Husband & Wife in Therapy

When I first started to learn about therapy, I shared the first specific expectation (p. 21), that the therapistÆs job was to tell clients what to do. I found this a daunting personal responsibility, this expectation that I would need to ôplay Godö and come up with answers for all kinds of problems.

Instead, during this course in particular, I have come to recognize that therapy is about guiding the client to insights and deeper personal understanding. I will also gain insight and learn more about how human beings think and react, but that is not the point of the work I will be doing. The sooner I am able to make this clear to my clients, the sooner we will be abl eto begin meaningful work.

I have also been concerned about some of the boundary issues that Weeks and Treat outline, especially regarding payment for sessions. I realize that I have my own issues about money, and I was especially interested to read Weeks and TreatÆs (2001) observation that ôthe dynamics of guilt and obligation can be manipulatedö when payment is not handled appropriately (p. 27).

Clients who are new to the therapeutic proce

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ious and sullen, and his grades have dropped since starting high school. The younger son is a star athlete, a budding artist, and has always done well in school. The therapist determines that the older son has a pessimistic view of life, while the father and the younger son are more optimistic. The mother initiated therapy because of her concern or the older son, while the father believes the boy is ôjust going through a phaseö and will snap out of it eventually. The therapist decides to use encouragement to empower both the mother and the older son and to build the father and younger sonÆs awareness of how they can become more empathetic to the pessimists in their midst. Robert Sherman and his colleagues (1991) describe encouragement as a way ôto enable people to feel more optimistic and acquire the courage to behave more effectivelyö (p. 27). Rather than focusing on the older sonÆs problems that brought the family to therapy, the therapist decides instead to try to encourage whatever positive feelings the boy may have about himself and to look to the rest of the family for encouragement, as well. Because two of the three other members tend to look at things more positively to begin with, this suggests that encouragement m
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Approximate Word count = 10003
Approximate Pages = 40 (250 words per page)

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