Hi, Amelia Lyons, Clinical Supervisor Trainer and Iron Bevan Health Board. Looking at types of intervention, John Heron said there were six types of intervention that helpers used and virtually all interventions can come under these headings. So, and it's all about intention, the intention of the helper. So, my intention is to be supportive. An example of that sort of intervention might be listening or using silence.
My intention is to get a person to think. That's called a catalytic intervention and an example of that might be a question. Cathartic, my intention there is to get a person to begin to feel their feelings and express their feelings. Informative, my intention is to give some information. Prescriptive, my intention is to prescribe perhaps some exercise, some medication, some nutritional.
intervention. Confronting, my intention is to perhaps confront a discrepancy between what the person is saying and what they're actually doing. So all interventions can be classified under these six categories.
So what kind of helper are you? So for example, if you're a supervisor or a coach or a psychotherapist, we might expect... that your interventions may fall largely and your intentions into the facilitative side of the categories and if you're a medic or it's a life and death situation and that could also be true in a business if you're a business consultant you're called in to help a business that's dying then you may be asked to make prescriptive interventions due to your expertise So which side would you tend to put yourself?
And that may be according to your role, but it also might be according to the model that you use. So if I'm person-centered, again, I'm largely looking at the facilitative interventions and not really into the authoritative interventions. I'm working out of my help ease frame of reference, and I want all my interventions to be based from there.
rather than what I think might be the right thing to do. However, if we look at the idea of confronting, just listening to someone could be very confronting. Asking them to talk about their feelings might be experienced as very confronting.
Using silence and waiting for the person to speak might be experienced as quite confronting. So what is your intention at that point? And that's the key. And where is that intention coming from? So by doing a transcript and analysing your interventions and analysing the intentions behind them, that's the challenge.
If you do a transcript of an interview with a patient or a supervisee and have a look and see to what extent do your intentions match? your interventions. Thank you.