How to Do Motivational Interviewing by Bill Matulich

Author:Bill Matulich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: how to, psychotherapy, counseling, counseling strategies, behavior change, motivational interviewing, motivational counseling, addiction counseling, medical counseling, psychological counseling, bill matulich
Publisher: Bill Matulich

Being able to respond to your client’s statements with clear, accurate reflections is one of the most important and powerful techniques of motivational interviewing and probably more useful during the middle part of a session than even well crafted open questions. Reflections, though, seem to be one of the most difficult skills for students in a workshop to master. In some ways, why reflections are so difficult is a bit of a mystery, since reflective listening is taught in any number of basic counselor training classes. Part of the explanation for this is that in normal practice of all kinds in which some form of counseling is appropriate, people tend to rely more on questioning than they do on reflective listening. The thinking is “I need to get some information from my client, so I need to ask her questions.” In studies of reflective listening, though, it is actually the case that you can get more, and more accurate, information by using reflections than you can by asking questions.

There are other advantages to relying more on reflections than on questions. Reflections create momentum. Skillful reflecting reinforces and creates more change talk, guiding the client to argue more for change. In MI, we want the client to be responsible for change. This is difficult to do if you rely only on questions. So, in the middle part of a session, you will want to use more reflections than questions. In MI, it is usually thought that reflecting twice for every question you ask is approaching a high level of competence.

Complex Reflections

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.