8.1. Case Example: Relationship Dialogue with a
Fragile Client
One of our second year graduate students is seeing a 19-year-old male client with a history of physical and emotional abuse and dissociative processes. Concerned with the adequacy of her work as a therapist, she initiates the following conversation in the fourth session of therapy:
T1: Is there anything you want to discuss with our therapeutic relationship?
C1: You mean what I think of this?
T2: Whatever you think. You’ve told me that sometimes you have a problem with trusting people, and I want to make sure...
C2: I don’t know, I think this is a lot easier, it’s more of a professional type thing and it just seems easier. I’m determined to get to the bottom of what’s going on with me. And so like at this point I’m more kind of ignoring that not trusting, and it’s not really bothering me as much as just wanting to be able to...
T3: Be able to get to the bottom of this.
C3: Yeah, Be able to get to the bottom of this and actually trust.
T4: Just trust someone,
C4: I mean I tried for years to trust my family, and it didn’t really get me anywhere except cause me more pain.
T5: So you’re not experiencing this as-
C5: But outside of here, it does still happen, quite a bit. I mean I don’t really talk that much. I try to talk to my girlfriend and everything, but last night I was twisting things right around and ended up thinking something way different from what she was saying. It’s like, lots of times when people talk to me, it’s like I’m hearing like my family of something.
T6: So someone will say something, and you’ll hear something that your family normally says to you...
Materials designed to
accompany the book Learning Emotion-Focused Therapy: The
Process-Experiential Approach to Change from APA Books.
©2003 Robert Elliott, Jeanne Watson, Rhonda Goldman, and Leslie Greenberg
http://www.process-experiential.org/learning