My Client, a 24 years old female, presented with an overwhelmed feeling about managing her time. Her name is Elle and she is Korean American immigrant. She was born in South Korea. She came to Atlanta, Georgia by herself when she was 16 years old. She used to live with her mother, stepfather, half sister and brother until she came. One of the reasons she came to the U.S is that her mother decided to transfer her custody to her daughter’s biological father who left his own family 16years ago. She was excited to leave for America, the land of opportunity, and she also was sad to separate her mother from Korea at the same time.
It was difficult for her to adopt new family because it was her first time to meet her biological father, step mother, and step sister. At that time, she focused on obtaining her High School diploma although her relationship with her family was conflicted. She decided to leave her family when she was 18 after graduating High School. She moved to New York herself and started to live alone. She was completely independent from her family. She worked two days a week, attended college as fulltime student, and deeply engaged with church as a Christian. From that moment, time management skills became the most concerning factor to maintain her life as a worker, fulltime student, and member of her church. Overall, she satisfied what she had done for the last 4years; obtained bachelor degree, married, worked and depended on religious life. But still she struggled with time management which often frustrated her.
Elle is complaining that she does not have enough time to study and she can’t focus even though she has time. She is more anxious when the due date of her project is coming. To explore the problem, I want to define her meaning of the time. Therefore I was asked few questions related to her family (cultural) time, functional time, and real time. The first question I asked her was how her parent managed their time. It is important question because parents’ behaviors significantly affect their child’s behavior. She answered that her family lived in small Island of Korea. Her stepfather was a fisher man and her mother was a house wife who did not have any anxiety about time. She meant that they worked hard but time is not a matter in their lifestyles. It was a totally different situation that she is experiencing now. Furthermore, her parents’ parenting style was more like neglect that never tells her what to do or have to do. It sounds to me that she did not have chance to learn to do things on time.
The second question was what is she doing on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. It will define how she is functioning based on the time. On weekly, she worked three full days as an esthetician to maintain her financial issue. She also attended graduate school two days and went to church two days. And she has two days to do her studies, housework, and chance to keep other appointment. Most of time she feels pressure to take too many roles as wife, student, worker, and member of her church. These complicated life styles make it hard to focus on her studies even though she has time to study. This lack of study time produces another stresses on other daily activities. She desperately wants to improve the behavior of study because she her priority is to graduate her master program by next year.
My Goal for this client is improve behavior, the amount of time she spends on study and decrease the feeling of anxiety. I assumed that level of anxiety will reduce if she controls her time.I will use indirect observation, self anchoring scale and Clinical Anxiety scale from the WALMYR Assessment Scale (WAS) as well. To observe her study behavior, I asked her to keep a record of the time she spends on studying and bring it to the next session. I made the above chart to keep a record for myself. It counts the frequency and duration which include self anchoring scale as well. The textbook inspired me to make chart. The dates count frequency that how many times she studies during a week. The length of study time will account duration of how long she studies during a week. And the last part is amount of anxiety she feels about her upcoming project which indicates self-anchoring scale. I used 5 scale points that 1is lowest level of the problem and 5 is highest level of problem.
It was difficult for her to adopt new family because it was her first time to meet her biological father, step mother, and step sister. At that time, she focused on obtaining her High School diploma although her relationship with her family was conflicted. She decided to leave her family when she was 18 after graduating High School. She moved to New York herself and started to live alone. She was completely independent from her family. She worked two days a week, attended college as fulltime student, and deeply engaged with church as a Christian. From that moment, time management skills became the most concerning factor to maintain her life as a worker, fulltime student, and member of her church. Overall, she satisfied what she had done for the last 4years; obtained bachelor degree, married, worked and depended on religious life. But still she struggled with time management which often frustrated her.
Elle is complaining that she does not have enough time to study and she can’t focus even though she has time. She is more anxious when the due date of her project is coming. To explore the problem, I want to define her meaning of the time. Therefore I was asked few questions related to her family (cultural) time, functional time, and real time. The first question I asked her was how her parent managed their time. It is important question because parents’ behaviors significantly affect their child’s behavior. She answered that her family lived in small Island of Korea. Her stepfather was a fisher man and her mother was a house wife who did not have any anxiety about time. She meant that they worked hard but time is not a matter in their lifestyles. It was a totally different situation that she is experiencing now. Furthermore, her parents’ parenting style was more like neglect that never tells her what to do or have to do. It sounds to me that she did not have chance to learn to do things on time.
The second question was what is she doing on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. It will define how she is functioning based on the time. On weekly, she worked three full days as an esthetician to maintain her financial issue. She also attended graduate school two days and went to church two days. And she has two days to do her studies, housework, and chance to keep other appointment. Most of time she feels pressure to take too many roles as wife, student, worker, and member of her church. These complicated life styles make it hard to focus on her studies even though she has time to study. This lack of study time produces another stresses on other daily activities. She desperately wants to improve the behavior of study because she her priority is to graduate her master program by next year.
My Goal for this client is improve behavior, the amount of time she spends on study and decrease the feeling of anxiety. I assumed that level of anxiety will reduce if she controls her time.I will use indirect observation, self anchoring scale and Clinical Anxiety scale from the WALMYR Assessment Scale (WAS) as well. To observe her study behavior, I asked her to keep a record of the time she spends on studying and bring it to the next session. I made the above chart to keep a record for myself. It counts the frequency and duration which include self anchoring scale as well. The textbook inspired me to make chart. The dates count frequency that how many times she studies during a week. The length of study time will account duration of how long she studies during a week. And the last part is amount of anxiety she feels about her upcoming project which indicates self-anchoring scale. I used 5 scale points that 1is lowest level of the problem and 5 is highest level of problem.
Encouraging her to involve my goal, I restated her concern about time and explained this data gives idea of how she spends time on studies. Fortunately, my client has positive attitude about my idea of keeping a record because she understands that this record will show her exact amount of time she spends on study a every week. The client and I agreed to have one hour session at one o’clock every Tuesday. I am going to use Clinical Anxiety Scale (CAS) which is one of the WALMYR Assessment Scales (WAS) during session. This will help to define the relationship between time management skills and anxiety scale.
Since I don’t have my field placement for this semester, Dr. Fast and my classmates will be my instructor for my assessment.
References
Bloom, M., Fischer, J., & Orme, J. G. (2006). Behavior observation. In Evaluating practice: Guidelines for the accountable professional (chap.5). MA: Allyn & Bacon.
Genogram. (n.d.). Retrieved February 24, 2009, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Web site: http://en.wikipeial.org
Bloom, M., Fischer, J., & Orme, J. G. (2006). Behavior observation. In Evaluating practice: Guidelines for the accountable professional (chap.5). MA: Allyn & Bacon.
Genogram. (n.d.). Retrieved February 24, 2009, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Web site: http://en.wikipeial.org
Mira--
ReplyDeleteThis is an excellent and informative post! I particularly like the way you have incorporated your genogram and your observation chart into your blog, as well as a new picture of yourself.
Your analysis of the client and your treatment plan are also excellent. All this very good and careful work must have taken you a long time!
I'm not sure that the level of anxiety will decrease as your client tries to better control her time. I worry that the opposite may happen. It might be more useful if you could convince your client that she does not need to do every job perfectly and on time. She may not know this since her parents were involved in a very different kind of lifestyle where they did not deal frequently with problems that involved deadlines and fulfilling the expectations of others.
According to the cognitive behaviorists like Albert Ellis, perfectionism may involve cognitive distortions. (e.g. black and white thinking: I must do this job perfectly or I cannot do it at all) If you review the article we discussed on perfectionism (Ferguson & Rodway, 1994) you may get some more ideas about treating this issue.