Helping Skills and Facilitative Conditions

Solution-Focused Brief Therapy

• Focus on client's strengths and resources to generate change
• Utilize client's attitude and language to foster change
• Core concepts:
  • Utilization: using client's strengths to generate change
  • One-down: help me understand you
  • One-up: I'm in control of the process
  • Rituals: forcing change through ordeals
  • Directives: homework
  • Reframing of negative behavior
  • Restraining: change must be done slowly
  • Positive connotations: change must be desirable
• Shazer, Berg, and Weiner's solution-focused brief therapy model

Collaborative Therapy

• Egalitarian relationship between therapist and client
• Useful for reaching understanding, improving communication, and resolving conflict
• Knowledge is created through dialogue and realities
• Harlene Anderson's collaborative therapy model

Narrative Therapy

• Postmodern approach
• Therapist tries to understand people and their stories, along with their problems
• Understanding stories: based on their own interpretation of reality
• Dominant stories: stories that shape a person's life and society
• Multiple stories
• Interventions:
  • Re-authoring: telling your own story from your perspective and finding purpose
  • Externalization: putting problems and behaviors as external
  • Deconstruction: reducing problems to their smallest significant parts
  • Unique outcomes: accepting the possibility of new storylines
  • Existentialist perspective: one can create their own meaning

Clinical Psychology

• Provides continuing and comprehensive mental and behavioral care for individuals
• Focus on remoralization, remediation, and rehabilitation
• The helping process:
  • Theoretical foundation: goals of helping
  • Hill's Three-stage model: Exploration, Insight, Action
  • Facilitative conditions: empathy, compassion, collaboration
  • Therapeutic relationship: real, working alliance, transference, and countertransference
  • Outcome of helping for clients: remoralization, remediation, rehabilitation

Helping Process

• Overview: based on Roger's client-centered theory
• Emphasis on client's experiences, feelings, values, and inner life
• Perceptions of reality vary
• Subjective experience guides behavior
• Understand their frame of reference to understand another person
• Theory of personality development:
  • Organismic valuing process: how infants evaluate their experiences
  • Need for unconditional positive regard
  • COWs guide a child's organization of their experience
• Defenses and reintegrations:
  • Threats: differences between who I am and who I think I ought to be
  • Overcome disintegration, rigidity, or discrepancies through awareness and accuracy
  • Reintegration: reduces COWs, increases positive self-regard

Attending, Listening, and Observing

• Overview
• Attending: physical orientation towards clients, let them know we are paying attention
• Listening: capturing and understanding messages, overt communication, and reflection
• Observing: paying attention to overt communication in non-verbal behavior
• Cultural issues and nonverbal behaviors:
  • Emblems: substitutes for words
  • Illustrators: accompany speech
  • Regulators: monitor conversation flow
  • Adaptors: habitual acts with no purpose

Psychoanalytic and Attachment Theories

• Psychoanalytic:
  • Consciousness-insight
  • Defenses-difficulties
• Attachment:
  • Reducing anxiety turns into safe exploration
  • Early relationships
  • Defenses
  • Therapeutic relationship
  • Insight

Action Stage

• Considers Prochaska's model for change
• Changes can be thoughts, feelings, and behaviors
• Acting is crucial for consolidating new thinking patterns
• Behavioral and cognitive theories:
  • Focus on behaviors rather than unconscious motivations
  • What maintains symptoms rather than what causes them
  • Behaviors are learned
  • Emphasis on the present
  • Importance on specific and clearly defined goals

Systemic, Brief, and Postmodern Therapeutic Models

• Structural model:
  • Minuchin's model
  • Families and young people
  • Works with general system theory, applied to social behavior
• Milan model:
  • Palazzoli, Boscolo, Cecchin, and Prata
  • Family problems are there to maintain homeostasis and are supported by interactional patterns
• Strategic/interactional models:
  • Problem-centered and solution-focused
  • Interested in creating change in behavior
  • Related to Erickson's strategic therapy and the MRI of Palo Alto