Do you see what I meant about poking the beehive with a stick?
As I like to begin, thank you all. I'm serious.
I'm curious, not to sound rude I really wonder (and I know singasongofjoy you weren't being rude stating you were curious), are there any applicants or people planning to apply to doctoral programs in psychology reading this discussion? Are there any counseling psychologists or students in counseling psychology doctoral programs who are reading this discussion? .
I graduated from a counseling psychology program.
I think this next bit covers most of what was written above. It can be argued that whenever there is a loss there is grief, but the way that grief looks differs from person to person. If we acknowledge that grief follows loss, I think looking into instrumental and intuitive grief becomes relevant to what we're discussing. I'm basing what follows on work by Kenneth Doka. Instrumental grievers take the approach of action-based responses to loss. Like jmiah717 wrote, "cut bait or try again". Instrumental grievers don't feel as easily as intuitive grievers do, so they simply don't think to describe their experience much with emotional terms. Disappointment is a feeling, but I don't think it's a word that people associate with a lot of feeling. Instrumental grievers have feelings, because people do, they just don't speak in terms of them as easily as intuitive grievers do.
Intuitive grievers have a knack for feeling deeply, so that's how they respond to loss. They can make sensible decisions and be able to function, eat well, sleep well, exercise, go to work, etc. immediately after a loss, but they are healthy and happy to express their emotions and oftentimes this means sharing with others when grieving, too. Instrumental grievers really don't see the point in doing the sharing feelings with others thing. Most people are not purely instrumental grievers or intuitive grievers, they can and do express themselves in both ways, yet most people do lean towards one style more than the other. There are people at more extreme ends of the instrumental-intuitive continuum, too.
Fair enough; sounds like you're summarizing Doka's theory.
Ph.D. training emphasizes training in thinking, and getting emotional (or having the ability to emote deeply) has a bad rap in graduate school become it's often thought of in terms of attrition. It doesn't follow that because someone feels a lot, in one way or another (anxiety and passion are both feelings), they cannot perform well academically (e.g. ace tests, write and publish papers, conduct research, etc.). It seems to me that students in Ph.D. programs who have and demonstrate emotional intelligence of various kinds just isn't the scenario that we're most familiar with. We know "being emotional", as opposed to having emotion perhaps, can be immature, and so that's what we remember.
Here's where you lost me. I disagree that Ph.D. programs set out to pathologize having emotions or deep feelings, and many of us experienced plenty of intense emotions throughout the program and did fine, namely because we didn't have a lot of emotional reactivity outwardly toward others, which I think is what you're getting at in terms of being seen as problematic. My program taught that emotions are healthy; you just need to monitor your reactions and develop more advanced skills in deciding how to express them (if at all), particularly with clients, but also in general. I did research on emotional intelligence of counselors (both doctoral trainees in my program and master's students, and later, sampled APA-accredited PH.D. programs across the country). I found that there was a spectrum (a bell curve, as we would expect), just like in every other setting, of people who know their emotions well and value them, down to people who see emotions as pointless and lean toward emotional shut down.
Bowen, a family systems theorist, discussed differentiation of self, which essentially says that we have to have a healthy balance of independence/emotional distancing and interdependence/emotional contact, and contains the aspects of I-Position, Emotional Reactivity, Emotional Cutoff, and Fusion with others. My advisor loved Bowen, and in my program, we learned that extremes in emotional reactions AND extreme lack thereof are both problematic for therapists and both are signs of poor differentiation. We can over-identify with clients and become fused or highly emotionally reactive, or underidentify/shut down emotionally and emotionally distance ourselves to the point of lacking empathy (Emotional Cutoff). Neither is a good place to be. My predissertation and dissertation were based on this concept, and I've read a lot of the emotional intelligence literature.
So I'm not sure why you're saying that Ph.D. students demonstrating emotional intelligence "isn't the scenario we're most familiar with." Like I said, emotional intelligence is a spectrum, and people in psychology doctoral programs mirror the bell curve. Have you personally seen professors pathologize emotions and think that this is standard? I just wonder why you think Ph.D. programs discourage experiencing emotions. Again, it sounds like you're speaking about emotional reactions rather than experiencing emotions themselves, perhaps?
Also, I think it's too extreme to say that graduate school rejection should not at all be thought of as grief. That it should not be thought of as grief seems to be what's being implied. The response to the loss of attending graduate school can mean something more than disappointment to people who have invested an enormous amount of preparation, planning, and time into it. This being the case, and stating this is the case, is not pathology. No matter how evident it is that admission is not guaranteed, when people lose someone or something that is valuable (like the opportunity of admissions acceptance), it hurts and is a problem to be solved (not one or the other). That's how I see it.
Just to offer a different perspective on your experience, from personal experience and from observation of others, when we become attached to an idea or expectation, we experience suffering when it doesn't come to fruition. The more attached to the idea you are, the harder it will be to adapt if it doesn't work out (i.e. the more suffering you experience). This is from life experience and a little Buddhist philosophy that I've seen play out in my own life and in the lives of clients I've worked with. Can we call it grief and loss? Obviously some people in here say no, but I don't really care either way. The reality is, the stronger the attachment to the goal/idea, the worse we feel when it doesn't work out. According to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which is basically Buddhism and Eastern Philosophy condensed into a counseling theory (and an evidence-based approach used in VAs), inflexibility in thinking leads to depression and anxiety because we get set on ideas of what we want out of life and have trouble adapting to a life outside of the box of our expectations and wants. I think what you and other students who are not accepted into a doctoral program are experiencing is part of this phenomenon. In short, being strongly attached to an outcome we want makes the suffering real when the outcome doesn't happen. I see this all the time and it feels bad to experience ourselves...it's the "but it was supposed to happen..what now?" shock. It's tough, for sure.
