Reviewed by Elaine Rose
This training package comprises four DVDs, each over two hours in length. The training covers, in helpful detail, the key aspects of motivational interviewing – core concepts, resolving ambivalence, increasing importance and building confidence. Each DVD can also be purchased separately.
I rate these training DVDs highly. Cathy Cole, a counsellor and psychotherapist, takes the trainee through each stage of this style of working using case studies and live interviews, all set against a theoretical backdrop. The DVDs provide trainees with an opportunity to understand core concepts of motivational interviewing and to practise its foundational skills.
The style and delivery is ideally paced, with common sense, normal language, helpful explanation and demonstration of putting motivational interviewing into practice in a variety of settings with all age groups. The benefits of training by DVD is that trainees can pause, replay and practise skills, and the use of live case studies is invaluable to practitioners of all levels and range of experience.
The first DVD, Core Concepts of Motivational Interviewing, shows how this style of working differs from other approaches, while the second DVD, Increasing Importance in Motivational Interviewing, is central to working with addictions and those who are reluctant to accept the need to change. The next DVD, Resolving Ambivalence in Motivational Interviewing, explores the key issue of an individual’s ambivalence towards change and sets out how to help a person develop an action plan and aid the client to move this on. The fourth DVD, Building Confidence in Motivational Interviewing, demonstrates how best to work with people who come up with roadblocks to effecting and sustaining change. Many people lack self-esteem and need particular techniques to boost them along the way, such as identifying past success and their personal strengths and core values.
In a nutshell, motivational interviewing is a counselling approach that has a very specific goal, which is to allow the client to explore their own ambivalence in changing a particular target behaviour. The counsellor’s job is to get the client to talk about their own particular reasons for change and, more importantly, to help them talk about how they might strengthen a motivation for change and in what way making that change will work for them.
There is much person-centred therapy ideology within motivational interviewing, where the client is the expert in relation to their difficulties. However, motivational interviewing goes much further and there is far more expected of the therapist’s understanding of the drivers involved and how they can be harnessed. The reframing of denial to ‘sustain talk’ is but one example of motivational interviewing at the coal face.
I recommend these DVDs to all psychotherapists and counsellors working in the field of addiction or with individuals who have been unable to make sustained change. The training is high quality and a good investment.
www.psychotherapydvds.com
Cost on application to www.psychotherapy.net
Two CPD points awarded per DVD purchased, on application.
Elaine Rose is a UKPC registered psychotherapist, elainerose@f2s.com