pages For each Queshor Essay questions 1. Justin Bieber is a 16 year old Caucasi
ID: 130834 • Letter: P
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pages For each Queshor Essay questions 1. Justin Bieber is a 16 year old Caucasian male who is referred to your private practice due to conflict between his mother. Justin Bieber comes from Union City, New Jersey and is currently being raised by a single mom. Justin has a poor relationship with his biological father who lives in Canada. In the past he has been the victim of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of his mother's boyfriend. His mother and her boyfriend have broken up since this traumatic incident. Recently, Justin Bieber has been getting into extreme arguments with his mother over not receiving permission to leave the house and attend certain events. He has run away from home and has also refused to go to school. Additionally, he is refusing to go to his maternal grandparents' home to celebrate Christmas with his family and wants to remain alone during the holiday. Using the examples we discussed in class, explain what counseling approach you would use to treat Justin. Specifically what theoretical orientation would you use in therapy with Justin? Please explain in detail what techniques you would use to facilitate the healing process.Explanation / Answer
Given Justin Beiber’s age and presenting problem, a person-centered, short-term individual counselling would be a helpful counselling approach. This approach is considered to be effective keeping in mind Justin’s family background and the familial discord between his parents. His experiences with a single parent family appears to have severed his relationship with his mother. The distance and the inability to access his biological father appears to be a source of frustration as well. Moreover, his own personal history of physical and emotional abuse is tragically intertwined with the transitional life of his family as he was abused by his mother’s partner. Thus, in a way, the transitional phase of Justin’s own life from late childhood to adolescence ran parallel with the transitions in his family and his mother’s’s attempts to recover from the stress of single parenthood were unfortunately marked by emotional skirmishes for both Justin and herself.
While,Justin himself is identified as the primary client and sessions would be planned keeping in mind his specific goals and areas which he identifies as problematic for his everyday functioning,
The context of divorce and raising a single family seems to be the major source of JUSTIN’s maladjustment. To this end, counselling could benefit from the involvement of Justin’s mother in the initial phase of counselling in order to get a better sense of his life history and presenting problems. However, this procedure would be followed with Justin’s consent as he is the client. Any misinformed action may make him feel rejected and may trigger a negative and suspicious attitude towards the counselling process. In order to avoid this, the counselling approach would focus on building empathy and rapport with Justin, making him feel fully accepted and an an equally empowered participant in the counselling process.
The reasons behind choosing an individual focused approach in counselling is motivated by Justin’s own presenting problems. His experience within his broken family, combined with his mother’s own anxiety and excessive control over Justin appears to have created negative thoughts and emotions in him and he feels that he is constantly monitored and his abilities are always put to test. However, much of the anger which he feels could be a result of the development changes given that Justin is in the peak of adolescence. A person entered counselling approach would help to address the specific age requirements and be able to address Justin’s need for independence and developing a social identity in harmony with his peers. Moreover, his history of physical abuse seems to have ruptured his feeling of security and which may explain why he chooses to avoid his family(grandparents) and demonstrates greater confrontational behaviour with his mother.
It Is believed that by keeping Justin at the focus of the counselling sessions, in terms of own thoughts, feelings instead of what others around him expect him to think and do, one would be able to create a space of empathy and genuine understanding to the end that Justin would begin to feel relationships in his social dials as equally nurturing and feel equipped enough to understand and extend an understanding towards others as well.
Keeping in mind, the emotion focused nature of Justin’s counselling needs, a short term, goal oriented work would be scheduled for 8-10months as adolescent clients are shown to experience greater satisfaction with short term therapeutic work where they can attain concrete goals.
Based on the counselling approach and Justin’s particular case, a psychoanalytic Theoretical approach to counselling is found to be quite facilitative here. As a theoretical approach, psychoanalytic way of thinking focuses on early childhood experiences and the mother-child relationship as crucial to formation of later personality. In particular, Justin’s childhood experience of abuse and emotional deprivation with the loss of his father due to the circumstances of divorce appears to have created an emotional life which is marked by trauma, both as a result of assault at the hand of another individual and also at a symbolic level with the experience of care of only one parent.
The psychoanalytic approach is chosen because it provides a significant way of conceptualising about trauma and also to reflect this information back to the client in an emotional language which the client may find empowering and nourishing in the process of recovery.
Moreover, the psychoanalytic approach would function in alignment with the individual centric nature of the counselling approach as it is the drams, fantasies and the associations of the clients in which are of prime concern in analytical work.
Based on a psychoanalytic diagnosis, Justin’s issues with anger and separation from his mother and extended family could partly be a result of his age specific need for building social alliances outside his family as an adolescent and they can be partly explained as his repressed feelings of aggression and hatred for the mother for his childhood experience of abuse. Such a theoretical approach would help to understand the ‘symptom’ or the problem as a conglomeration of multiple issues and counselling with Justin would thus benefit from a psychoanalytic understanding of his life as a dynamic configuration of the struggles of multiple individuals and circumstances such as his mother, his absent father, the way his abuse was remedied by his mother and its repercussions on their relationship with each other, Justin’s own hopes and fears as an adolescent and his fantasies and desires about his own sexual life. An opening for some of these issues could be initiated in some of the following techniques:
Free association where Justin would be invited to be calm and feel relaxed and say whatever comes to his mind without fear of any judgement without any interruption from the counsellor. The rationale is that when he would be asked to talk ‘freely’ then his speech would be unhindered and it is then that his repressed feelings and thoughts may be given an opportunity to be expressed from the unconscious.
The material would then be analysed and interpreted keeping in mind the theory of repression and sexuality and its crucial links with Justin’s experiences.
Interpretation of dreams wherein Justin would be asked to share any dream that he had while sleeping during the course of the counselling. Dreams are considered as the “royal road” to the unconscious and it is believed that the ego censors are least active during sleep and the unconscious instincts, desires find an easy passage into consciousness through dreams. Dreams would be analysed in terms of both their manifest content that is the actual material as it is recalled and the latent content or the hidden meaning of dreams which is interpreted from the manifest symbols of dream.
Analysis of Resistence or the actions or phrases where Justin shows a passivity or indirect aggression towards his own progress in counselling would be another key technique and this would help to gauge at the possible barriers or defences to the counselling process. While nurturing, the counselling process can also be equally challenging, specially for an adolescent boy like Justin with a history of trauma and anger. Addressing his own traumatic past may yield challenges to his defenses and repressed thoughts. Often, changing the pattern of ego’s defence mechanisms in itself can be anxiety provoking as it means a breakdown of a familiar way of living. Thus, Justin may show resistance to the counselling process such as by coming ate for sessions or cancelling or forgetting appointments, or by demeaning the counselling process and the counsellor. All these are patterns of behaviour which in itself would become a part of the counselling issue and addressing g them would be another step ahead towards growth and understand the complexity of the self.
These are some of the few psychoanalytic techniques which are hope to facilitate the work with Justin. However, like any treatment module, techniques are as good as the ‘experts’ using them and to this end, whether it is a psychoanalytic or a behavioural or a humanistic counsellor, the approach and the theoretical orientation need to be guided by the particularity to the client. In the present case, the above considerations were drawn after a studied analysis of Justin’s own areas of maladjustment and challenges and to this end they are found to provide an effective lead in his counselling
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