Ivan Yau ~ Consolidation ~ Listening and Interviewing

Do No Harm Principles 1.DON’T facilitate ventilation of long- suppressed emotions in early stage. 2.When client is in vulnerable state, DON’T comfort (usually means denying the legitimacy of feelings) / make comments and suggestions.

Empathetic Understanding  Deep meaning (including needs and desires) should be strongly connected with client’s continuous efforts, hardship and past history.  When important meaning is identified, explorations on client’s effort, hardship and history are usually necessary and useful.

Pay Attention to the Process  Reading client’s feedback as a guide for formulating further response.  Be sensitive to some characteristics of client’s feedback as a sign of rupture or disengagement.  Beware of client’s internal processing.

Merging with other therapies  Easily merge with SFT, CBT, Task Centered Approach,...compatible with Gestalt, Satir Model,…  Quite different from Structural Family Therapy,…  Look into pattern and connect with the key concepts of the therapies

Some Limitations in IN  Lack of systemic view: no direct relevance to couple work / family interview, working on client’s environment.  Pay attention to work on strong emotion.  Insufficient time to help students have in- depth self-exploration so to sharpen their sensitivity.

Some Reflections  These skills are Basic and Fundamental for interventions in Individual Clinical Setting.  For practice, worker works in Uncertainty and takes Context into account.  Context will means a lot of things – like organizational culture, service scope and delivery mode, client’s expectation,…

Counseling process  1. Moment-by-moment Interaction, 2. Encounter Within the Session, 3. Session Considerations.  For the beginning of 1 st session, there are lots of commonalities. As the session evolves, more and more variations are found.  In IN design, we keep practicing 1 only.

Counseling Process  General process  engagement and exploration on needs and desires, goal setting, working through patterns / issues, facilitating and maintaining change, evaluation and relapse prevention.  Session process  free flowing / opening up narrative space / reviewing changes since last time, focusing issues to work on, consolidation and rounding up.

Last Reminders Student’s responsibility to…  Read the Notes Regularly.  Practice these in daily life if possible  Keep reflections  Counseling can be liberating or oppressive, it depends ……