Samar Wahba

EDCEP 822

The Case of Jace

The only time I lose it is when other people get on me about what I should or shouldn’t do.

That teacher deserved to hear it from me, and I’m glad I threw my book at him. He gave

me an F last semester, and he’s always been after me. He told me that I needed to go to

class even though I told him I was getting something from my locker. He is the one who

pushed it with me. The teachers at school are on me about everything, just like my stupid

mom. My little brother hates it when I go off on Mom and we fight, but she’s always all

over me. I don’t need to be in counseling—everyone just needs to leave me alone.

—Jace, 14

I would want to work with Jace in the school setting and refer him to other clinical and

community settings to ensure that he is receiving the full amount of treatment support possible.

To start, I believe that a mix of individual and family counseling would be sufficient for Jace

since he expressed the root of his problems tend to surround his mother and are affecting his

brother.

A Behavioral Intervention I find would be appropriate for Jace's case are classical and operant

conditioning. Classical and operant conditioning can be used as a foundation for understanding,

targeting, and changing youth behavior. A stimulus that is not otherwise significant to Jace can

become associated with an inherently important stimulus; thus, the stimulus he finds

insignificant will become necessary. Operant conditioning is a process that could be used with

Jace to reinforce or distinguish certain behaviors through a system of rewards and punishments.
Operant conditioning is especially relevant for youth because parents have control over various

rewards and consequences, which could help Jace and his mother. The counselor could use

operant conditioning to identify the effects of reinforcing his problem behaviors, helping his

parents, teachers, and other important people in his life to adjust to the environment. Hence, his

unwanted behaviors are no longer reinforced, and desirable behaviors are reinforced.

In terms of CBT, there is a large variety of interventions that could be helpful for Jace.

CBT interventions such as social skills training, cognitive-restructuring approaches, problem-

solving approaches, and cognitive modeling would be constructive when addressing Jace's

disruptive behavior. The counselor can take time to identify the Jace's thoughts and potentially

replace them with more useful thoughts. For example, the counselor can explain that "I'm not

going to my teacher get away with that" could be shifted to "The teacher did something I didn't

like. I'll go to my principal." After practicing the CBT process with the Jace several times, the

counselor can teach the Jace how to track his thoughts and combat triggering thoughts with

more productive beliefs. As part of the process of challenging thoughts, Jace can engage in

healthier and more productive behaviors.

DBT could be a possible counseling approach used for Jace's inability to regulate his

emotions. A counselor who uses DBT could help Jace address personal and environmental

factors that might trigger negative events. A skill used in DBT that could be effective for Jace in

counseling is called "walking the middle path." This intervention is used for youth who have

black-or-white thinking, feel limited empathy, have limited conflict-resolution skills, and have

difficulty making the desired changes-all of which Jace does. With this technique, the counselor

would work with Jace to identify dialectal dilemmas. Together, they could discuss the feelings of

emotional vulnerabilities vs. the self-invalidation, crisis vs. inhibited experiences, and
differentiate autonomy vs. dependence. Jace will also be able to work on validating himself and

others and changing his behaviors through reinforcement, shaping, punishment, and extinction.