Interpretive Skills and Insight

Interpretive Skills

• Interpretive skills help facilitate insight into behaviors.
• They either ask clients to think about meanings or offer possible meanings.
• These skills invite clients to think more deeply about the causes and maintenance of their problems.
• Helpers collaborate with clients to construct meaning through an interpretive process.
• Skills utilized to facilitate insight include open questions, probes for insight, interpretations, and disclosures of insight.

Open Questions and Probes for Insight

• Open questions and probes invite clients to think about the deeper meanings of their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
• These questions and probes guide the client to explore and become curious about what is going on, respectfully and nonjudgmentally.
• They are similar to those used for thoughts and feelings but focus on insight.
• Open questions and probes for insight should be gentle, done with curiosity, inquired collaboratively, and aimed at helping clients think about insight.
• Clients should be given time for answers.
• Vary questions with other skills to avoid sounding repetitive.

Interpretations

• Interpretations present a new meaning, reason, or explanation for behaviors, thoughts, or feelings, beyond what a client has stated.
• They help clients see problems in a new way.
• Ways that interpretations can work:
  • Making connections between seemingly isolated statements or events.
  • Pointing out themes or patterns in a client's behaviors, thoughts, or feelings.
  • Explicating defenses, resistance, or transference.
  • Offering a new framework or explanation to understand behaviors, thoughts, feelings, or problems.
• Interpretations provide a conceptual framework that explains problems and offers reasons to overcome concerns which increase a sense of security, mastery, and self-efficacy.
• Case conceptualization is important before starting interpretations.
• It's important to be aware of the danger of imposing personal values on clients, especially when interpretations are given authoritatively.
• Culture is intertwined with meaning since interpretations provide a new framework or explanation for problems.
• From a psychoanalytic perspective, interpretations should not be used frequently but can play a major role in the client's gaining insight and stimulate insight leading to reality-oriented behavior.
• Psychoanalytic theorists see early childhood as the base template for later life so early childhood experiences are often the focus of interpretive behavior.
• Because psychoanalytic helpers believe early childhood relationships form the foundation for all ensuing relationships, interpreting the transference is an important interpretation type.
• The interpretation reveals discrepancies between the views of the therapist and client.
• According to cognitive psychologists, helpers try to change the way that schemas (clusters of related thoughts, feelings, actions, and images) are structured.
• Narrative therapy assists clients in rewriting narratives.

Developing Interpretations

• Data can be drawn from the verbal content of clients' speech, past experiences, interpersonal patterns, defenses, developmental stages, existential concerns, spiritual issues, and unconscious activities.
• The core conflictual relationship theme method describes components to conflictual interpersonal patterns.
  • People have wishes or needs.
  • They expect consistent responses from others.
  • They consequently have a response from the self.
• People develop defenses early in life to help them cope with situations.
• Interpretations can be developed by linking clients' current emotions and functioning with what they might be expected to be feeling or not feeling at their stage of life.
• Helpers can also help clients understand themselves in terms of existential concerns like death anxiety, freedom, isolation, and meaning in life.
• Interpretations can be developed from clues about unconscious activities.

Accuracy

• Accuracy can never be completely determined.
• Perceived helpfulness is the important criterion for evaluating interpretations.
• Criteria for determining whether interpretations are helpful:
  • The client feels a sense of understanding that "clicks" and makes sense.
  • Clients have a feeling of energy and excitement about discoveries, particularly when they feel they have discovered the insight themselves.
  • Clients provide additional information that affirms the interpretation.
  • Clients start thinking about what to do differently based on the insight gained.
• The helper's task is to engage in an interpretive process by working collaboratively with the client to construct interpretations done as a collaborative process where the helper is invested in the process itself more than any specific interpretation.

How to Interpret

• Begin by asking the client for an interpretation.
• Then, give a tentative interpretation to augment/extend the client's understanding.
• View the initial interpretation as a working hypothesis.

Disclosure of Insight

• A helper reveals a self-understanding to facilitate clients' understanding of their thoughts, feelings, behavior and issues.
• This can be used when clients are stuck.
• The helper discloses their experiences to attain realizations clients had not been aware of.
• The helper honestly needs to think about intentions and need to use it intentionally
• With appropriate disclosures, helpers can think about what contributed to their behaviors in situations similar to those of their clients.