Taking the plunge: How reflecting on the personal and social GgRRAAAACCEEESSSS can tame your restraints and refresh your resources

In this chapter we ‘take the plunge’ and explore how reflections on our personal selves and values can provide counter-practices to the pull of those beliefs about ‘desirability’, which may be self-censoring and limit what we can become as a clinical psychologist. The chapter invites readers to reflect on the evolving interaction between the personal and professional ‘self’, using the mnemonic of the Social GgRRAAAACCEEESSSS (Burnham, 2012) as a set of significant contexts for critical reflection. The authors ‘take the plunge’ themselves, modelling an open and reflexive consideration of prior personal ‘positionings’ in relation to developing self-as-professional. They consider and illustrate through example, how we may select which of our repertoire of selves to bring into our clinical work, or leave ‘outside the door’. When this process begins in training we can continue to creatively explore this frontier throughout a career. The authors attempt to model an openness in relation to the ‘messy’, and valued personal GgRRAAACCEEESSSS, highlighting that each of these aspect of self can, in turn, be both a restraint and a resource. Considerations for clinical practice and supervision are discussed, as well as relationships with colleagues.