The following explores the marital/couples case of “Jake and Amy” a middle-aged, Caucasian/White, upper-middle class, couple, presenting to counseling as they grapple with the decision on whether they should follow through on expanding their family, they already have one child together, or for Amy to have an abortion. After five unsuccessful years of attempts to have another child, Jake and Amy exist in opposition now that Amy is pregnant. Amy moved forward with investing the bulk of her time and energy into her career while Jake took on the primary responsibilities to their home, including care taking for their 9-year-old son, Lenny. Jake would very much like to have another child, while Amy is uncertain about …show more content…
As such, IPCM requires a sufficient grounding in an array of theoretical frameworks and modalities including: psychodynamics, human behavior, social learning/development, cognitive therapies, and experiential psychotherapy to name a few. IPCM itself is founded on five theoretical “pillars”: progressive knowledge, system theory, a theory of constraints, differential causality, and sequential …show more content…
From the IPCM perspective, knowledge is progressive and can never be complete or absolute, thus one’s concept of truth and reality are not synonymous rather based upon their current available information. In the context to psychotherapy, a therapist’s understanding of a client and their issues becomes clearer with additional data and interaction yet remains inconclusive. Accordingly, under the IPCM model, assessment and treatment are co-occurring and inseparable over the course of treatment (Gorman, 2015, pg. 162). Interestingly, our knowledge as viewers to the show, In Treatment, illustrates progressive knowledge pattern. With each episode, we learn a little more about the couple, Jake and Amy, peeling back the metaphoric “layers of onion”. Sometimes we have a better understanding of their collective history and other times we learn more about their individual histories contextual to their coupleship. Although under the IPCM format, “assessment” is considered ongoing, session work begins with a four-session model. The initial session is a conjoint session, followed by individual sessions with each partner. It is wrapped up with another conjoint session to consolidate the information gathered, including empirically informed formulations from pre-session assessment tool(s), the Systemic Therapy Inventory of Change (STIC). One set is administered prior