Vignette analysis - Essay Example

Module Assignment # [Use this template to complete your assignment] Case Vignette: Treatment Plan for Recovery Identified Problem # 1: Veronica is experiencing symptoms of PTSD that are interfering with her daily functioning.Behavioral Definition:Long-term Goals:1. One important long-term goal is to restructure the entire cognitive ability of Veronica. This restructuring can help to “decrease self-reported PTSD severity and associated anxiety” (Kar, 2011, p. 167). 2. Another important long-term goal is to very carefully handle the grieving process.

Her grieving process has been wrongly handled in the past by other counselors. She has been judged and preached which is not how counseling should work. Short-term Objectives:1. One short-term objective of Veronica’s therapy is to encourage her to put her feelings and experiences into words.2. Another objective is to ensure her that she is not the only person in the world to understand the journey she has been through. 3. Refocusing on priorities is an important objective. So, she should be strategically driven away from unimportant things which in no way connect to her present. 4. Veronica is somehow responsible for tragic things that happened to her.

So, her treatment cannot advance unless she is mentored to better understand her responsibility for tragic events.Therapeutic Interventions:1. First intervention should be to reduce the level of grief and increase the level of competencies. Anything from cognitive remodeling to increasing awareness about life to regulating emotional can be done to achieve this end.2. Second step in Veronica’s case is related to revisiting the traumatic events to bare important aspects of her story. 3. EMDR or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is a good therapeutic intervention for Veronica because it will allow her to take every memory out of the shelf in which she stuffed them in a disorganized manner over the years and put them back in an organized way (Staggs, 2013). 4. Group therapy can also be used as an important intervention primarily because Veronica is already very isolated.

Essay:It is the way Veronica thinks about events in life which leads to formation of highly faulty and painful beliefs. So, the need is to remodel the way she sees those beliefs about herself and the world. Veronica faces from persistent shame which is a key feature of PTSD (Adshead, 2000, p. 144). It is clear that she has been through a mind-benumbing and very confusing journey of grief. But, it is even clearer that she has not been treated as objectively as possible which made her quite therapy twice.

Veronica might actually suggest that during the 5 week course of repeated rape, she began to derive enjoyment from the activity somehow at some point. The counselor him/herself could feel that instead of telling her mother at the end of 5 week association with Mark, Veronica should have informed when he first showed signs of coming on to her. But, she should not be criticized or rejected. Rather, she should be mentored to focus on what is really important in life. Empathy should be used to help Veronica reprocess her experiences.

Also, more exposure is needed in the area of making her revisit her past. Prolonged exposure therapy is a good intervention for this purpose because in it, the patient revisits a trauma again and again to the point that it no longer remains activating (Staggs, 2013). Group therapy based on other patients with PTSD symptoms can also help Veronica normalize or regulate a lot of her angry emotions. References:Adshead, G. (2000). Psychological therapies for post-traumatic stress disorder. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 177, 144-148. Kar, N. (2011).

Cognitive behavioral therapy for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder: a review. Neuropsychiatr Dis Treat, 7, 167–181.Staggs, S. (2013). Psychotherapy Treatment for PTSD. Retrieved from http://psychcentral.com/lib/treatment-of-ptsd/000665