boundary

My female owner just ended telephone therapy with a father client who was sent by the courts to attend a parenting programme at her clinic. Although she did not conduct the full-day training, her role was to carry out 4 weekly telephone consultations (30mins each) to guide him through the contents. The problem was that he was allowed 2hr supervised time per fortnight with his toddler daughter. Hence, there was nothing much about parenting that they could talk about during each telephone consultation.

Estranged from his wife and denied access to his daughter and possibly lonely, the client then started pouring out his life history to her. He happened to be involved in the same line of work with her, pursuing a PhD (sweat! My female owner can’t help but muse that she always ends up with clients who are more qualified than her. She had a previous mother client who is an academic staff in her field). In addition, he is currently working with juvenile youths in the forensic setting. Just her cup of tea.

Anyway, my female owner got the sense that he was getting too close for comfort during last week’s telephone consultation as he started asking her about her schoolwork and private life. This week was worse. Possibly because he knew it was going to the last session, he kept on talking his issues, repeating them over and over again, for an hour!

Well, my female owner, not one to interrupt or to cut short a conversation, found it really difficult to end the call. Ending the call was traumatic, coz when she ended with the usual “you can call the clinic if you want to come in to work through other issues”, the client asked if she would be the one attending to him. And when she said it depends on the allocation, he said that he hoped to be able to meet her for coffee one day and said “well, you have my number”. My female owner stammered through to say something along the lines that it was not appropriate but didn’t think that her message got through, coz he made her take down his email address.

My female owner can just imagine her supervisor marking her down for failure to handle boundary issues.