An Immigrant’s Daughter

Immigrants at Ellis Island, New York, Photogragh by Augustus F. Sherman, Located at New York Public Library, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A Telehealth Story

A young woman said to me that she had had a good week. I said, “What’s going on?” She said, “I’ve decided that I need to respond more maturely.” She was back home from college because of COVID. The family’s from [Country]. There’s a lot of cultural issues. She’s back home now and they’re treating her like a child again. There’s a lot of cultural factors which she had stepped away from when she was in college. She came home and she started acting like a child, of course. She began arguing with your mother, confronting her mother on her cultural issues and all that. We talked about that, in and out of other things. But then she said, “I just realized that I need to do that, to be more mature.” Something her mother did, and the client chose not to react the way she had before. The idea and change came from her. We had discussions about it, her reactions to her family and the cultural issues. Her loss of independence. She said, “When my mother did that, I would’ve in the past yelled at her, gone into my room, and had a tantrum. I chose not to respond. Mom is Mom and that’s the way it’s going to be when I’m back home.” We had been working on that. She had some depression at home, some anxiety. As we were working, she was able to integrate and make it her own. I've had that with several, all Telehealth clients. It’s the stories that we do learn from. I’m a hands-on person. I learn from people and so the stories are the most important thing.

I’ve always trained a new social worker about the use of self that we bring to the relationship that we develop with clients. Why is a client coming in, what is the client wanting? In my first session I always ask that. What is it that you would like to accomplish? Why are you coming in? They have an idea. If we can accomplish some minute goals that they have, sometimes they can give me very big general goals, but you can break it down and start with something. Then with the relationship, the genuineness, the caring, the trust, the developing all those kinds of things, I see that those tools are what I use to help the clients not only accomplish some of those short-term goals, but then looking at the bigger picture which is their interpretation of things. Then we’re helping them change some of those beliefs that they have about themselves. I think about what I do and how I do things, because I do supervision for the intensive outpatient program. I’m doing a little teaching. I think about those things, so that I can pass it on to them for their work with their clients. It’s good to get feedback from you, because I haven’t had a lot of contact because of COVID.

The Psychotherapist has 23 years experience, is Relational in orientation and began to use Telehealth because of COVID-19.