the focus of treatment, your starting point, how you expect the treatment to unfold, and how or when you choose shift the focus of your interventions.

Remember that the secret of good quality writing lies in taking enough time to uncover your best ideas. Allow yourself to generate an abundance of material, far beyond the 500-word limit imposed by the question. This approach will provide you with plenty of ideas from which you can select the best and most relevant ideas. Using your best material enables you to express your thoughts most clearly and even allows you to show the level of sophistication you have achieved at this point in your development as a therapist.