Read the case of Janice below. Individually, answer the following questions/prompts and post your responses to this Week’s DB by the Saturday due date.
Identify potential transference reactions.
Describe your feelings in response to the client’s reaction as if you were the therapist in this case. Genuinely, explore how you emotionally react to this client. (Potential counter transference) We all have reactions to clients and these reactions can give us information about ourselves and also about our clients. What we feel is different than how we behave in reaction to our feelings. The point here is to examine our emotional reactions so we can react behaviorally in a therapeutic way vs a potentially harmful way.
Remembering that as Social Workers our goal is not to encourage transference or interpret it for the client, but to attempt to understand it and only deal with it if it is affecting the therapeutic relationship negatively. What understanding of the client’s transference are you coming to?
4. How would you respond to the client’s reactions to further the therapeutic work and protect the therapeutic relationship?
5. After you have discussed the above points, work to come to a consensus on point 4 and post this to your Team DB and title it Final Consensus.
You are a female therapist. Janice, who has come to therapy to discuss family issues is 24 years old and does not like her step mother. Her father left the family to marry her stepmother who is much younger than him and according to Janice “dresses too young for her age.” You have seen Janice three times and she has told you she is angry about her father’s marriage to this woman. She had to live with her for two years as her father remarried when she was 16. Janice left home at 18 due to the discord and finished her high school senior year while living with her best friend’s family. Her father refused to pay for college because she left the home and she has worked to get her college degree on her own. She is close to her mother whom she feels was betrayed by her father. She and her mother often discuss her father and stepmother. Janice’s brother is getting married soon and he wants the family to be together. Janice is feeling she should support her brother by attending the wedding but she also feels a need to take a stand against the step mother, and she has demanded that her father not let her stepmother sit with the family. Janice’s brother wants everyone to come and get along. In the last session you explored with Janice, the theme of speaking for her mother and the feeling of needing to protect her. Janice could see that this was true but also felt that her mom needs her and she is “not going to let her down like her dad did.” You challenged Janice in the last session as to whose decision it was regarding where family members sit at the wedding- hers or her brother’s. Janice reacted by blushing and becoming silent. She cancelled her next appointment. You feel that you and Janice have a good relationship and you were surprised that she cancelled. Janice rescheduled late in the week and is now sitting in front of you; arms crossed and looking downward. She appears annoyed, sighing a couple of times. Janice noted that your skirt is very feminine, and says it is the same color that her stepmother is wearing to her brother’s wedding. “She called and told me, as though I really want to talk to her about clothes.” She tells you that she is considering not going to the wedding as her mother is upset that she will have to sit on the same row as the family. She remarks “someone needs to take sides and stand up for the people they care about.”
Put the number by each answer.
