Lonely Despite Job Success: A Therapist's Session - Essay Sample

Introduction

The session is about a talking therapy between a female client and a therapist. The patient is having a problem of feeling lonely due to a lack of friends close to her. She had moved from her home area to a new place after securing a job. She explains to the therapist that she is happy about the job since it is well paying, and it has earned her the freedom that she has been longing. She is also comfortable with the working conditions and even with the workmates. However, the problem is that she now feels lonely due to lack of close friends like those she used to have at home. She misses having a close friend who can be accompanying her when going out maybe for shopping. This will make her feel safe, reduce anxiety, and have fun. However, certain aspects have been hindering her from making friends. At work, she is reluctant to make friends for she feels that she should not make intimacy with them without first knowing them at a personal level. Besides, she also holds an assumption that she is not there to make friends instead to work. She also fears that they might not like her as a friend. In the neighborhood where she lives, she feels that her neighbors would not fit as her friends since they are older than her, and they all have children. She fears that they would only talk about their children, which she won't be able to contribute. However, the assignment agreed is that she will start engaging her neighbors and workmates in some social conversations as steps toward making new friends.

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Strengths and Challenges of the Session From a Therapist’s Point of View

In the therapist point of view, there are particular challenges which this client is facing. The major challenge facing the client is the inability to make friends. If only the client could make some friends both at work and in the neighborhood, the problem she is having of feeling lonely could be dealt with. However, there certain issues that contributed to this challenge. One of them is not knowing how to start a healthy relationship. Though she finds the workmates as being friendly, she doesn't know how to start a friendship with them. Negative perception about the reaction of her workmates is the other aspect. She feels that her workmate might not like her, and this make her reluctant to start a friendship with them. Prejudice is also another challenge that limits her from getting friends. For example, she feels that people in the neighborhood will only engage her in conversation related to their kids, and this limit her from starting a friendship with any. The other challenge is negative believes that she is in work to do work only and not to make friends. Feeling that she had utterly lost touch with her old friends and feeling as if she cannot get such friends in her current place is also a challenge. However, the strength of the session is positive on starting to make new friends.

Specific Skills you used, Discuss the Pros/Cons of each Skill

There are particular skills I used in this session, one of them being empathy. The advantage of this skill is that it can help a therapist to identify and understand other people experience even when they don't explicitly describe their feelings and thoughts. However, the disadvantage of this skill is that sometimes it can be an exaggeration of client experience. The other skill applied to this session is listening skills. It involves the ability to actively listen, remember their important feelings and event, and reflect thoughts to them. The merit of this skill is that it helps a therapist capture all the necessary information from the patient. Its demerit is that sometime it may fail to capture some information that a client may communicate through silence. The other skill used in the session is social communication skills. The advantage of this skill is that it helps to make a client feel comfortable to express her thoughts and ideas. However, its demerit is that it can affect the ability to set boundaries between the client and the patient.

Possible Direction to Take Next Session

A possible direction for the next session will be to determine how far the client has managed to engage some people as friends. The client agrees that she feels that she should try and make some friends both at the workplace and in her neighborhood. The agreed assignment was that she would try to engage them in some social discussion as the first step to making friends. Knowing her perception about the response of some of the individuals she will have engaged in some conversation would be the right direction for the next session.

Theoretical Orientation

In this session, I utilized two theories, which are cognitive therapy theory and reality theory. According to cognitive therapy theory, physical sensation, feelings, and thoughts are all interconnected. The theory is hence applied in this session to help the client problem by helping her change the way she behaves and think. Besides, the theory requires an individual to deal with her current challenge without focusing on the past. In this session, the client is made not to focus on the relationship she had at her home place and start focusing on developing new ones in her current location. The other theory applied in this session is the reality therapy theory. It focuses on problem-solving through making better choices that can help an individual achieve the desired goals. Similar to cognitive therapy theory, it focuses on the present rather than the past. The theory requires a therapist to listen to the client needs actively and determining how their behaviors are bringing them further or closer to these goals. In this session, the theory has been used to show that there are some negative behaviors with the client that limit her from achieving her goals.

The challenge the client is facing is feeling lonely due to the inability to make friends. She, however, realize this and what she needs is to be directed on how to change her behaviors to achieve her goals. The use of some therapy theories can attain this. Both cognitive therapy and reality therapy theories are essential in this kind of therapy. They help to resolve the challenge of the client trough focusing on the present rather than the future. They can be useful in assisting Jessica to solve her problem.