Motivating interviews: Everything you need to know

Motivating interviews: Everything you need to know

I was lucky enough to be one of the first people in Great Britain, those of the authors of this advisory approach, Dr. Bill Miller and Dr. Steve Rollnick, trained in motivational interviewing. It is now, thirty years later, it is difficult to explain how exciting it was to stand at the beginning of something that was so important in the world of psychotherapy. It changed my life.

Anyway, this small article contains everything you really need to know about the mysterious art of motivational interviewing and why it is so important in the world of advice and psychotherapy.

Motivational interviewing was originally made by Dr. Bill Miller, an American university lecturer and psychotherapist, designed in 1983 in a pioneering article about changing health behavior of problem drinkers. His ideas developed and other people, especially Dr. Steve Rollnick, worked together until the end of the 1980s and early 1990s a brand new therapeutic discipline called motivational interviewing was created.

mi (as it is known) is important because it is one of only two complete types of advice. The other is what is interchangeable as humanistic advice or rogeric advice or most often referred to as personal -centered advice. This style was developed by Carl Rogers in the 1950s as an alternative to medical help and medication for emotional problems.

Why is mi important?

Before Mi came onto the market, the world of psychological intervention was really dominated by only three forms of help. At one end of the spectrum were doctors, psychiatrists and medication, and at the other end there were "advice", and somewhere in the middle there were clinical therapies such as cognitive behavioral therapy (together with several other hundred variations), which believed that changes were dependent on one or more, such as. B. Change, hang from education or behavioral training or insight, etc..

mi has changed all of this. A central tenant of Mi is that we change if we want, and often do not really work advice, medication, doctors, therapy, advice, because deep inside we just didn't really change to change! Mi tries to solve this ambiguity and believe that we will do it if we are really determined to change. It's that simple.

In order to give the approach a certain form, Bill and Steve developed what they call the 4 principles of the MI. These are:

• Develop the discrepancy

• Roll up with resistance

• express empathy

• Support self -efficacy

A little later in development they added:

• avoid arguments (which is always a good idea in therapy!)

Together with these guiding principles, they also made a list of strategies for MI practitioners. These are:

1. reflecting listening (which is actually a huge and very clever area of ​​mi)

2. affirmation

3. Open Questioning

4. summarize

5. Self -motivation statements (i.e. talk about changes)

Apart from these screws and nuts, there is what has become known as Spirit of Mi. This includes everything else that cannot simply be listed or labeled. As Bill said: "Mi is mostly only one way of being together with people."

What people are interested in is that there are no preferred ideas about why or how people should change or what should work or not. It is also a very short therapy. It doesn't take long and tends to "get to the point" (as Bill would often say). The standard motivation improvement therapy (the therapy version of MI) for people with alcohol problems consists of just four sessions and an evaluation. Compared to CBT or most other forms of help, which usually at least 16 sessions and sometimes much, much more, this is wonderfully short and just as effective.

I hope this article was useful and summarizes the main elements of Mi and puts it in a context.

Thanks for reading.

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