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Assignment on Psychotherapy Application
In this 1500-word essay, you will apply all you have learned about psychotherapy (Units 4-6) to the same fictional case you developed in your Unit 3 assignment. The instructions below are detailed, teaching and guiding while also laying out the “to dos”. You’ll see the steps of your work carefully laid out and – as with your earlier assignment – an outline will be provided to help scaffold your thoughts and plan your approach.
Check tips on how to do your Psychology Assignments.
Just a reminder that here you are not necessarily playing the role of clinician. You are not tasked with creating a formal treatment plan for this fictional person. Doing so fruitfully would require graduate training. However! For this assignment, we will be using the fictional case to apply foundational principles of specific psychotherapy methods in a storytelling manner. This allows us to bring them to life in interesting ways and an opportunity for you to demonstrate your knowledge, critical thinking ability, and investment in learning about psychotherapy.
If you are curious to see where this assignment goes and how it comes together in the end, please view the Example Paper.
Step 1 – Gearing Up!
Introduction, about 250+ words.
Having just completed two sessions of assessment and evaluation, the fictional client you created is ready and eager to begin psychotherapy! They’ve heard that clinicians often base their work in a theoretical orientation; that this orientation will guide their thinking about the presenting problem and provide specific tools and methods for working through it.
Assignment on Psychotherapy Application
The client decides to do a little research and finds out that, interestingly, while there are many kinds of therapy, they all share some “essential ingredients” (i.e., common factors).
- Open this assignment with what your fictional person learns about the basic features and common factors of psychotherapy.
- What should the they expect (in general) when they walk in the door?
- What are they excited about or looking forward to about the process?
- Are they intimidated by anything they see/read about the general psychotherapy process and the common factors?
- What did they learn about the general effectiveness of psychotherapy?
- And how did they feel about that?
Check tips on how to do your Psychology Assignments.
Tell this story from the same storyteller perspective (i.e., third person) as you did in the Unit 3 assignment. Here, you are demonstrating your command over and synthesis of all you learned in Unit 4. You will likely bring in sources here to support what the client learns about the common factors and the general effectiveness of therapy.
Assignment on Psychotherapy Application
Step 2 – What If…
Body of paper, about 1000 words total (333+ words per choice).
What if the client was seeing a(n)… (choose 3)
- Psychoanalytic clinician?
- Cognitive therapist?
- Cognitive-behavior therapist?
- Interpersonal psychotherapist?
- Applied behavior analyst?
- Humanist/existential clinician?
- Therapist using the acceptance-and-commitment model?
- Group therapist?
- Family clinician?
- Clinician specializing in mindfulness-based practices?
Not every approach listed above will be relevant or fit nicely with the client’s story. Given how many are listed here, at least three of them should. So, for three (3) of the above, do the following:
Assignment on Psychotherapy Application
Write a journal entry, from your fictional person’s perspective, reflecting on their session. They are a diligent journaler! When they get home from their therapy session, they complete a journal entry describing…
- what the session was like
- what the clinician did
- what they asked them to do
- what goals were laid out
- an empirical treatment study your client looked up/was given by the clinician to support the relevance of the approach
This entry will include the client’s insights and their unique perspective on what transpired. Include any of the education/information the therapist provided them on the approach they are using and its empirical backing (a treatment study cited, referenced, briefly summarized).
Through this journal entry, you are proving to the reader that you fully understand the guiding principles, goals, methods, scientific value, and techniques of the selected psychotherapy approach. Here is an example of a journal entry for “Ellie” (from our Unit 3 Assignment instructions).
Assignment on Psychotherapy Application
Today was an interesting session, indeed! I was explaining to Dr. Benjamin that I busted out crying yesterday for no reason. He said, “Well let’s see if there is no reason…” and he asked me to remember what I was doing, thinking, or feeling right before I started crying. I told him that I was cleaning up some old paperwork and came across some legal briefs I’d been working on right before going on maternity leave. I suddenly felt so alone. I remember thinking, “I’m stranded here – all my friends are there in that world and I am here.”
I realized in that moment that the tears did indeed happen for a reason –Dr. Benjamin put it this way “Your mood was following your thoughts.” He asked me if it was really true – was I really alone in the world? And the more we explored that the more I saw how untrue this thought was. My friends still exist! I can call them at any time!
Dr. Benjamin gave me a worksheet called a “thought log.” He asked that whenever I found myself crying, upset, scared, or otherwise distressed to make a note of it in the log. I was to record the situation that led up to it (event), what was going through my head at the time (thought), how I felt in reaction or the consequence of that thought (consequence). And the last column challenged me to think more rationally about the situation (rational counterstatement).
Assignment on Psychotherapy Application
This seemed like “homework” – which I wasn’t expecting in therapy! Dr. Benjamin told me that this is a very common approach to treating depression and anxiety. He told me about a study by de Oliveria et al. (2011) that showed when a thought log like this, when added to a traditional cognitive behavioral treatment approach significantly improved the symptoms of people suffering from social anxiety disorder. He said since this study was originally published, the thought log approach has been applied to many more situations – like my own!
Remember:
- if your fictional person is a child or older adult you are now equipped to bring in what you learned in Unit 7 to address their unique needs!
- you will be writing three of these journal entries, one corresponding with each of the three therapies you chose (this will comprise the bulk of your paper).
- Use separate and descriptive subject headings to delineate these three sections clearly, see outline below for guidance here.
Step 3 – One Year Later…
Check tips on how to do your Psychology Assignments.
Conclusion, about 250+ words.
Curious minds want to know!
- How have things unfolded for the client?
- What are they up to, say, a year later?
- Are they still in therapy?
- Have they been successfully discharged?
- What does their immediate future look like?
- If they have been discharged, under what circumstances might they return to therapy?
Reference some of the things the client mentioned in their journals. You are back in the role of storyteller now – use this section to give your reader some closure.
Assignment on Psychotherapy Application
As with the first assignment, there are no right or wrong answers here – you are a student of psychology, not a trained licensed clinical psychologist. So, you might not choose “the” best treatment (interestingly, even trained psychologists never have 100% conviction that what they are doing is “the” best choice – they are simply guided by empirical research and their clinical judgment). What matters here is that you make educated guesses that reflect your solid and synthesized understanding of what we have covered in this introductory course.
Proposed Outline
Use this outline to scaffold and plan your approach:
- Gearing Up!
o A 250-word storytelling narrative that explores the topics in Step 1 above
o This section serves as an introduction of sorts. Typically, in APA format, we do not label the introduction. Since this paper is somewhat nonconformist – and since it is a continuation of your first assignment – it will be okay to label this section something creative. “Gearing Up…” is a fine choice, but you don’t have to use it.
o You will want to credit any source you use, i.e., in support of your description of the common factors and/or the general effectiveness of psychotherapy.
- What If…
Check tips on how to do your Psychology Assignments.
o Creative subject heading with the name of Therapy #1 identified.
330+-word journal entry for this treatment as described in Step 2 above.
Remember when the client talks about empirical support, you will be citing/referencing a relevant treatment study. (We prepared for this this some in our Units 5 & 6 discussions).
o Creative subject heading with the name of Therapy #2 identified.
330+-word journal entry for this treatment as described in Step 2 above.
Remember when the client talks about empirical support, you will be citing/referencing a relevant treatment study. (We prepared for this this some in our Units 5 & 6 discussions).
o Creative subject heading with name of Therapy #3 identified.
330+-word journal entry for this treatment as described in Step 2 above.
Remember when the client talks about empirical support, you will be citing/referencing a relevant treatment study. (We prepared for this this some in our Units 5 & 6 discussions).
III. One Year Later
o A 250-word storytelling narrative that explores the topics in Step 3 above.
Assignment on Psychotherapy Application
Please view the Example Paper for guidance on how this assignment might look upon completion. Do not rely on the interventions used or plotline of this example too closely, but it is here to demonstrate the thought work, tone, resonance, point of view, and research legwork needed to do well on this assignment.
Paper Writing Guidelines:
- Paper should meet the 1,500-word mark, not to surpass 2,000 words (title page and references do not count toward the length requirement).
- Paper should be written in APA 7 style; this includes title page and document formatting (1-inch margins, double-spaced, 12-point font, etc.) as well as properly formatted in-text citations and reference page. An abstract is not required.
- This paper will have in-text citations throughout, which may be strange since there is a storytelling/journaling angle here, but as a student of psychology you still want to credit your sources and support your points with evidence. You will have at least 4 resources, cited in the text properly in APA format as well as a full references page to close your piece. These four sources will likely align with a source in support of common factors/general effectiveness of therapy (Step 1) and three studies supporting the use of each of the therapy approaches you chose (Step 2). You may have more than 4, but 4 is the minimum.
- Apply sound writing mechanics: write with clarity and pay attention to spelling/grammar. Consider reading your paper out loud or having a friend, family member, or dictation software read it back to you for a different perspective.
- Use subject headings to visually organize your paper for you and your reader. These can correspond with the outline above.