1. Explore      current and early relationships as they relate to issues of attachment and      autonomy. This includes gaining an understanding of how the client      understands the world and his/her relationships with others (e.g., the client’s      mental representations based on internalized objects). Understanding the client’s      internal frame of reference will help the counselor understand the client’s      behaviors.
2. Describe the      ideas and feelings about self that the client might have developed in the      context of these early relations (internalized objects).
3. Establish a      relationship between the client’s sense of self and current problems, identify      conflictive patterns that the client may be repeating in current life, and      explore to what extent current experiences trigger the client’s emotional      reactions elicited by past experiences (reliving the trauma).
4. Uncover      defense mechanisms embedded in the client’s presenting concerns and other      symptoms, and explain how they relate to the client’s current difficulties      and past experiences.
5. Help the      client become aware of issues described above, and help the client process      and resolve early conflicts.

 
Individual Psychology: 
1. Identify how presenting concerns relate to client’s ability to successfully meet specific life tasks.
2. Explore family constellation to discover experiences that might have led the client to develop his/her specific faulty logic. Describe the content of this faulty logic and the sense of self the client developed in the context of these experiences.
3. Establish a connection between the content of the client’s faulty logic and (1) experiences in the family of origin, (2) problems in current life, and (3) the sense-of-self in relation to the world that the client developed.
4. Identify the underlining purpose of the client’s problematic behavior, and describe how it prevents the client from successfully meeting the life tasks.
Person-Centered: 
1. While exploring the client’s presenting concerns, the counselor will assume that internalized conditions of worth have led the client to disconnect from parts of himself/herself. This disconnect, in turn, has resulted in feelings of incongruency and anxiety, which has impaired his/her internal locus of control as well as thwarted his/her self-actualizing tendency.
2. Examine the discrepancy between the client’s self-concept and ideal self-concept. Since the theory proposes that given the adequate facilitative conditions (empathy, positive regard, and congruence) in the counseling relation, clients will be able to reconnect with themselves and find their own way, the theory does not offer much in terms of a framework to explain the particular issues of each client. This is more a theory of the change process itself than a theory of personality development.
Existential:
1. Identify how presenting concerns (problem behaviors/cognitions) relate to specific givens of existence.
2. Elucidate how these difficulties represent (as mechanisms of defense) or are the consequences of the client’s efforts to avoid facing the normal anxiety generated by specific givens of existence.
3. Describe how these defensive behaviors have led the client to experience of neurotic anxiety and/or neurotic guilt and further problems.
Behavioral/Cognitive/REBT:
1. Relate the presenting concerns to faulty learning, irrational thoughts, and/or faulty cognitions.
2. Identify the client’s irrational thoughts (Ellis) and/or specific faulty cognitions or maladaptive thought patterns (Beck), and illustrate how these lead to the problematic behaviors.
3. Describe the antecedent behaviors and cognitions that trigger the client’s maladaptive behaviors and thoughts (this is called behavioral assessment).
Goal Setting and Interventions:
The information provided in the conceptualization process leads to specific counseling goals. Again, use outside sources to support your discussion of Goals and Interventions.
In the psychodynamic approaches (Object Relations and Individual Psychology), these will likely include:
· Resolving earlier conflicts
· Modifying negative aspects of the self
· Facilitating the development of positive aspects of the self in the context of the therapeutic relation