Fundamental Theories and Skills for Crisis Counseling

Life crises range from expected transitions to unexpected and traumatic life-changing events. Several models define the nature of crises and provide counselors with a roadmap to provide interventions. Early theories of crisis counseling illustrated crisis responses as dysregulation or dysfunction within the coping or belief systems of an individual. Although crisis counseling is not brief therapy, several supportive time-limited interventions can be helpful. Psychoeducation is a valuable tool that can help people gain important content and provide some normalizing information that can help reduce shame and self-blame in many situations. For clients who are immobile or incapacitated, action planning and commitment activities may be involuntary processes. Motivational interviewing is a counseling approach that focuses on how and why people change. One of the main goals of motivational interviewing is to elicit client change talk.