Reading your reactions to a client, and deciding what they mean
How this works. Strong reactions to clients are normal. Sometimes annoyance is just annoyance, and frustration is just a hard day. But when reactions are intense, repeating, or pulling you away from your usual clinical stance, they can be clues that a personality pattern is playing out in the relationship itself. Choose your assigned client, read the clinician's account, and talk it through as a group. Then use the trait worksheet to describe what seems evident in the presentation.
Choose your assigned client
The clinician's account
Turn this on after your group has talked. Tap a highlighted phrase to see what it might point to.
Talk it through
What is the clinician feeling, thinking, and wanting to do?
What client traits and behaviors might be evoking these reactions?
Which reactions might point to the client's pattern, and which might just be ordinary frustration or something of the clinician's own?
If this pattern shows up in the client's life outside the room, what does it look like?
Trait worksheet: HEXACO
As a group, set each slider where this client seems to sit. Leave a slider at the middle if the vignette gives you nothing to go on.
Trait worksheet: AMPD trait facets
Tap the facets that seem evident in the presentation. Be choosy. A profile that selects everything describes no one.
Filled = your group's picks. ✦ = one interpretation. Where they differ, argue it out.
Open this only after your group commits to its ratings.