Melissa is a nearly 30 year old, Caucasian woman who recently experienced divorce five months ago with her husband of three and a half years of marriage. She lives with her daughter, and is supporting their new lifestyle through waitressing, which she has done for approximately give years. Melissa informs Dr. Wachtel that she is encountering some obstacles in making changes to her current career path. She wants to quit her waitressing job, and pursue an experience more related to her school counseling degrees. She voices that her main concern that brought her to seek help in therapy is making the correct and informed choice about her career change because she worries about financial stability given that she is a single mother raising her daughter …show more content…
Rationalization is categorized as a neurotic defense mechanism (Vaillant, 1992), and it is more commonly known as making excuses. Melissa constantly provides reasons why she should not leave her waitressing job, while also pointing out reason for searching work more related to her college degree. She states that waitressing provides the financial stability that she needs, and that it is a job she would like to continue because there is little burden to bring home after the workday. Furthermore, she wants to make sure that if she switches jobs, “it is going to be something that is going to benefit [her] down the line with what [she] is going into”. However, she later explains how it felt liberating to be able to remain where she is currently without someone pushing her decisions. Melissa realizes that there are benefits to switching her career, such as insurance benefits, but it appears that she is purposely choosing not to change. Many of the reasons for not switching she provided earlier in the session seems to be secondary reasons for not pursuing work more related to psychology, while the main reasons seems that she enjoys the degree of freedom and independence her new lifestyle is giving her. There may be shame and anxiety associated with the relief she experienced when she became independent once again. Melissa is rationalizing her decision to remain as a waitress because coming to terms with the …show more content…
Erik Erikson’s psychosocial development theory is helpful in this sense because it emphasizes how external experiences factor into one’s identity and sense of self (Berzoff, 2011). Furthermore, he highlights the idea of how an individual’s identity continuously changes throughout life. This theory provides much insight about how the conflicts in different stages of life affect Melissa’s identity formation, and how unresolved conflicts from earlier stages influence her present personality. As we will see, it seems that Melissa’s identity faced some challenges in her earlier years, and is still undergoing changes in later stages, as classified by