Psychological Counseling OH Card

The OH card is a commonly used projective auxiliary tool in the field of psychological counseling. Its core function is to help clients bypass psychological defenses and materialize vague and unspeakable emotions and cognitions in the subconscious. It is neither a metaphysical fortune-telling tool nor a necessary process for all consultations. Its effectiveness depends entirely on the use scenario and the match between the two parties.

Last week, I received a girl for workplace anxiety consultation. For the first twenty minutes, she kept going over and over, "I don't know what bothers me, I just don't want to go to work, but I'm afraid I can't find a better job without giving up." When we got stuck, I pushed the OH card box in front of her and asked her to pick one out. The card she pulled out showed a man standing on the edge of a cliff, with a hand pushing on his back. The girl stared at the card for three seconds, then burst into tears, saying that this was her current situation: the project she was working on had been running for three months, and her boss was always doing extra work at short notice. She mentioned it twice and couldn't handle it, and the boss laughed and said, "It's a good thing for young people to exercise more."

Interestingly, practitioners from different consulting schools have quite different attitudes toward OH cards. Most counselors with a psychoanalytic orientation love to use it. They feel that this is a lightweight free association carrier. It is much more user-friendly than the Rorschach inkblot test. There is no sense of oppression of "taking a test" and it is easy to help the client open up the conversation box. ； However, many consultants from the cognitive behavioral school are not convinced. They feel that there is no standardized norm for the OH card, and the reliability and validity have not been rigorously verified. Instead of relying on pictures to guess emotions, it is more efficient to directly make emotional scales and sort out automatic thoughts. ； Most counselors with a humanistic orientation have a neutral attitude. They think that the card is just a primer. If the client is willing to use it, it does not matter. As long as it can help the client express his true feelings, any form is fine. Which one do I belong to? To be honest, I don’t have such a strong obsession with genres. If it’s useful, I’ll use it. If it’s not, I’ll throw it aside.

Of course, no matter how the schools argue, the general public has the most misunderstandings about OH cards. Two months ago, a little girl who was just a sophomore in college came in and the first thing she asked was: "Teacher, can you use your OH card to help me calculate when I can be single?" ”I laughed out loud and told her that this card was really not Tarot and there was no standard answer. If you draw a card with two people holding hands, you think it’s okay to meet true love next month, you think it’s okay to go to a concert with your best friend next week, or even you think it’s because you want to reconcile with the roommate you’ve been having an quarrel with recently. All the right of interpretation is in your hands, it’s not written in the card, and it’s not something I can have the final say on. To put it bluntly, what you see is what you already have in your subconscious mind, and the card just helps you put it on the surface.

I also ran into many pitfalls when I first came into contact with OH Card. At that time, I thought this tool was so "magical" that I wanted to use it for every consultation, until I met a client who really hated looking at pictures and talking. He is a programmer who does back-end development. He frowned when he saw the card I took out. He said that seeing these blurry paintings reminded him of being forced to write a composition about pictures by his Chinese teacher in elementary school, and he felt nothing at all. I was so embarrassed that I quickly put the card away and never forced a visitor to give a card again. Now I will only take the initiative to offer OH cards to two types of people: one is like the working girl at the beginning, who has no problem with expressive ability, but can’t explain what is bothering her. ； The other type is clients who are particularly resistant to expressing emotions and are used to being reasonable. Using a card as a cover can make them feel that "I'm not talking about my own affairs, it's me talking about this card", and their defenses will loosen.

After all, my deepest feeling after doing consulting for so long is that all tools are dead, but talents are alive. The best thing about an OH card is never what is drawn on it, but what the person holding the card is willing to say. Oh, by the way, last time there was a high school student who drew an all-black card. He was silent for five minutes and said to me, "This is what it feels like when I'm locked in my room at night studying questions. My mother always opens the door and comes in to deliver milk, saying that I don't know how lucky I am when I'm in the midst of blessings." In the end, he didn't say what the card was, but what does it matter? He said what he had hidden for half a year, and that was enough.