Motivational Interviewing In Counseling

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Introduction. Clients with substance abuse issues are growing at a high rate. These clients can come in to an environment where they are told to go seek treatment for their substance abuse, or they are not even told to seek treatment but they do anyway. The clients that are less motivated are often thought of as people that do not care and so they are pushed aside from those that are willing to come to treatment. This paper is going to focus on engaging clients who have a substance abuse diagnoses using Motivational Interviewing as a way to engage them in the beginning stages of treatment. These clients could be coming into either an outpatient or inpatient setting; however, the articles I chose focus on an outpatient setting. Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a tool that has been used for many decades. According to Motivational Interviewing by Hettema, Steele and Miller “Motivational interviewing (MI) was developed as a way to help people work through ambivalence and commit to change (Miller 1983). An evolution of client-centered therapy, MI combines a supportive and empathetic counseling style (Rogers 1959) with a consciously directive method for resolving ambivalence and direction of change.” MI is used only briefly, usually is one or two sessions with the client. The goal of MI is for the client to build motivation in order for themselves to make a change. The counseling profession expresses that the counselor is not the one making the change, but the client is the one who seeks to change themselves. MI requires the counselor to listen more as opposed to telling the client what to change. This approach seeks to have the client find their own motivation for change within themselves. This research is focusing on substanc... ... middle of paper ... ... because the participants are challenging and resistant. There was no strategy conducted to counteract them. The study looked at each participants demographic and substance use in each evaluation, and it also analyzed the percentage of participants who returned for one or more appointments after the evaluation. The study found that more participants, who were in the MI group, came for at least one more session after their assessment. The study documented that 59.3% of participants who received MI came to their next appointment, as opposed to only 29.2% in the standard evaluation group. Participants in the MI group continued to come back at a higher rate than those that received the standard evaluation after the first appointment. This suggests that MI is more effective in engaging clients at the assessment time, and possibly after that when continued in treatment.

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