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). This was an aspect that I was able to observe in my work with Monica. At the end of our meeting together, my main takeaway was that she felt understood.
Some background information on our meeting together, Monica presented an issue with time management between all of the work and commitments she currently has. Her concern was more in line with having a lot on her plate and wanting to prioritize better in order to get all of her work done without going completely crazy. She expressed wanting to make more time for herself to practice self-care and have some relaxing down time.
Below are some contextual examples of my use of OARS with Monica:
O: Could you tell me more about the work that you currently do? The commitments you have?
A: Yes- it sounds like you definitely have a lot going on, I can only imagine the amount of stress
that you are under.
R: You are feeling quite stressed with all of your work. . . would it be fair to say you are feeling
overwhelmed?
S: So, correct me if I am wrong, your commitments are equally important to you but require a lot
of your time and attention.. you wish you had enough time to put your all into everything
while still taking adequate time and care of yourself.
I believe that Monica received the material very well. As I stated previously, it appeared that she felt understood through my reflections back to her. I strongly believe that those sorts of validations and responses make an individual feel truly listened to and understood. In order to reflect back to an individual how they are feeling, one needs to truly hear them. I think that I did a pretty good job of this for the most part. I was able to reflect well and was able to do so using Monica’s exact words while also rearranging them appropriately (I was not parroting her information back to her- lol). I did however run into a few roadblocks if you remember reading about those (p. 32). I found that I sometimes wanted to provide solutions or give advice (roadblock #3). When I ran into this problem, I did take note of it and retract as best as I could- since this was practice I was able to honestly tell her “wait a second - let's backtrack. . I meant to say..” - since she knows these roadblocks as well, we were able to catch them together! This of course would be different with an actual client. I am wondering what are some ways that we can navigate around roadblocks with a client when they come up in session and we act upon them? Just a question for further consideration!
For the most part I thought we both did really well, and it was nice to start putting these skills into practice. Getting exposure to asking these sorts of questions, summarizing, reflecting, and affirming was helpful and definitely something that can always be practiced further! I am excited to continue to read about all of your experiences with MI practice.
Thank you!!
Jocelyn,
ReplyDeleteI am glad you brought up the question of road blocks because I too am wondering how to redirect during a session when we find ourselves heading into some of these danger areas of problem solving and advice giving. It is easy to say no during practice and wait redo but you cannot do that with clients. I know that in my session with Minar she was able to say hey Lisa do you see what you are doing there? It was very helpful but if I was in a session I might not recognize I have done that till I am already knee deep into it. I wonder if say for instance instead of you saying
So, correct me if I am wrong, your commitments are equally important to you but require a lot
of your time and attention.. you wish you had enough time to put your all into everything
while still taking adequate time and care of yourself.
what if you found yourself saying "so you have things that are of equal importance to you and you are not finding adequate time to care for yourself what if you were to....." and then you notice you are heading into advice giving I look at that and I think how would I redirect where I was going without my client knowing I am redirecting. So could we say What if you were to image an extremely hectic day and imagine yourself at the end of the day can you tell me how you are feeling at the end of that day and what things you are thinking about?
I am not sure if this would be a good redirection or not? While it might provide some data about what stress looks and feels like to them or even what things they think about to reduce that stress I am not sure if this would be a good redirection? What do you guys think and thanks for the question Jocelyn as it really got me thinking.
Lisa
Hello Jocelyn!
ReplyDeleteI read through most of the blogs, and I have came to a conclusion: we all started with reflective listening. My responses to everyone are very similar. I have never talked so much about reflective listening! One thing about this skill that I really kept in my mind were the roadblocks. We all spoke about these roadblocks before even enrolling in this course. I recall we all expressed concern about at least one of these in the past. It was nice to see there is a skill that tackles these roadblocks. It's like that sense of relief a client gets when they have an explanation for the way they are feeling/behaving. And hmmm, a way to navigate through the roadblocks and retract, that would be something very useful. Perhaps one can say "I jumped ahead of myself a bit, how about we go back to..." I don't think the client will be aware of these specific roadblocks as much as we are so I suggest being honest with yourself and the client. Thanks for adding the specific quotes used from your practice session. As I practiced with Lisa, I felt silly at times, and maybe a little repetitive, but it worked. It really works so for that reason, I put my shyness to the side and shifted my focus. The goal of this skill is to gain information while allowing the client to feel heard and understood.
P.S. I really like the clean and simple look of your page.