Capacity for Meaningful Relationships

INSTRUCTIONS:
Please read the provided clinical vignette and then select two of the six essential skills for recovery (typed out below) (Shumway & Kimball, 2012) to create therapeutic questions or interventions that could be conducted in session to help them with their journey to recovery.
Example:
Student selects hope as one of the essentials skills to apply to a case scenario. The therapist would ask the client to think about a time recently where they felt hopeful about their ability to maintain sobriety. I would ask the client to very clearly describe this time in great detail – when was this, what was happening, and what helped them to feel so hopeful. After the client describes the time of hopefulness, the therapist would ask the client to rate on a scale of 1 – 10 how hopeful they felt in that moment (one being not hopeful at all to 10 being extremely hopeful) and then to rate in this moment how hopeful they were currently feeling. **This student would then need to create one more intervention from a second essential skill to meet the requirements of the assignment.
CLINICAL VIGNETTE:
Naseem is a 47 year old man. He is married and has three children, ages 6, 9, and 12. Naseem recently felt as though he had hit rock bottom, when his wife of 22 years took their three children and moved into an apartment. Naseem reports to the therapist that she would not come home until he had addressed his addiction. He also has been in jeopardy of losing his job. His acknowledges that he has reached a place where he finally realizes that his addiction to alcohol is a real thing, not just something that other people make up to be angry with him. Despite this acknowledgement he does not know what to do. He knows he needs help from others and that the pain of living this way has far outweighed his reliance on alcohol, but he feels hopeless in many ways that he will ever be able to live without alcohol. It has been such an important relationship, for most of his life, almost as far back as he can remember alcohol was used to celebrate life’s achievements, as a way to connect with colleagues and family members, a tool to deal with stress at the end of the day and a way to mask the pain. He decides that therapy is the best option, although he isn’t sure that it will be helpful for him.
In his first session, the therapist does an extensive assessment of his addiction and checks to gather information about Naseem’s readiness to change. The assessment conclusions are that Naseem has an alcohol use disorder, severe. There are also signs that Naseem may meet criteria for gambling disorder, but mild and that Naseem feels ready to face this struggle as well. Naseem reports that the does not know if his wife will join him in treatment but today he must get started and begin treatment, but tells the therapist that he would appreciate it if she could call and ask her to come in, since she does not want to speak to him. Naseem is afraid to talk to his wife. He tells the therapist that their marriage has become very troubled over the past five years and that they rarely speak to one another anymore; when they do speak it is yelling. He shares with the therapist his issues at work and as he begins to open up about work he shares that he just does not feel fulfilled in what he does for a living and he rarely leaves work with any sense of accomplishment. Sometimes this motivates him to drink during his lunch break, not enough to get drunk, but just enough to help him go back to the office and get through the remainder of the day. The session ends with Naseem stating he just feels like he has lost control of all that is important and that he does not even know who he is today. He makes an appointment for next week to continue with treatment.
Six Essentials to Achieve Lasting Recovery:
1. Hope: a reawakening after despair; to live with greater confidence
2. Healthy Coping Skills: managing the pain and stress of life
3. Sense of Achievement and Accomplishment: moving beyond the limits of addiction toward personal goals
4. Capacity for Meaningful Relationships: the positive support and connection with family and peers
5. Unique Identity Development: the emergence of a unique positive identity
6. Reclamation of Agency: the internal knowledge that you have choices in your behavior