Description

Presenting Problem

From a Transpersonal perspective Deidre, being in the developmental line of “Personal Functioning” (Carrier & Mitchell, 2016, p. 394), is experiencing anxiety as her psyche attempts to “develop a stable [and] cohesive ego” (p. 397) for her new sense of identity to match her current life and psychological makeup, with regard to attachments from the past that are preventing her from connecting more fully with herself.

Deidre’s past presents a series of traumatic events that built upon each other and culminated in her having an abortion, when she was 18. After her father died when she was 17, she retreated into drugs and alcohol, which led to her being at a party in which she got pregnant from a man she didn’t know. The abortion specifically has begun to present itself in dreams about “who her child might have been and how ‘different-in a good way’ her life might be”.

The sudden onset of the anxiety and the dreams could be triggered by her graduating from college, she began at the age of 19 when she moved to Kansas after the abortion; and possibly getting married to her boyfriend Tom, whom she met in her first year of college. Tom is pro-life, and Deidre is feeling guilty for never sharing she had an abortion.