Insight! How I Approach a Client with Anxiety

Those who know me know I am a social worker and a therapist. I was doing therapy with a private practice until my untimely (and unjust) departure from that establishment. I took a little hiatus from doing therapy and focused on my full-time employment as a social worker. I recently started doing therapy for seniors and as much as I like my clients, I will soon make my departure from that company to seek a better opportunity. I plan to make this into a series discussing my approach to providing therapy for different disorders. I hope that if you are a person planning to become a therapist, this provides you with some good information that you may use in the future. If there are any concerns or information you’d like me to delve deeper into, please don’t hesitate to reach out. 

So, the nature of this post is to give insight on how I approach a client that comes in with the presenting problem of general anxiety. Now I’m not saying this is how you, as a budding therapist, should approach this disorder or even it’s the best practice however it is the approach that I have used to connect and help my clients to the best of my ability. The major skill that I employ is motivational interviewing. After this post, I’ll write about it and link it to this post to further explain what that is. Now I’m not a therapist who believes you need to be in therapy for the remainder of your life but therapy should be an available resource for people that need it to deal with and process whatever the individual is dealing with. There are those disorders that may need many sessions to handle it AND there are those disorders that may warrant lifetime therapy however I would not say it’s like that for all disorders. It all comes down to the ability of the therapist and client to identify the root problem, deal with it, and find ways to manage the symptoms that plague the individual regularly so that they aren’t dealing with it daily or it's not as debilitating as it was before seeking therapy.

Initial Session

In the initial session, I seek to get a general overview of you as the client. In the first therapeutic practice that I worked in, I completed biopsychosocial for clients, and I enjoyed it, which provided me with good insight into who the person is and their history. I find out about the client’s history, childhood, employment, social circle, mental health history, drug usage, etc. If I have time once that’s completed, I try to have a general conversation about the client’s interests to see how they operate outside of therapy to better understand how to approach them in future sessions. See their likes and dislikes, etc.

Subsequent Sessions

For these next few sessions, I would try to gain more information about the individual as well as provide different techniques that they may be able to use to alleviate the symptoms. The initial technique that I like to provide when it comes to anxiety is deep breathing. Anyone with anxiety who has ever participated in a therapy session in their life has been taught to use deep breathing to relax. One thing to always remember as a therapist is that not all techniques work for everyone. Each technique has to be tailored to the individual. Another technique I like to use is progressive muscle relaxation. The best way that I can explain it is that the individual learns how to tense and relax different areas in their body that may get tense whenever they are dealing with anxiety so that when they are experiencing their anxiety they know how to relax themselves better.

Discharge

The most ideal discharge is when the individual feels that they are no longer anxious regularly. Most times however people tend to discharge from therapy due to a lack of connection between them and their therapist. Always remember that as a person seeking therapy, you should approach it as you would if you were dating. I say this because it’s easier to receive information from someone that you generally like and trust versus someone that you have no intention of being around. This is my major gripe with forced therapy, even if the person needs it. Therapy has to be a willing interaction between both parties for it to work effectively. Another unfortunate reason people are discharged early is due to issues with payment. Therapy is a needed but expensive resource. If your insurance doesn’t cover the sessions, it can become a costly service.