| Summary: | Counseling psychologist Dr. Kathleen S. Bieschke conducts a counseling session with a Caucasian young adult lesbian client who reports a history of family conflict. Dr. Bieschke works with issues of diversity from a supportive, affirmative approach. In this session, she encourages the client's open discussion of issues pertaining to her lesbian identity. Early in the session, the therapist seeks to ascertain the client's clarity and comfort with her gender identity and her degree of openness versus secrecy among her family and friends. The client discusses a pivotal moment in which she defines herself as lesbian to self, friends, and family. This precipitates a family crisis and prolonged period of conflict. The client describes initial lack of acceptance by her parents, marked by physical and verbal fights, including an incident of threatened violence on the part of her father, which the client reported to the police. The therapist carefully questions the client around concerns regarding physical abuse raised in this incident to determine whether the abuse occurred in childhood and to assess whether there are grounds for current concerns. Because the client is an adult, the abusive incidents appear to be historical, and there do not appear to be existing concerns for the client's safety, the therapist does not take further action. With encouragement, reflection, and minimal interruption, Dr. Bieschke allows the client to tell her story of identity formation and eventual reconciliation with her parents. The therapist seeks to provide a corrective experience to the inconsistent reliability of adult figures in the client's life and raises this process observation to the client.
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