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Asked by anon-315999 on 1 Apr 2022. This question was also asked by anon-323411.
Question: What helping strategy do you use the most
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Jamie Chan answered on 14 Mar 2022:
Hi there! I don’t use any helping strategies because I’m a social psychologist, which means my work is more focused on study people’s behaviour than providing treatment (like a clinical psychologist)
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Hannah Howman answered on 14 Mar 2022:
Similar to Jamie, I work in a different area of psychology so I’m more focused on why people behave the way they do rather than providing treatments. Though I have been a Shout Volunteer where I helped support people online, and one of the things we focused on was getting people to think of coping strategies that have helped them in the past.
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Reece Bush-Evans answered on 14 Mar 2022:
Similar to Jamie and Hannah, I work in a different area of psychology. Therefore I am most interested in finding out why people behave the way they do rather than providing treatment. That being said, I am working on some research now on online gambling and trying to find ways to help people. One tool we are using is SMART goals to help people set realistic goals that can help them whilst online.
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Nadine Mirza answered on 17 Mar 2022: last edited 17 Mar 2022 6:43 am
So even though I do research now a lot of the strategies I learnt when I was doing therapy work with people helps with my research work. This is because for my research I often interview people about their lives and experiences.
One of the strategies that helps with this is “Active Listening”, which encourages people to talk and tell you more.
In Active Listening there’s lots of little things you can do like:
-Using sounds like “mmhmm”, “ahan” or “okay”. This is called Minimal Encouragement and shows people we are listening to them as we talk
-Being comfortable with long silences. It can be awkward to stay silent for too long, especially after asking a question, but staying silent means usually the other person will jump in and keep talking.
-Not interrupting
-Repeating things back at people and using the words they used to get them to tell you more. For example, they might say they’ve been going through a tough time lately and it’s stressful. You can then say so it sounds like you’re going through a lot of stress. Can you tell me about these tough times?
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Sophie Callis answered on 18 Mar 2022:
The main strategy or therapeutic approach that I use is called “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy”, shortened to ACT. Often when we feel strong emotions like sadness or worry, we want to push those feelings away or avoid whatever is making us feel like that. Sometimes that works, but often it ends up taking us away from doing the things that are important to us. ACT helps us to learn to accept that those strong emotions are part of being human, and to work towards doing what is important anyway.
For example, if you were worried that you might say something wrong in class, you might avoid putting up your hand so that you don’t have to feel anxious. You might even want to stop going into school. But this might mean that you miss out on learning something important, or you might miss out on seeing your friends at school. As your therapist, I would help you to work out what is important to you, to guide us in making helpful changes. I’d teach you how to notice your worried thoughts but without needing to treat them as facts. We’d think together about little steps you could take, to work towards doing what is important and meaningful to you.
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Michelle Newman answered on 18 Mar 2022:
I don’t work as a therapist so I don’t use specifically clinical strategies. However, the work I do looks at how we assess individuals so that we can then decide what support or rehab an individual needs. These are predominantly tools for when someone has a brain injury. We use lots of short tasks to assess the different parts of how a brain functions, so that we can understand what is working and what is not working. So we would take a look at memory, attention, problem solving, and speech for example.
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