1. Identify how presenting concerns (problem behaviors/cognitions) relate to specific givens of existence.
2. Elucidate how these difficulties represent (as mechanisms of defense) or are the consequences of the client’s efforts to avoid facing the normal anxiety generated by specific givens of existence.
3. Describe how these defensive behaviors have led the client to experience of neurotic anxiety and/or neurotic guilt and further problems.
Behavioral/Cognitive/REBT:
1. Relate the presenting concerns to faulty learning, irrational thoughts, and/or faulty cognitions.
2. Identify the client’s irrational thoughts (Ellis) and/or specific faulty cognitions or maladaptive thought patterns (Beck), and illustrate how these lead to the problematic behaviors.
3. Describe the antecedent behaviors and cognitions that trigger the client’s maladaptive behaviors and thoughts (this is called behavioral assessment).
Goal Setting and Interventions:
The information provided in the conceptualization process leads to specific counseling goals. Again, use outside sources to support your discussion of Goals and Interventions.
In the psychodynamic approaches (Object Relations and Individual Psychology), these will likely include:
· Resolving earlier conflicts
· Modifying negative aspects of the self
· Facilitating the development of positive aspects of the self in the context of the therapeutic relation
· Reconciling split-off aspects of the self,
· Changing aspects of the client’s sense of self (e.g., feeling unlovable)
· Identifying and modifying faulty logic
· Gaining encouragement to face life-tasks, and/or to develop social interest
· Identifying the underlining purposes of symptomatic behaviors
· Work through conflicts in attachment and autonomy
Interventions may include:
Psychoanalytic and Object Relations:
· Free association
· Dream analysis
· Confrontation
· Interpretation
· Gaining insight
· Analysis of the transference
Individual Psychology:
· Lifestyle assessment
· Paradoxical Intention
· Spitting in the Soup
· Catching oneself
· “Acting as if”
· Task setting
· Motivational interviewing
In the Person-Centered approach, the goal is to create a safe, trusting relationship that will allow clients to explore the parts of themselves that they have denied or distorted. This will entail recognizing and giving up the internalized conditions of worth. Clients will likely then develop an internal locus of evaluation, become more open to experience, and achieve self-trust.
