Brief Description of Agency and Services Provided
Family Services of Southeast Texas (FSST) is an organization that offers confidential support services and information to survivors of domestic violence, personal struggles, family problems, and work-related difficulties. FSST operates through a hotline number through which the client can invariably find intake services for safe protection and support solutions such as counseling (FSST, 2019). Besides, this entity provides fundamental information and referrals to survivors and their close family and friends. FSST has been fulfilling its objectives because it is driven by the mission to empower families and community members through readily available counseling resources, shelter, education, and advocacy. These services are offered to residents of Southeast Texas. Distinctively, this institution has been at the forefront in providing healing services to people facing myriad issues such as grief, stress, parenting problems, marital difficulties, and substance abuse.
Summary of Assessment Information
The woman seeking help is an African-American called Jane. She is aged 28 years, a single mother of two daughters. She hails from a family of two. Her sister graduated with a degree in clinical medicine. Jane has an undergraduate degree in marketing and works in an advertising firm within Texas.
Jane is seeking help from the organization because she is suffering from anger and anxiety. Jane’s current state is worrying, as depicted by the way she wraps her hands around her handbag as she began speaking. She looked thoughtful and anxious as she narrated the event as to why she is seeking help. According to Jane, problems started when her biological father passed by her house. Her father repeatedly praised the outstanding achievements of her elder sister, who graduated from medical school. When her patriarch left, she found herself intensely anxious and even developed breathing problems. Fortunately, she was able to calm herself down using strategies she learned during her college days. The next day Jane quarreled with a co-worker over a memo that was never printed. After listening keenly to her story, I reasonably concluded that Jane was no longer anxious but instead was suffering from depression and sadness because her father failed to appreciate her achievements and was never respected at work.
I relied on family systems theory to arrive at my logical conclusion. This theory acknowledges the sovereignty nature of subsystems within families and the focus as organized units (Creech et al., (2012). This theory explains that most families are organized in a form of hierarchy and consists of several members. Fundamentally, a family must play a self-regulation role to help prevent anger, anxiety and depression. The assessments process reveals that Jane’s family failed in its role to regulate the relationships between father and the two daughters. The source of anger and depression arises from the tendency of Jane’s father to acknowledge success of his elder daughter and ignore social progress exhibited by Jane. In other words, the family system failed Jane.
Socioeconomic status does not only correspond to income but also educational accomplishment, financial protection, and prejudiced insights of social position. According to Blustein (2013), socioeconomic status determines the quality of life and the opportunities and privileges one is given in society. According to Jane, her educational achievement is the main cause of depression in addition to the fact that she is not given adequate respect at work. She has not achieved as much as her elder sister.
In social work, culture refers to the possible way of life in a social setup and life pattern, as depicted by an individual’s behaviors, beliefs, traditions, values, and social relationships. Lee (2010) further reveals that culture entails the sharing of ideas, values, and attitudes with people of that culture. The client is affected by several cultural factors. The first factor is education, and as depicted by the conduct of her father, well-educated persons tend to be successful in life. She is beneath her older sister as per the description of her father. Cultural values remain another factor worsening the situation. Values relate to perceptions that shape priorities in life (Lee, 2010). She is distressed that her children may be as unsuccessful as their aunt going by the position Jane occupies in society.
The client demonstrated strengths through recognizing, accepting, and honoring anger. This is the first step in getting help. Social workers expect the vulnerable and victims of anger and depression to be brave and show commitment to problem resolution. Conversely, Jane shows emotional weakness exhibited through sadness for having been unrecognized by her father or disrespected by her colleague at work.
The father, Jane, and colleagues are directly affected by the problem. According to social work, the macro practice aims to bring change in the general community. This may relate to the provision of public campaigns or any political initiative. At the macro level, the general community around Jane, especially women, is directly affected. Jane fails to act as a role model for others as she fails to confront her problem. At the mezzo level, the family and colleagues at work are affected because Jane fails to acknowledge the success of her elderly sister. She feels bad about it. Besides, her colleagues are scared of her nature and anger directed at one of them. At the micro-level, she is directly affected by the anger, depression, and anxiety she has sufficiently shown in this case. This problem needs direct help on a case-to-case basis at the institution that amply provides counseling and therapy help. This intervention is anchored in social care policy that struggles to support women in honoring depression and promoting healthy ways of expressing anger in society.
Summary of Goal Planning, the Intervention Plan, and the Actual Intervention
The main objective of this help initiative was how to develop positive, healthy anger. This was achieved through cognitive behavior theory. This intervention focused on talk therapy. This intervention entailed a sit down with the client to create an environment to ease an already tense environment. According to Mayo Clinic (2014), cognitive behavior therapy allows a social worker to respect and promote a client’s right to self-determination so that he/she can identify his/her clear goals regarding dealing with anger and depression. Failure to allow for this may expose clients to serious and imminent risks to themselves, family, friends, and colleagues. Cognitive behavior therapy was implemented in talk sessions where Jane was challenged to evaluate anger directed at her family and colleagues. Several aspects needed changing as I challenged her to embrace her full range of emotions. Therefore, providing help in this instance needed Jane to sit down with her father and the colleagues to clear out the issues. Confronting the problem meant that Jane had to accept who she was and her privileged position at work and family. In this way, she needed to accept and acknowledge her elder sister was better off in terms of social position. Equally, she needed to address the issues at work and agree on who could take the roles of printing memos.
The goal planning was guided by family growth and diversity theory, one of HBSE theories. This theory relates with the institution of family that is becoming complex for social workers to fully understand its dynamics and provide necessary help to clients. Today, family may ordinarily include blood relatives, friends and work colleagues. According to this theory, when a person leaves his or her home, the person is described as a single young adult (Creech et al., (2012). Here, a person strives to be independent regarding activities and decision making. Therefore, any interference may lead to depression. The criticism interference by Jane’s father directly affected the patient.
The client was effectively motivated and was capable of covering her full range of emotions. Additionally, she was capable of recognizing, distinguishing, and accepting her feelings in relation to anger and depression. Regarding resources, there were recorded videos and talk shows on how to confront anger. All the same, they were never utilized. Self-determination was an available option. Alternative interventions that were never used included problem solving, task centered practice, narrative therapy, and crisis intervention model.
The significant skills that assisted in helping the client were active listening and critical thinking. In this case, active listening helped in establishing trust and respect to necessitate the ability to discover more details about the case. Likewise, critical thinking made it possible to consider diverse information, alternatives, and previous cases to provide a logical solution.
Summary Evaluation of the Intervention
The desired outcome of suppressing feelings causing the anger was achieved. Cognitive behavior theory was successful as it helped in highlighting the main causes of emotions, depression and anxiety and provided clear pathway towards self-defeating behaviors. After several sessions, Jane was happy to report that she was neither anxious nor depressed. The client also reported that it was the first time she felt at ease with anger. Previously, she struggled to avoid it. Classical conditioning tool was used to evaluate the overall process to determine the success of the outcome. The previous stimuli of anger which was criticisms and lack of respect was paired against how she felt and behaved. To evaluate this aspect Jane was asked to visit his father to start their initial conversation. Jane later reported that despite her father’s behavior of discriminating her at the expense of her sister, she never felt bad about it. This signified success of this intervention. Finally, the termination was initiated during the last session and consisted of several activities. These included discussions on how to confront future anxiety and depression should they occur. In addition, she was given additional materials like articles and recorded videos containing insightful tips on how to recover from anger problems and how to manage future challenges.
References
Blustein, D. (2013). The psychology of working: A new perspective for career development, counseling, and public policy. Abingdon-on-Thames, England: Routledge.
Cox, D. L., Van Velsor, P., and Hulgus, J. F. (2004). Who me angry? Patterns of anger diversion in women. Healthcare Women Int. (9), 872-893.
Creech, S., Kachadourian, L., and Taft, C. (2012). Assessment and treatment of posttraumatic anger and aggression: A review. JRRD, 49(5), 777-788.
FSST. (2019). About Family Services of Southeast Texas. FSST, Accessed November 2, 2019, from https://www.westrengthenfamilies.org/about-us/.
Lee, E. (2010). Revisioning cultural competencies in clinical social work practice. Families in Society, 91(3), 272–279.
Mayo Clinic. (2014). Anger management. Accessed November 2, 2019, from http://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/anger-management/basics/definition/prc- 20014603.