8.4 More Individual Counseling Approaches: Motivational Interviewing, Gestalt, REBT, Play, and Narrative Methods

8.4 More Individual Counseling Approaches: Motivational Interviewing, Gestalt, REBT, Play, and Narrative Methods

Quick Summary: The ETS content topics ask you to understand the purposes and theories of individual counseling and apply them appropriately. Beyond SFBT, CBT, reality therapy, person-centered, and Adlerian counseling (8.1–8.3), ETS sample questions test motivational interviewing and Gestalt techniques. This section also covers REBT, psychodynamic and existential ideas, play and expressive therapies, and narrative therapy, and ends with a guide to matching approach to student.

---

Motivational Interviewing (MI)

Developed by William Miller and Stephen Rollnick, MI is a collaborative, goal-oriented style of conversation that strengthens a person's own motivation to change. It suits students who are ambivalent or resistant—such as a student required to meet with the counselor after a suspension who will not discuss the incident, the situation ETS uses to illustrate MI.

• Spirit: partnership, acceptance, compassion, and evocation (drawing out the student's ideas rather than installing the counselor's).
• Core skills (OARS): open questions, affirmations, reflections, and summaries.
• Change talk versus sustain talk: the counselor listens for and strengthens the student's own statements about desire, ability, reasons, and need for change, and later commitment language.
• Developing discrepancy between current behavior and the student's goals, and responding to discord without arguing (earlier editions called this "rolling with resistance").
• MI pairs well with the transtheoretical (stages of change) model of Prochaska and DiClemente: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance.

Example of a double-sided reflection: "On one hand, you don't want another suspension; on the other hand, you feel you have to stand up for yourself when someone disrespects you."

Gestalt Therapy

Fritz Perls, with Laura Perls and Paul Goodman, emphasized awareness and the here and now—the answer to ETS's Gestalt sample item.

• Unfinished business: unexpressed feelings from the past that intrude on the present.
• Empty chair: the student speaks to an absent person (for example, a parent who left) or to a part of themselves.
• "I" language and responsibility: "I feel angry" rather than "You make me angry."
• Attending to the body and exaggeration: "Notice your fists—what are they saying?"

In schools, brief Gestalt techniques help students express grief or anger; counselors avoid intense confrontation beyond their role and training.

Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)

Albert Ellis's REBT, a forerunner of modern CBT, holds that irrational beliefs—not events—create emotional disturbance. The ABCDE model: Activating event, Beliefs, Consequences (emotional and behavioral), Disputing irrational beliefs, and an Effective new philosophy. Common irrational beliefs include "musts" ("I must be liked by everyone"), awfulizing ("It would be terrible to fail"), and low frustration tolerance ("I can't stand it"). Rational emotive education teaches these ideas in classroom lessons.

Psychodynamic and Existential Ideas

• Psychodynamic: explores unconscious conflicts, early experiences, and defense mechanisms (see 3.4). Long-term insight therapy is not appropriate in the school counselor's role, but the concepts help explain behavior and guide referrals.
• Existential: focuses on meaning, freedom and responsibility, isolation, and mortality (Viktor Frankl's logotherapy; Irvin Yalom). It helps adolescents facing identity questions or grief.

Play and Expressive Therapies

Young children in Piaget's preoperational and early concrete stages often cannot talk through problems in abstract terms.

• Child-centered play therapy (Virginia Axline; Garry Landreth): the counselor tracks play, reflects feelings, and sets limits with the ACT model—Acknowledge the feeling, Communicate the limit, Target an acceptable alternative.
• Sand tray, art, puppets, and bibliotherapy: stories let a child see their situation in a character's experience and talk about it at a safe distance.

Schools use brief, structured play-based methods; long-term play therapy is a referral.

Narrative Therapy

Michael White and David Epston proposed that people understand their lives through stories. Externalizing the problem separates the student from it ("How does the Worry Monster trick you before tests?"). Finding unique outcomes—times the problem did not win—supports re-authoring a preferred story. Narrative work pairs well with SFBT's exception questions.

Matching the Approach to the Student

Whatever the approach, school counseling stays short-term and goal-focused. ASCA lists long-term counseling as an inappropriate school counselor activity, so needs that call for ongoing therapy lead to referral (see 12.2).

Praxis Application

Scenario: A ninth grader returning from a fighting suspension slumps in the chair and refuses to talk about the incident. The principal requires the meeting.

Analysis: Motivational interviewing fits best: the counselor avoids lecturing, uses open questions and reflections, affirms the student's autonomy ("It's your call what we talk about"), and listens for change talk about staying in school or avoiding another suspension.