As you interact with clients and peers, you will need to demonstrate interpersonal skills.
Assignment Content
As you interact with clients and peers, you will need to demonstrate interpersonal skills. This assignment will provide you with a career-relevant scenario in which collaboration and teamwork skills must be employed. Then, you will reflect on your interpersonal strengths and challenges.
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Leaderless Group Activity – Staff Decision Scenarios
You are staff members of a counseling agency, and, as a group, you must arrive at a decision regarding what to advise the counselor in each scenario.
Scenario 1: Megan
You are one of the counselors who act in a supervisory and advisory capacity for the new counselors and interns at your community mental health agency. A young counselor has approached the committee with a request for advice on how to proceed in the following situation.
A young woman, Megan, is a new client at your agency and reports that she is in great distress about a decision she must make.
The client is 2 and 1/2 months pregnant and has just found out. She had no noticeable symptoms and found out only because she missed a menstrual period this month. She believes the only explanation for the pregnancy is an experience 6 weeks ago when she had unprotected sex with a young man she barely knew in a car outside a party she had attended. She drank too much and has little memory of the situation. She had been distressed that night because her boyfriend of 3 years told her that he had fallen in love with someone else.
Megan believes it is a woman’s choice whether or not she carries a pregnancy to term, but she feels unsure about personally taking the step to obtain an abortion. She has not informed the young man of the pregnancy because she has since discovered that he is married and has a family of his own.
Megan has damaged lungs as the result of a childhood illness. She was previously told by her doctor that she may run considerable risk to herself if she carries a pregnancy to term.
Megan has reluctantly informed her mother of the pregnancy, who has stated that she will never speak to her daughter again if she has an abortion and feels angry and disgusted with her daughter for her “irresponsible, selfish, disgusting behavior.” Megan says her mother’s belief is that “if you have the pleasure, you must pay the price.”
The counselor is experiencing great anxiety about treating this client because of her personal beliefs. She was raised in a religious family and has always thought herself to be pro-life.
Scenario 2: Sara
You are one of the counselors who acts in a supervisory and advisory capacity for the new counselors and interns at your community mental health agency. A young counselor has approached the committee with a request for advice on how to proceed in the following situation.
A young woman, Sara, is a new client at your agency and reports that she is in great distress about a decision she must make.
Her mother has terminal bone cancer and has had many months of extreme and worsening pain. She has asked Sara to help her overdose with painkillers by obtaining a medication that will help her resist vomiting and allow a large overdose of the painkillers to be absorbed. She begs her daughter to help her and not to allow her to suffer any longer.
Sara loves her mother deeply and says she cannot bear to see her continued suffering. Her father died several years ago. There are no other siblings or close relatives. The care of her mother and the decision are on her shoulders, she says. Her physician has, in an oblique way, told her how much of the prescribed painkillers it would take to kill her mother. Her mother’s prognosis is grim, according to the doctor.
The counselor is feeling anxious about dealing with this issue.
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