In reflecting on my week, I realized I am experiencing a challenge with my six-year-old client. This was the very first client assigned to me and frankly, I just didn’t know how to work with a child so young. I processed the techniques that I could utilize with a child this age and thought about the amount of information I can actually learn from her.

I spoke with different clinicians about the various ways to treat a client of this age. One of the clinicians told me it was a good idea to treat the child with the parent in the office. Another informed me to treat the client first for half of a session and then the parent for the remainder of the session.

However, my supervisor informed me about something that just completely made things a little more complex for me. In this particular situation, my six-year-old client came in with a presenting problem of hyperactivity as per the mother. This little girl’s brother is also being treated at my internship site. The client’s mother is Spanish speaking and speaks and understands very little English.

I am the only person in the agency who is bi-lingual in Spanish and English. With that said, I am supposed to work closely with the other therapist who is treating the older brother of my client. In addition to that, my client’s mother is being treated by a different agency.

She has a primary counselor who she sees once per week. She also sees a psychiatrist monthly and is on prescription anti-depressive medication with a diagnosis of Clinical Depression. My clients’ mother and perhaps this is my fault for not setting boundaries, seems to be attention deprived. This is manifested when I do attempt to speak to her about her daughter and she goes on and on about her relationship with her ex-husband and touches minimally on her children.

I try to be as empathic as I can be; however, my supervisor informed me, as I should already know, that I could not have sessions with her that assimilate individual counseling for her problem with her ex-husband because she is already in counseling and this poses and unethical situation. My supervisor also informed me that either the mother needs to switch to come and see me and assign her daughter to another counselor in the agency or I will have to cut it short with her and be very specific about her daughter when interacting with her.

This absolutely makes sense and I didn’t reflect on it before. I believe this is because I actually thought I was doing a good thing by spending time with the mother and offering my understanding in how hurt she feels about her husband’s departure.

Additionally, this week, my clients’ mother presented me this with court papers granting her full custody of her children, which includes a restraining order against her ex-husband. I was definitely interested in looking at the papers but then she began to ask my advice about how she can go about mandating a mental status examination on her ex-husband because according to her, he is not mentally stable. She also wanted me to give her advice in terms of calling Child Protective Services on him stating she thinks that in the future, her children will not be safe around their father. With all said, my assessment and hunch is pointing to a revengeful nature from her part due to him leaving her. I am not undermining her concerns. She may be on to something but I can’t evaluate that just yet and I felt quite uncomfortable with the questions she was asking of me.

In fact, I thought that if I wasn’t careful enough, I could be faced with some ethical and legal issue that I definitely don’t need, especially when I’m just starting off. The entire situation is completely making me nervous. I’m finding myself wanting to vent with my supervisor every Tuesday I see this parent and it’s starting to get to the point where I am really not looking forward to Tuesday’s. I understand her pain. I’ve certainly done my share of mistakes in relationships, sometimes even wacky ones. However, I don’t want to be caught in a bind with this situation. Perhaps I just expected things to go somewhat easier considering I am “only” an intern. I guess it’s just a learning process and a journey.