Comments on Rahman\'s Therapy Session With Daniel

Reality Therapy

Rahman's session with Daniel was fascinating for me to read. Because my own goal in pursuing this degree is to work as a life coach, the fact that Daniel is approaching therapy not because of serious behavioral disturbances but because he is interested in exploring and thinking about the direction his life is taking made him seem precisely relevant to the sort of work I hope to do. His presenting symptom admittedly appears to be anxiety, but it seems like a sort of anxiety we have all experienced, and Daniel's problems sound like ordinary problems. In some sense, the mystery is why someone in Daniel's position wants to seek therapy in the first place. Rahman lists his goals as "to be more altruistic, to be open to inspiration, and to be more organized and peaceful." These are all admirable goals in therapy, but I do think it's worth noting that Daniel isn't seeking therapy because he has been acting out or engaged in paranoid ideation or anything more pathological. He sounds like an ordinary individual making ordinary progress through life -- I thought Rahman's choice of Reality Therapy technique here was a good fit.

Rahman reports that Daniel ran into problems with the Reality Therapy technique when he was asked to suggest some ways whereby he might be able to achieve his goal of being more peaceful. Instead Daniel seems to wish that he could just "be in the habit" of attaining peace without having to do anything to build the habit. I was led to wonder several things from this stumbling-block that Rahman reported in the session. Daniel is sixty-five years old. Although he is still working in IT tech, he is at an age when most people begin to think about retirement and ultimately about the end of life. If Daniel were retired, I cannot imagine that he would be devoid of ideas and suggestions for things that he could do to attain peace -- retirees are usually interested in the idea of remaining active, and are always keen to seek hobbies that keep them engaged while also letting them enjoy the relative ease that retirement brings.

I say this because Reality Therapy puts a focus on the client's own sense of agency, understanding (in Corey's words) what gives the client "power or control, freedom or independence, and fun" (Corey 2013, 310). Is it possible that Daniel is at a loss for suggestions because his own age might be a factor in his anxiety and discomfort? If I were co-therapist, I would definitely wonder if the fact that Daniel is sixty-five years old might perhaps be the elephant in the room. After all, if the fact that he is still working is underscored by the wish not to be, or if his employment is underscored by a sense of looming anxiety about what he would do after retirement, or if he plans never to retire -- all of these factors could, for a sixty-five-year-old man, have a distinct effect on the client's sense of "power or control, freedom or independence, and fun." Most sixty-five-year-old men have a very good sense of what they find relaxing: it seems rather mystifying that Daniel couldn't come up with a single suggestion as to what might relax him, but instead insisted that he just wished he had the habit. That sounds to me like the sort of mindset that could very well be affected by his age, and his employment status, and his thoughts about the future. My inclination as co-therapist would be to probe a little more deeply into these areas. The anxiety, the lack of peace, the disorganization that Daniel has reported in his life sounds like it might actually be caused by issues that he's not discussing directly. In that case, the rather blunt directness of Reality Therapy could end up missing the point completely, if it ends up taking Daniel purely at his word without probing a little more deeply. Does Daniel think about retirement? Does he think about death? These are the sorts of things I'd be curious to hear, to assess his anxiety.