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Motivational Interviewing 4 - Information Sharing, Offering Concern, and Giving Advice

Good evening everyone! Monica and I had another meeting this week in order to practice some more motivational interviewing skills! This week I wanted to focus on the latest chapter that we have all read, chapter nine in Rosengren. This chapter was all about information sharing, offering a concern, and giving advice. I thought that this chapter was particularly interesting as this is something as a counselor in training, I struggle a lot with. When I first started this program and worked with a mock client, I found myself stuck in trying to offer advice, when truly that was not my place. Firstly, after reading this chapter, I know I was doing it incorrectly and in a way that would have been unhelpful. Secondly, after reading this chapter, I have now learned how to better navigate around this in a more helpful and appropriate way. To begin my work with Monica in this session, I was testing out a few different styles that learned about on page 223 in Rosengren. These different styl...
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Motivational Interviewing 3 - Working with Ambivalence

Good afternoon, everyone! For this third motivational interview practice, Monica and I decided we wanted to take a closer look at ambivalence, which is the focus of chapter eight in Rosengren. For the purpose of my own practice, we decided that Monica would continue to role play her character from our second motivational interviewing practice. To refresh, this “client” Monica presented was showing great distress following a serious incident. This incident was in relation to her habit of texting while driving, and resulted in her parents taking her car away until she commits to changing her bad habit of excessive phone usage while operating a motor vehicle. In our second session, Monica stated that she did not think her phone usage was a problem and she is normally quite careful- with the exception of this incident that almost resulted in a serious accident. She was presenting a great amount of resistance when it came to talk about potential change. In this third session, Monica was pr...

Motivational Inerviewing 2 - Extra Credit Opportunity

Good evening everyone, happy July!! I hope that you have all already begun enjoying your vacation from school- I know I have! Monica and I decided to tackle this second motivational interview together again for the purpose of further practice, and some extra credit! This was a great opportunity for the two of us to continue putting our motivational interviewing reading to practice, and gaining further exposure on what motivational interviewing looks like. This week we decided we wanted to both focus on  resistance  (Rosengren ch. 6).  Disclaimer: we decided to make role play for the purpose of this assignment. All issues presented by Monica in this interview were made up in order to demonstrate what resistance can look like in a client. Monica is playing a client who I have (hypothetically) been seeing for a while. Lately she has been having issues with texting while driving. While this is something she "has always done safely", she recently almost got into a real...

Motivational Interviewing 1 - Reflective Listening

Good afternoon everyone, I hope you have all had a good and restful weekend! This week I met up with Monica in order to practice some great motivational interviewing skills that we have been reading about the last few weeks. For the purpose of this first assignment we both took a deeper look into reflective listening and decided to practice these wonderful skills from chapter three of Rosengren. This chapter introduced OARS, which is a helpful acronym describing the microskills used in motivational interviewing. OARS stands for open-ended questions, affirmations, reflective listening, and summaries. When reading, reflecting, and discussing OARS with Monica, we both could agree these seemed fairly simple to do as we have practiced doing a few of these in previous courses. Rosengren highlights “reflective listening is the primary skill on which MI is built. It is the mechanism through which practitioners express their interest, empathy, and understanding of clients” (Rosengren, 31). ...

Attending Alcoholics Anonymous as a Guest

As we learned in the YouTube video, 12 Steps of AA with Father Martin, AA began in 1935 by Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith. This is where the 12 principles (known as the 12 steps) derived from. Prior to my two visits to AA in Tinley Park, I made myself familiar with the 12 steps, the 12 traditions, and the Big Book .  When I made my first visit to Tinley Park Community Church for Sunday night's AA meeting, I went along with a friend, as the thought of going alone made me quite nervous. I had absolutely no idea what to expect the first time I went through those doors; this was my first time ever attending an AA meeting. To my surprise, I was greeted by two friendly women with a handshake, smiles, and a few pressing questions:  1) Is this your first meeting?  2) Are you a student? You must  be a student? You'd think we had "students" written on our foreheads, as we were asked this same question a few different times during that first meeting alone! Well, yes. I...