Question

Roberta has come to counseling because she is contemplating a divorce from her husband of 12 years. She has been unhappy in her marriage for several years and doesn’t think that she and her husband can rekindle the interest necessary in their relationship to make it work. To complicate the situation, she has been seeing a married co-worker for several months on the sly and is sexually involved. Roberta thinks she loves the man she is having an affair with and would like to marry him. Though he wants to continue seeing her he has made it clear that he is unwilling to end his marriage or break up his family to be with her. Roberta and her husband have three young children and she knows a divorce would be crushing to the children. She’s come to you for counseling to sort through these issues.
At the end of the session, Roberta is very distraught and asks if you would be available to meet her for coffee later that day to continue the conversation in a more casual environment. Under what circumstances might this be appropriate, if at all, and what potential conflicts might this create?

Answer 1

Coffee shop provides for a relaxed interaction . Client inhibition go down drastically when compared to counselling in formal setting.

Recent psychological findings conclude that coffee improves the collective memory retrieval and ability to solve problems .

Robetta case is very complicated and she might not be feeling comfortable and relaxed in telling all the things to the counsellor in formal setting. So going to coffee would help her explain the problems in more elaborate ways.

However , it may conflict over having advantage of psychological tools in formal setting. A counsellor can have greater and specialised strategy to feel her relaxed and take out information and resolve them. Sometimes , client needs to be instigated to burst and show anger to retrieve experiences where client shout and shows her anger which give insight to counsellor that will not be possible in cafe for a coffee.