Assessments
Assessment can play a significant role in counselling and psychological services. Formal and informal assessment can take place throughout the counselling relationship. Yet, there are specific circumstances where formal assessment is the primary reason clients are seeking services. In our practice, this in the case with diagnostic and psychoeducational assessments. Formal assessment typically involves gathering a wide variety of background information along with the administration of specific testing measures. Together this information is the basis for a comprehensive report. The purpose of a diagnostic assessments is what it sounds like, for a diagnosis. There are a number of situations where a formal diagnosis may be of importance. In our practice this typically involves a situation where there is a question as to whether or not a formal diagnosis can be made and identifying the specific diagnosis. A psychoeducational assessment, on the other hand, specifically examines cognitive and academic functioning as it may relate to things like learning issues, ADHD, and giftedness. In both types of assessments we examine a number of factors in order to arrive at a differential diagnosis. There are a few types of assessments that we do not conduct including assessments for the custody and access of children and medical-legal assessments for court purposes as these are specialty areas unto themselves.
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling of some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.
– Victor E. Frankl
Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.
– Victor E. Frankl
The most beautiful people we have known are those who have know defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
When we love, we strive to be better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.
– Paulo Coelho
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes, on the grass under the trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
– John Lubbock
I have learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
– Henry David Thoreau
We will find that kindness is a way of making less effort. It is the most economic attitude there is, because it saves us much energy that we might otherwise waste in suspicion, worry, resentment, manipulation, or unnecessary defense. It is an attitude that, by eliminating the inessential, brings us back to the simplicity of being.
– Piero Ferrucci
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? … Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do… And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
– Marianne Williamson