Dinonyane on career, improving mental health and managing coronavirus anxiety (Part 1)

Betsho Mokgatlhe-Dinonyane has always been intrigued with the mind and enjoyed understanding why and how people think the way they do. That interest, combined with her passion for helping people with “abnormal behaviours”, led her to pursue counselling as

Give us a little insight into who you are and your background?

I think it’s only fair to start with the basic details one would like to know. My name is Betsho Mokgatlhe-Dinonyane, a wife, sister and mother to a lovely toddler.

I think I am not too different from my fellow 20 something-year-old who enjoy traveling and seeing different corners of the world exploring different cultures more especially trying different foods.

Academic-wise, I completed my undergraduate at UCT, my honors with UNISA and my masters with UEL. I’ve truly been fortunate enough to study the way I did. I got a combination of the classic way of learning, as well as via correspondence and that is something I am truly grateful for.

Tell us what you do and what your specializations are?

I have an MSc in Clinical and Community Psychology and so my social interests are really focused around helping individuals and communities. And when I say communities, I’m including families/couples, work spaces and the LGBTQA+ communities. A community I with which I had more access to is that of sex workers. I genuinely wish they had more of a voice in our country. I’m yet to find more ways to assist.

With regards to individuals, I offer a variety of services. These include play therapy (for younger age groups), counselling, career guidance and life coaching.

Why did you choose to become a counsellor?

My reason for becoming a counselor was because I have a natural inclination to assist people. I think many people in this field have that as a fundamental ability. You know the ability to connect with people and all the certain kind of space for them to comfortably share. I also learned that I have a curiosity for a scientific approach to problemsolving what some scientist identify as ‘abnormal behaviors’.

Funny enough though, the first area of interest that I had after high school was construction management but somehow I ended up this direction and I am convinced I am in the right space.

Now, what has kept me as a counselor, is the joy and satisfaction I get from seeing the relief on my clients’ faces throughout the journey of their therapy.

What role does a counsellor play on a mental healthcare team?

I feel I have partially responded to this question with the previous one - in that counseling really is meant to help relieve extreme forms of discomfort. I think that is the fundamental purpose of therapy. A secondary role of a counselor is to instill a specific set of skills that this individual or these individuals may not have had before coming to see me. Doing so makes it such that they don’t rely on me for certain decision making and they gain emotional independence.

Care to explain the difference between a counsellor and a psychologist?

The difference between myself and a psychologist is the fact that I cannot formally provide a clinical diagnosis nor can I write clinical reports. I have personally been trained to provide psychotherapy but not all counselors are trained to that degree. To add to this understanding, a layer after the psychologist is the psychiatrist. Now the psychiatrist is supposed to do exactly what the psychologist does the difference Between them is the fact that a psychiatrist can prescribe medication where as a psychologist cannot.

What services does your practice, Seding Therapy offer?

My practice, Seding-Therapy, offers the individual and community format of counseling and I am the primary counselor under Seding-Therapy. Myself and a team of outsourced individuals also provide services for companies which include team building, organizational research, HR projects and providing therapy to employees.

Who do you get to work with the most?

At moment it’s individuals. This ranges from children as young as 12 years old to adults in their 70s. I have

a combination of male and female clients but in this season of the people on providing therapy to I would say I have an estimated 40% mail and 60% female. I think since Covid started I’ve had an increase in the number of males coming to see me. And so within this group of individuals that I’m working with the biggest age group is young adults with the occasional 40-50year old.

What kinds of tools and methods do you use to help your clients?

My style of providing therapy combines both Eastern and Western approaches to providing therapy. I feel both approaches have so much validity and relevance to Batswana. However I share tools that are specific to individuals. For example if I notice that someone is religious I will assist them in using that to get them to a place where they feel safer. Another example is if I notice that someone enjoys sports I get them to use that to get themselves to cope. So in some I use existing skills and buffer them.

In more difficult cases, people come to me with very minimal coping skills, some have none at all. In those cases I would explore a variety of tools that assist with managing psychosomatic symptoms and techniques for managing thought processes.

What can someone expect to happen during one of your consultations?

Talking and being honest in doing so. There’s also a lot of listening. It’s important that in a session client is listening and not in their head too much, because it is likely that they could walk away from the session not having taken away the assistance they came for.

Can you share some common traumatic experiences you get to help people through?

I am unfortunately not comfortable sharing that in too much detail. When I use the word ‘traumatic’ to describe an experience, that is a very subjective way to approach understanding what someone is going through. So my traumatic is not your traumatic and vice versa. However, I personally feel that some of the most traumatic experiences I’ve come across are losses - job loss, losses of spouses and the passing of ones parents.

The reason why loss hits us so hard and it becomes such an impact is because as human-beings most of us protect ourselves from thinking that that kind of pain is something that you can never experience. In other words we are not open to the idea I’m experiencing such great pain because in our minds that is something that happens to other people.

We are in the midst of a pandemic and we are witnessing many different reactions from people as a result. Why do humans react the way they do?

In addition to part of one of my previous answers (which is that we almost convince ourselves that certain kinds of experiences are not designed for us), we are also generally not equipped to handle change.

This I think comes from a young age where starting from birth we are put on a routine where things become a little bit expected. We see the evolution of life from childhood, adolescence, becoming a young adult etc. Now these

Betsho Mokgatlhe-Dinonyane

expectations mould us to think the world will never colour outside of the lines and in this time, the world has definitely coloured beyond the lines. So I think part of it is a combination of confusion, the lack of stability and the amount of unknown. This is such a foreign concept and absolutely nobody has a prediction on what the next day is going to look like.