Basic Attending Skills
Basic attending skills include the verbal following, having good eye contact, interesting posture, and minimal encourager in interacting with the client. As a psychologist, one should follow what the client is saying without bringing pre-thought-out ideas. There should be minimal encouragers such as nodding of one’s head to show the client that you are interested and encourage them to continue talking. Basic attending skills involve questioning using open-ended questions to invite the client to explore more and inquire (Kanel, 2014). Counselors using open-ended questions allow the client to explore their feelings and thoughts without the feeling of being interrogated. In the process, the counselor can gather the correct information on the nature of the crisis. Counselors should equally use closed-ended questions to derive facts and clarity during the assessment. Interweaving open-ended questions with closed-ended questions, paraphrasing, and reflection allows the counselor to complete the forms, which help understand the nature of the crisis.
ABC Model of Crisis Intervention
The ABC Model of Crisis Intervention happens in three steps: developing and maintaining contact through basic attending skills, identifying the problem, and therapeutic interactions and coping. A-Developing and maintaining contact, which is the first step, involves assessing the crisis by any counselor with whom the clients feel comfortable and have empathy. The counselor must identify the client’s problem and keep the client, and himself focused on the cause of the crisis. The major aim of this stage is to establish therapeutic relationships and rapport with the client, which involves demonstrating respect for the client. B-Identifying the Problem and Therapeutic Interaction is the second phase of identifying the problem (Kanel, 2014). While the client may have the challenge of determining the problem, the counselor needs to identify precipitating events which involved asking what happened that led to the crisis or what caused the abnormal behavior. Therapeutic techniques used include listening, assessment, reframing, and planning. C-Coping, which is the final step of crisis intervention, involves solving personal and interpersonal problems consciously. The counselor should establish or strengthen existing coping skills to the problem solving to deal with anger, hurt, criminal activities, fear, and abuse of chemical substance by the client, allowing them to explore their own coping method where possible.
Nature of the Crisis
When trying to understand the nature of the crisis, counselors should directly identify emotional distress, how the client has been functioning academically, socially, occupationally, and behaviorally. The impairment observed in functioning areas can easily be noticed, and appropriate problem identification carried out to established the best therapeutic techniques or measures. Emotional stress can easily be assessed by ethical checking cases of homicide, suicide, substance misuse, psychosis, organic issues, and elder or child abuse. Most of these changes experienced by the client can easily be assessed and detected by family members rather than the counselor. According to Dass-Brailsford (2009), toddlers, elementary and preschool children are likely to experience regressive behaviors with fear and anxiety witnessed among the majority of the victims. The children may experience school phobia, while for the adolescents, there is increased oppositional and aggressive behavior and denial of coping with the crisis reality. Some people may lose the sense of sadness, increase or decrease appetite, sleep, and lose interest. These are the direct observation that a counselor should be able to observe from the client directly.
No time to work with examples? Order from a legit essay writing service and get your work in no time!
References
Dass-Brailsford, P. (Ed.). (2009). Crisis and disaster counseling: Lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina and other disasters. Sage Publications.
Kanel, K. (2014). A guide to crisis intervention. Cengage Learning.
