Case Study 2 — Chapter 22: Goals, Intrinsic Motivation, and Achievement

Amara: The Work That Is Actually the Work

Background

February. Amara's second semester of the MSW program has begun. The first semester was orientation — to the academic demands, the clinical framework, the cohort, the city, and herself in this new context. The second semester is where the program becomes more specific.

She is taking Trauma-Informed Practice (her concentration's core course), Advanced Research Methods (not her preference but required), Group Work Theory and Practice, and maintaining her field placement at the community mental health organization. She has twelve clinical hours logged. She needs 450 by the end of the program.

The number 450 is not a motivating number. It is a compliance number — an external quantity that maps onto the minimum required for licensure. She knows this. She is also aware that the 450 hours are not the point; the 450 hours are the container in which the actual learning happens.

She has been thinking about the difference between the container and the thing it holds.

The Intrinsic Motivation Question

Amara works through the chapter's motivation framework with a degree of personal investment that she does not bring to the research methods requirement.

Her regulatory profile for the MSW program:

Research Methods: External-to-introjected. She is doing it because it is required. She does not love it. She has not yet found the genuine rationale that would shift it toward identified regulation, though she suspects one exists: good research is the foundation of knowing whether interventions actually help, and she cares deeply about whether interventions actually help.

Group Work Theory and Practice: Identified, moving toward integrated. Groups are what she has always been interested in — the specific dynamics of what happens when multiple people with different attachment patterns and family histories are put in a room together and asked to support each other. This is genuinely interesting to her.

Trauma-Informed Practice: Integrated to intrinsic. She is here because of this. The trauma-informed framework is the reason she chose this program over the others, and learning it in a formal academic context — with the research, the theory, the evidence base — is exactly what she had hoped the program would provide.

Field placement: Complicated. The clinical hours have a bureaucratic quality (the logging, the supervision documentation) that is extrinsic in texture. The actual work with actual clients is, when she is not in the self-referential empathy pattern Marcus is helping her with, genuinely intrinsically engaging.

She writes in her study journal: The program is not uniformly motivating. Some of it I am doing because it is required, some because it is genuinely mine. What I'm trying to figure out is whether I can find the genuine rationale for the parts that are required — whether I can shift from compliance to endorsement — or whether I'm stuck with some proportion of "just because" for the duration.

The Research Methods Revelation

Week four. Advanced Research Methods. The professor — a dry, precise man named Dr. Okafor who clearly loves this material in a way he seems mildly frustrated that his students do not — asks the class: "Why does methodology matter?"

The expected answer: because it tells us how the research was done and whether to trust the findings.

Dr. Okafor says: "That's the test answer. The real answer is: because you cannot know whether what you are doing is helping without it. You can have the warmest therapeutic relationship in the world. You can feel certain you are making a difference. And you can be wrong. The methodology tells you whether you are wrong."

Amara writes this down. And then sits with it.

She has been in clinical practice for six months at the placement. She has felt certain about certain moments. She has also, twice, had clients who did not improve in the ways she expected. And she did not have the methodological vocabulary to know why.

She writes: Dr. Okafor just made me care about research methods. Not because the course is interesting. Because the purpose of the course is something I actually care about: knowing whether the work is doing what I think it's doing.

This is identified regulation developing from the outside in: she didn't start with the interest, but she found the genuine rationale. The course has not become intrinsically interesting. It has become genuinely important.

The WOOP for Clinical Hours

Amara applies WOOP to her clinical hours goal.

Wish: Complete 150 clinical hours this academic year, with sufficient quality and variety to build my trauma-informed practice foundations.

Outcome: She imagines it — the confidence that comes from accumulated competence, the specific clinical scenarios she will have navigated, the supervision conversations that will have deepened her understanding. The 150 is not the point; the 150 is the measure of what will have happened.

Obstacle: She identifies it clearly: the self-referential empathy pattern. The sessions she loses some of her own perspective in. The clients who activate her old history in ways that make her less present to them and more present to herself. This is the obstacle that most interferes with quality — and it is also, she notes, what her supervision with Marcus has been focused on for two months.

Plan: When I notice I am tracking my own history in a session rather than the client's experience, I will internally note "self-referential" and return to a specific present-focused question: "What is this person experiencing right now?"

She takes the plan to Marcus in supervision.

Marcus says: "That's a good plan. I want to add one piece: when you notice self-referential, you don't have to eliminate it. You can use it. Your history is a resource if you know it is happening. The problem is not having the history; the problem is not knowing you're using it."

Amara incorporates this into the plan: When I notice self-referential, I will acknowledge it internally ("this connects to my experience of X"), use it as a hypothesis about what the client might be experiencing, and then check the hypothesis rather than assuming it.

The Competence Growth Moment

March. A client she has been working with for eight weeks makes a disclosure that is significant — something they have been circling for multiple sessions and finally named directly.

Amara holds it. She does not rush to respond. She reflects accurately. She asks one specific question rather than five. She notices the client's relief at being heard in the specific, accurate way.

After the session, she writes her case notes and then, separately, in her personal journal: That happened right. Not because I did it correctly according to the textbook. Because I was there. Because eight weeks of building the relationship produced enough trust that the person could say the thing.

This is why I came here. Not the clinical hours. Not the grades. Not the credential. This.

She has been working in this field for less than a year. She knows she is a student and not yet a practitioner. She also knows — with the specific certainty that comes from intrinsic engagement rather than from external validation — that she is in the right place doing the right work.

Analysis Questions

Amara's regulatory profile varies significantly across her program requirements — from external/introjected for research methods to integrated/intrinsic for trauma-informed practice. How does SDT predict that this variation would affect her experience of the program overall? What specifically can she do about the research methods gap?
The research methods revelation — Dr. Okafor's "you cannot know whether what you are doing is helping without it" — shifts Amara's regulation from external toward identified. This shift did not make the material more interesting; it made it more important. How does the distinction between intrinsic motivation and identified regulation matter here? Why does "important to me" work even when "interesting to me" doesn't?
Amara's WOOP process identifies the primary internal obstacle as the self-referential empathy pattern — the same one identified in Chapter 21. How does naming the same pattern as both a clinical skills issue (Chapter 21) and a goal pursuit obstacle (Chapter 22) illustrate the cross-domain applicability of the psychological work she is doing?
Marcus's revision of Amara's plan — "you don't have to eliminate it, you can use it" — shifts the plan from suppression to resourceful integration. How does this revision change the motivational quality of the plan? Is it more likely to be used consistently? Why?
Amara's competence growth moment — "that happened right" — is the intrinsic motivation experience at its most direct: engagement with the activity because the activity itself is meaningful, without reference to grades, clinical hours, or credential. The chapter discusses the relationship between intrinsic motivation and need satisfaction. Which of the three SDT needs does this moment most directly satisfy? Are the other two also present?