Exploring the Affective Inner Experiences of Therapists in Training: The Qualitative Interaction Between Session Experience and Session Content

Thirty-four 1st-year counseling students recorded their inner experiences following a simulated counseling session. Using a qualitative collective case study approach to extract emotion from a large pool of inner experience, 6 judges identified samples of affect through a triangulation process using intensity, extreme, and critical case sampling and then coded them into naturally occurring core ideas and domains. Affective experiences in the inner experiences were found frequently and were often quite intense. Affect was verbally suppressed and was mostly not noticeable on the audiocassettes. Four predominant affective themes emerged from the inner experiences: anger/frustration, disappointment/regret, anxiety/fear, and happiness/excitement.