THEORETICAL & PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS: Rogers / Ellis - Research Paper Example

Along the way, the person’s personality develops. For the success of the interview, it was most important that I play the role of a neutral person, not attacking or emoting to the cues displayed by her. I made concerted effort to listen to the client well and pick up unspoken cues along the way. I also had to dig a little before she was more open to conversing with me, which showed me that she, as a person, is slightly reserved and might not like being the first to break the ice in a situation.

Another very important aspect of the session was my complete lack of display of emotion – other than interest in her words. Ellis’s Psychological Analysis I asked the client to visualize herself as a calm and stress free person and imagine her sitting on the chair next to her. This allowed my client to define her desired state, by separating it from her current self. This form of self realization is essential in order for her to understand her feelings and how she perceives them, linked to her own understanding of stress and frustration.

Furthermore, this separation of negative feelings allowed her in overcoming self defeating beliefs. For example, on the one hand Fikret analyzed whether she liked herself as a calm and composed person and if there was anything that she would wish to change about her. Having done this analysis, I asked her to evaluate herself as she was now – frustrated, confused and stressed out – and see if she liked what she had become and if she would want any changes to be made there. This comparison – or the verbalization of it to be exact – proved fruitful: Fikret showed herself that her negative behaviors were extremely unhealthy and destructive for her.

The purpose of this is to show her that it was in her own perception –should she wish she could change her own perceptions and consequently change how she felt. Rational Therapy: Insights The first Insight applicable in my session was that the activating event for Fikret’s stress was her recent inability to communicate with her mother. Her mother did not wish to discuss with her the fact that she wished to move out of the house. Her mother was using the defense mechanism of Avoidance herself so that she would not have to deal with the disturbing idea of her daughter leaving the house.

This resulted in Fikret feeling the way she did. To overcome her own stress, Fikret must realize that she needed to rethink this scenario rationally and with no irrational beliefs she had about the situation e.g. her mother would refuse to answer her should she wish to discuss this situation directly. This is merely an assumption on her part. The second insight lies in her acknowledgement of the cause of her stress. Once she has told herself that her mismatched wavelength with her parents is causing the stress, she’ll feel better because now she has a plan of action to fix the situation.

Fikret’s anxiety and stress were compounded by her feeling that she would be unable to make her parents understand her point of view. The point to note here is that she hadn’t even once told her parents or expressed her feelings in words. She had created a mental image of how her parents would react to her and had automatically taken a position in response to that nonaction. This is in tandem with Ellis’s theory that people react to the external environment as a direct result of their own internal processes such as monologues and perceptions.

Rogers’ Psychological Analysis The client was displaying all the signs of defensive