Getting Back Together With Pat: A Summary

A. Assessment summary. Pat’s goal of getting back together with his wife needs to be addressed immediately in treatment. As his wife has a restraining order against him, it is important to ensure that he understands that he has to respect that and leave her alone. Because this is Pat’s biggest goal, it might be beneficial to help him evaluate why Nikki does not feel safe around him and how he can respect that. It would be beneficial to learn why Pat thinks that reading all of the books on his wife’s syllabus will make her want to be together again and to help him see that logically, that does not make sense. The hardest thing about working with Pat is helping him understand that there is nothing he can do to get back together with Nikki. Pat could benefit from finding a new hobby or interest to help him recover from the trauma of his wife’s affair. If he had something to dedicate time to that he enjoyed doing, it might help with stabilizing his moods. It would be helpful to work on coping mechanisms with Pat for dealing with the end of his marriage. Pat becomes enraged and unable to control himself whenever he hears his first dance song, that was playing when he walked in on his wife’s affair. It would be helpful to work on breathing exercises and other ways to calm …show more content…
Pat was very open with me about what he felt were issues for him and what he thought he needed to change. I was able to keep Pat on an even keel during sessions and help him to reflect on his sometimes extreme responses to different situations. He was still unable to recognize when he read A Farewell to Arms that it was not appropriate to became so angry about the ending that he threw the book out of the window and woke up his family. I tried to work with Pat to realize that he feels things differently than most people, more powerfully, and that’s okay, but that it’s not appropriate to react certain