See attached.
Directions please read the following client interview carefully. It is best to number each question that you are addressing.
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Counselor: “During our last session, you mentioned that you are the custodial caregiver of your grandchildren, tell me about the events that led up to you having the kids live in your home.”
Mary Sue: “My daughter has been on and off drugs since she was a teenager. She has had relationships with many people who were involved in drugs, alcohol, and criminal activity. My grandchildren have been in-and-out of my home since they were born because my daughter lived with me until the oldest one was four years old. Both children’s fathers are in jail and will not be getting out for quite some time. Finally, about three years ago, my daughter brought the children to me. She stated that her current boyfriend had threatened to kill her and if the children were around, he would kill them too. She was afraid. I told her that they could come and stay with me but I wanted her to sign over custody so I could make decisions for them. She agreed and within 30 days, I had permanent custody of a 9-year old girl and a 6-year old boy. Most of my friends think I am crazy. They ask what a 78-year old single lady is doing raising young children again. They also question whether I can deal with the changes in parenting and education changes that have occurred since I had my first child 60 years ago. It is not easy, but I am willing to learn. Since taking custody of the kids, I have been reinvigorated. I have a reason to get up in the morning. I am active and even when zip-lining with them a few weeks ago. My daughter and I still communicate, and she visits the kids from time-to-time. I experience a lot of guilt over how she turned out and I constantly wonder if I could have been a better parent. Maybe if I had done this or that she could have been a better person, a better parent.”
Before responding to the prompts below, review power point slides 6 & 7. Based on your reading this week and the client session above, complete the following:
1. One skill that the counselor can use to focus the session is immediacy. Construct and immediacy statement or question that can help Mary Sue focus on the here-and-now.
2. Based on the case study, identify the two issues you would focus on first with Mary Sue. Explain why you chose these issues within the context of Mary Sue’s mental, emotional, and psychological well-being.
3. Briefly discuss (1-2 paragraphs) how a family genogram could be useful to for both the counselor and Mary Sue.
In order to adequately complete this discussion assignment, you MUST consult and cite one peer-reviewed article in prompt #3. You must respond to ALL three prompts thoroughly.
Intentional Interviewing and Counseling:
Facilitating Client Development in a
Multicultural Society
9th Edition
Allen E. Ivey
Mary Bradford Ivey
Carlos P. Zalaquett
Copyright © 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Chapter 6
Encouraging,
Paraphrasing,
and Summarizing:
Active Listening and Cognition
Copyright © 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Chapter Goals and Competency Objectives (slide 1 of 2)
Awareness and Knowledge
Value active listening in the communication process.
Identify the role of intentional participation, decision making, and responding to client conversation.
Copyright © 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Chapter Goals and Competency Objectives (slide 2 of 2)
Skills and Action
Help clients talk in more detail about their issues of concern and help prevent the overly talkative client from repeating the same facts. Clarify for the client and you, the interviewer, what is really being said during the session.
Check on the accuracy of what you hear by saying back to clients the essence of their comments and providing periodic summarizations.
Develop cognitive empathy and facilitate client cognitive understanding for clearer decision making and more effective action.
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Introduction: Encouraging, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing (slide 1 of 6)
Encouraging, paraphrasing, and summarizing are active listening skills at the cognitive center of the basic listening sequence and are key in building the empathic relationship.
When we attend and clients sense their story is heard, they open up and become more ready for change.
Leads to more effective executive brain functioning, which in turn improves cognitive understanding of issues and decision making.
Copyright © 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Introduction: Encouraging, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing (slide 2 of 6)
Active listening is a communication process that requires intentional participation, decision making, and responding to client conversation.
Accurate listening leads to client understanding and synthesis, providing clients with a clearer picture of their own stories.
Active listening is central in facilitating our brain’s executive functioning—cognitive understanding and making sense of the emotional underpinnings of the story.
Copyright © 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Introduction: Encouraging, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing (slide 3 of 6)
Encouraging: Encourage with short responses that help clients keep talking. They may be verbal, (repeating key words and short statements) or nonverbal (head nods and smiling). Anticipated Client Response: Clients will elaborate on the topic, particularly when encouragers and restatements are used in a questioning, supportive tone of voice.
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Introduction: Encouraging, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing (slide 4 of 6)
Paraphrasing (also known as reflection of content): Shorten or clarify the essence of what has just been said, but be sure to use the client’s main words when you paraphrase. Paraphrases are often fed back to the client in a questioning tone of voice. Anticipated Client Response: Clients will feel heard. They tend to give more detail without repeating the exact same story. They also become clearer and more organized in their thinking. If a paraphrase is inaccurate, the client has an opportunity to correct the interviewer. Paraphrasing of client statements is important in cognitive empathy.
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Introduction: Encouraging, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing (slide 5 of 6)
Summarizing: Summarize client comments and integrate thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Similar to paraphrasing but used over a longer time span. Anticipated Client Response: Clients will feel heard and often learn how their complex and even fragmented stories are integrated. A summary helps clients make sense of their lives and will facilitate a more centered and focused discussion. Secondarily, a summary also provides a more coherent transition from one topic to the next or a way to begin and end a full session. As a client organizes the story more effectively, we see growth in brain executive functioning and better decision making.
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Introduction: Encouraging, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing (slide 6 of 6)
Checkout/Perception Check: Periodically check with your client to discover how your interviewing lead or skill was received. “Is that right?” “Did I hear you correctly?” “What might I have missed?” Anticipated Client Response: Interviewing leads such as these give clients a chance to pause and reflect on what they have said. If you indeed have missed something important or distorted their story and meaning, they have the opportunity to correct you. Without an occasional checkout, it is possible to lead clients away from what they really want to talk about.
Copyright © 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills: Encouraging, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing
A client, Jennifer, enters the room and starts talking immediately.
I really need to talk to you. I don’t know where to start. I just got my last exam back and it was a disaster—maybe because I haven’t studied much lately. I was up late drinking at a party last night and I almost passed out. I’ve been sort of going out with a guy for the last month, but that’s over as of last night. . . . [pause] But what really bothers me is that my mom and dad called last Monday and they are going to separate. I know that they have fought a lot, but I never thought it would come to this. I’m thinking of going home, but I’m afraid to. . . .
Jennifer continues for another 3 minutes in much the same vein, repeating herself somewhat, and seems close to tears. At times, speech is so fast that it is hard to follow her. Finally, she stops and looks at you expectantly.
Copyright © 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Basic Techniques and Strategies of Encouraging, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing (slide 1 of 3)
Encouraging
Encouragers are verbal and nonverbal expressions the counselor or therapist can use to prompt clients to continue talking.
Head nods and positive facial expressions
Open gestures
Minimal verbals – “Ummm” or “Uh-huh”
Repetition of key words from last statement
Silence with appropriate nonverbal behavior
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Basic Techniques and Strategies of Encouraging, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing (slide 2 of 3)
Paraphrasing
Paraphrasing is the most important cognitive empathic listening skill.
An accurate paraphrase usually consists of four dimensions:
A sentence stem that may include the client’s name.
The key words used by a client to describe the situation or person.
The essence of what the client has said in briefer and clearer form.
A checkout for accuracy.
Copyright © 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Basic Techniques and Strategies of Encouraging, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing (slide 3 of 3)
Summarizing
Summarizing pulls together and organizes client conversation, supporting the brain’s executive functioning.
Summarizing is key to Theory of Mind (ToM) and your ability to “mentalize” the world of the client.
Attend to client’s verbal and nonverbal comments.
Selectively attend to key concepts.
Restate key concepts to the client accurately.
Check for accuracy at the end.
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Observe: Listening Skills and Children (slide 1 of 2)
Listening skills are used with children in much the same way as they are used with adults.
Children generally respond best if you seek to understand the world as they do.
Smiling, warmth, and the active listening skills are essential.
Questions can put off some children but remain one of the best ways to obtain information.
Seek to get the child’s perspective.:
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Observe: Listening Skills and Children (slide 2 of 2)
Reflection Questions
What do you think about the interview with Damaris conducted by Mary Bradford Ivey?
What did you notice that the interviewer did well?
Did listening skills help to bring out Damaris’s story?
What can you expect if you use these same skills with an adult?
Did Mary focus on strengths?
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Multiple Applications: Additional Functions of the Skills of Encouraging, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing
When we attend to clients and use the active listening skills, we facilitate executive functioning and the development of new neural networks that become part of long-term memory in the hippocampus.
Executive functioning is also critical for emotional regulation.
Cognitions may be defined as language-based thought processes underlying all thinking activities.
Therapies focusing on changing cognitions to achieve client change: cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), rational emotive behavioral therapy (REBT), and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT)
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Multicultural Issues in Encouraging, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing
Language is one of the important issues related to the listening skills.
Building trust requires learning about the other person’s world.
Involve yourself in the cultural communities and activities.
Discuss cross-cultural differences early in the interview.
When you are culturally different from your client, self-disclosure and an explanation of your methods may be helpful.
Consider gender differences.
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Practice, Practice, Practice
Encouraging, paraphrasing, and summarizing are central skills to effective counseling and psychotherapy, regardless of your theory of choice and natural style.
Intentional competence in these skills requires practice.
Every client needs to be heard, and demonstrating that you are listening carefully makes a real difference.
Achieving intentional competence takes time and practice.
Dr. Amanda Russo highlights the rewards of practice (p. 147).
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Action: Key Points and Practice of Encouraging, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing
Purpose of Listening Skills
Encouragers
Paraphrases
Summarizations
Active Listening, Cognition, and Executive Functioning
Diversity and Active Listening
A Word of Caution
Copyright © 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Intentional Interviewing and Counseling:
Facilitating Client Development in a
Multicultural Society
9th Edition
Allen E. Ivey
Mary Bradford Ivey
Carlos P. Zalaquett
Copyright © 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Chapter 7
Reflecting Feelings:
The Heart of
Empathic Understanding
Copyright © 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Chapter Goals and Competency Objectives (slide 1 of 2)
Awareness and Knowledge
Discover the nature and central importance of reflecting feeling and what to expect when you use this skill.
Understand and appreciate affective empathy and its relationship to cognitive empathy and mentalizing.
Copyright © 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Chapter Goals and Competency Objectives (slide 2 of 2)
Skills and Action
Facilitate clients’ awareness of their emotional world and its effect on their thoughts and behavior.
Help clients sort out and organize their mixed feelings, thoughts, and behaviors toward themselves, significant others, or events.
Clarify emotional strengths and use these to further client resilience.
Center the counselor and client in fundamental emotional experience basic to resolving issues and achieving goals.
Facilitate executive brain functioning through emotional regulation and affective empathy.
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Introduction: Reflection of Feeling (slide 1 of 5)
Reflection of Feelings: Identify the key emotions of a client and feed them back to clarify affective experience. With some clients, the brief acknowledgment of feelings may be more appropriate. Affective empathy is often combined with paraphrasing and summarizing. Include a search for positive feelings and strengths. Anticipated Client Result: Clients will experience and understand their emotional states more fully and talk in more depth about feelings. They may correct the counselor’s reflection with a more accurate descriptor. In addition, client understanding of underlying feelings leads to emotional regulation with clearer cognitive understanding and behavioral action. Critical to lasting change is a more positive emotional outlook.
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Introduction: Reflection of Feeling (slide 2 of 5)
My dad drank a lot when I was growing up, but it didn’t bother me so much until now. [Pause] But I was just home and it really hurts to see what Dad’s starting to do to my Mum—she’s awful quiet, you know. [Looks down with brows furrowed and tense] Why she takes so much, I don’t know. [Looks at you with a puzzled expression] But, like I was saying, Mum and I were sitting there one night drinking coffee, and he came in, stumbled over the doorstep, and then he got angry. He started to hit my mother and I stopped him. I almost hit him myself, I was so angry. [Anger flashes in his eyes.] I worry about Mum. [A slight tinge of fear seems to mix with the anger in his eyes, and you notice that his body is tensing.]
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Introduction: Reflection of Feeling (slide 3 of 5)
Paraphrasing client statements focuses on the content and clarifies what has been communicated.
Reflection of feelings focuses on the underlying emotion and helps the client make his or her emotional life more explicit and clear.
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Introduction: Reflection of Feeling (slide 4 of 5)
In Thomas’s case, the content includes his father’s drinking history, his mother’s quietness and submission, and of course, the difficult situation when Thomas was last home.
Paraphrasing will indicate to Thomas that you have heard what has been said and encourage him to move further in the discussion.
Paraphrase: “Thomas, I hear you saying that your father has been drinking a long time, and your mother puts up with a lot. But now he’s started to be violent, and you’ve been tempted to hit him yourself. Have I heard you right?”
In this example, we are focusing on what is happening and seeking to understand the total situation.
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Introduction: Reflection of Feeling (slide 5 of 5)
The first task in eliciting and reflecting feelings is to recognize the key emotional words expressed by the client.
In Thomas’s case, you may have noticed “really hurts,” “angry,” and “worry.”
You know the client has these feelings because he has made them explicit.
Basic reflections of feelings would be “It really hurt,” “You felt angry,” and “You are worried.”
They include the client’s exact main words.
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Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills: The Emotional Basis of Counseling and Therapy (slide 1 of 6)
Observing the Verbal and Nonverbal Language of Emotions
As a first step, seek to establish and increase your vocabulary of emotions and your ability to observe and name them accurately.
Six primary emotions: sad, mad, glad, scared, disgust, and surprise.
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Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills: The Emotional Basis of Counseling and Therapy (slide 2 of 6)
Take a moment now and develop your own list using your experience and intuition.
Then you can compare that list with ours.
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Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills: The Emotional Basis of Counseling and Therapy (slide 3 of 6)
Expanding Emotional Vocabulary
Sad/unhappy, mad/angry, scared/afraid are also the center of much of the work done in counseling and therapy.
If we are to work to improve executive functioning and cognitive competence, we must deal with these challenging emotions constantly from a base of positives and strengths.
Enabling some clients to recognize underlying emotional anger will be a breakthrough, allowing for cognitive change.
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Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills: The Emotional Basis of Counseling and Therapy (slide 4 of 6)
Limbic Brain Structures Central in Affective Empathy
Amygdala: Emotional (and cognitive) driver, taking information from the senses and passing it on.
Prefrontal cortex (PFC): Labels emotions as feelings and, when possible, regulates action.
Hippocampus: Memory center that holds and distributes information throughout the brain.
Hypothalamus, pituitary, and adrenal glands: Produce the hormones for our brain and body.
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Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills: The Emotional Basis of Counseling and Therapy (slide 5 of 6)
The Importance of Building Solid Positive Emotions and Expressing Them in Feelings and Action
You can enable clients to bring out stories of positive emotions and thoughts; this is particularly valuable when you work clients who have a primarily negative cognitive style.
The left prefrontal cortex is the primary location of positive emotional experience (e.g., glad/happy).
If you use a strength-based approach based on positive psychology and therapeutic lifestyle changes, you can help clients achieve mental health and effective problem solving much more quickly.
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Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills: The Emotional Basis of Counseling and Therapy (slide 6 of 6)
Confusion, Frustration, and Mixed Feelings
Clients often express themselves in unclear ways, demonstrating mixed and conflicting emotions.
Help clients sort through these more complex feelings.
Basic emotions appear to be universal across all cultures, but the social emotions appear to be learned from one’s community, culture, family members, and peers.
Emotions become better defined with cognitive understanding.
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The Skill Dimensions of Reflection of Feeling (slide 1 of 5)
Choose a sentence stem.
Add an emotional word or feeling label to the stem.
Add a brief paraphrase to broaden the reflection of feelings.
Choose an appropriate tense to convey immediacy.
Check out.
Bring out positive emotional stories and strengths to counter the negatives and difficulties.
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The Skill Dimensions of Reflection of Feeling (slide 2 of 5)
Acknowledgment of Feelings
You will find that a brief acknowledgment of feelings is at times more appropriate than a deep exploration of feelings.
In acknowledging feelings, you state the feeling briefly (“You seem to be sad about that,” or “It makes you happy”) and then move on with the interview.
All clients have vital emotional lives, whether they are aware of them or not.
With children, acknowledgment of feelings may be especially helpful, particularly when they are unaware of what they are feeling.
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The Skill Dimensions of Reflection of Feeling (slide 3 of 5)
The Nonverbal Language of Emotion: Micro and Macro Feelings
Macro nonverbals are those that are relatively easy to see.
Micro nonverbals are fleeting expressions of concealed emotion, sometimes so fast that they happen in the blink of an eye.
Learn to observe these as they can be reliable indicators of underlying feelings as macro nonverbals.
Note them and watch for a time that these observations may be shared in the session.
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The Skill Dimensions of Reflection of Feeling (slide 4 of 5)
Diversity and Reflection of Feelings
Many of your clients of diverse backgrounds will come to you having experienced various types of discrimination and prejudice.
Respect individual and cultural diversity in the way people respect feelings.
Style of emotional expression will depend on individual upbringing, acculturation, and other factors.
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The Skill Dimensions of Reflection of Feeling (slide 5 of 5)
Explicit
Implicit
Nonverbal
Mixed
1. Observe the feeling
3. Repeat to the client
2. Name the feeling
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Observe: Reflecting Feelings in Action
EXAMPLE COUNSELING SESSION: MY MOTHER HAS CANCER; MY BROTHERS DON’T HELP.
Difficult life situations bring with them many emotions.
Whether you are dealing with clients who experience physical illness, interpersonal conflict, alcohol or drug abuse, or challenges in the work or school setting, learning the way they feel about the situation is vital.
The intentional interviewer or counselor is always alert to emotions underlying all situations and knows how to bring them out.
Busy physicians and nurses may sometimes fail to deal with emotions in their patients, or they may have little time to help family members of those who are ill.
Illness can be a frightening experience. Family, friends, and neighbors, as well as professionals, may have trouble dealing with it.
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Multiple Applications of Reflecting Feelings (slide 1 of 6)
Helping Clients Increase or Decrease Emotional Expressiveness
Observe nonverbals.
Pace the conversation and encourage clients to express more emotion.
When tears, rage, despair, joy, or exhilaration occur, help the client reorient to the present before reflecting and discussing feelings.
Reorient the session toward emotional regulation.
When working with emotion, use caution, as there is the possibility of reawakening issues in a client who has a history of painful trauma.
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Multiple Applications of Reflecting Feelings (slide 2 of 6)
Positive emotions color the ways people respond to others and their environments.
Positive emotions:
broaden the scope of people’s visual attention, expand their repertoires for action, and increase their capacities to cope in a crisis.
produce patterns of thought that are flexible, creative, integrative, and open to information.
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Multiple Applications of Reflecting Feelings (slide 3 of 6)
“Sad, mad, glad, scared” is one way to organize the language of emotion.
We need to give more attention to glad words such as pleased, happy, contented, together, excited, and delighted.
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Multiple Applications of Reflecting Feelings (slide 4 of 6)
Take a moment now and think of specific situations when you experienced each of the positive emotions listed in the previous sentence.
Did you smile or notice a reduction of your body tension after doing this?
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Multiple Applications of Reflecting Feelings (slide 5 of 6)
Depression, Emotion, and the Body
Executive functioning and emotional regulation break down in the absence of positive feelings and emotions.
Working with depression can be challenging, but our goal is to increase positive functioning.
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Multiple Applications of Reflecting Feelings (slide 6 of 6)
Reflection is a basic skill of the interviewing, counseling, and therapy process, yet it can be overdone.
Often a short and accurate reflection may be the most helpful.
Briefly identifying unspoken feelings can be helpful too.
However, not all clients will appreciate or welcome your comments on their feelings.
Brief acknowledgment of feelings may be received with appreciation early on and can lead to deeper exploration in later sessions.
Copyright © 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Action: Key Points and Practice
Emotions and Feelings
Identifying Emotions and Naming Feelings
Expanding the Emotional Vocabulary
Naming
Reflection of Feeling
Acknowledgment of Feelings
Diversity and Emotions
Emotional Regulation and Affective Empathy
The Limbic System
Positive Emotions in Reflecting Feelings
Interview Lessons
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EXAMPLE 1
1. I can sense you are carrying a lot of guilt from your past. Right now you are making a positive impact on your grandchildren that they desperately need in their lives.
2. The first issue I would address with Mary Sue is the issue of the opinions of others that may be getting in her head. Mentally, I think her hearing statements asking what a 78-year-old is doing raising children again makes her question her own abilities. It is important that Mary Sue is assured that she is capable of caring for these children. These statements have obviously made an impact on her emotionally as well because she noted the fact that her friends think she is “crazy.” That is something that could be extremely hurtful if that is how Mary Sue feels taking on caring for her grandchildren is being viewed by others. Psychologically, this life event is both challenging and rewarding for her. At her age it would be difficult to care for young children with high energy. It seems Mary Sue has a positive outlook on the situation and is even physically active.
The next issue I would address is the guilt Mary Sue feels from her past parenting. Emotionally, she is carrying a lot of guilt from how she may have been as a parent when she was younger. This has caused her to blame herself and question if her daughter’s parental shortcomings are actually her fault. Mentally, this issue could take a toll on her because it is something that would be weighing in the back of her mind most of the time. This would not only cause her to question her past parenting but also her current parental role she is taking on. Psychologically, the mindset that she messed up with her daughter as a parent could end up translating into this new role she has assumed. It is important to address this issue with Mary Sue early in the counseling relationship so she can hopefully put it in the past and do her best with her grandchildren moving forward.
3. Genograms are especially useful to counselors when evaluating a family unit (Magnuson & Shaw, 2003). They reflect the family relationship through evaluation of interpersonal relationships, characteristics, and membership (Magnuson & Shaw, 2003). They also take a closer look at family patterns from generation to generation and serve as a “provisional blueprint for change.” (Magnuson & Shaw, 2003). These are all beneficial to the counselor as they give them a clearer picture of who they are working with. By evaluating a family’s previous life cycles and behaviors, the counselor can then place present issues in the family’s evolutionary patterns (Magnuson & Shaw, 2003). The same concept applies for Mary Sue as well. By using a family genogram, she can get a better understanding of her family’s patterns and therefore have greater knowledge of present issues (Magnuson & Shaw, 2003).
The counselor can use the genogram as a tool for questioning Mary Sue’s present situation in relation to the themes, myths, rules, and emotionally charged issues of previous generations of family members. This will then reveal present issues and make them easier to understand (Magnuson & Shaw, 2003). Again, this also works to the benefit of Mary Sue, who may be able to reflect and come to conclusions of her own regarding the patterns of her family (Magnuson & Shaw, 2003).
Reference
Magnuson, S. & Shaw, H. (2003). Adaptations of the Multifaceted Genogram in Counseling, Training, and Supervision. The Family Journal of Counseling and Therapy for Couples and Families, 11(1), 45-54. DOI: 0.1177/1066480702238472
EXAMPLE 2
1. Immediacy: “I can hear the guilt you are feeling. When you share this feeling of you can could have done better your tone of voice starts to shiver.”
2. The first issue I would focus on is the guilt and shame she is feeling towards herself. I would help Mary Sue gain more insight to why she is feeling this way and help her find a positive outlook on the past situation and ways to help her in the present moment. She is carrying a ton of guilt and shame towards her parenting style and blaming herself for the way her daughter turned out. Addressing this will be vital into helping her not letting her shame and guilt effect the way she raises her grandchildren. The second issue I would address is helping Mary Sue find a group and resources to help her learn about school norms. This will help with her awareness as school has changed since her daughter went to school and being able to work with other families who are in the same situation will give her a sense of understanding. Giving Mary Sue these resources will help her grandchildren have academic success and will also help with proving she can still do it. Along with this she is paving a new direction for her granddaughters.
3. A family genogram is a map to help lay out the family dynamics for counselors to gain a better understanding (Browning & Hull, 2018). This map will allow counselors to help their clients find the areas where they have become stuck or resources they can utilize based off the genogram (Browning & Hull, 2018). Mary Sue’s genogram would help me zoom in and zoom out on the families’ secrets and struggles giving me a better understanding of why she may feel shame and guilt about her daughter’s drug addiction. Not only will this help Mary Sue gain an understanding of her family but will also let her see where change can occur in the family genogram for better success in her granddaughters lives.
Showing this to Mary Sue and helping her gain this understanding would be very beneficial to her self-awareness and progress in counseling. She will not only be able to help herself not feel guilt but be able to help her granddaughter’s future success and change the family genogram.
Reference
Browning, S., & Hull, R. (2018). Utilizing the genogram to integrate systems and psychoanalytic thinking. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 28(4), 567–583. https://doi.org/10.1037/int0000115
