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How individuals can help each other:
- Stage 1: Relationship building skills
- Empathy - communicating accurate understanding of feelings
and causes of feelings as expressed by the other person.
- Genuineness - openly sharing the feelings and thoughts
which you are experiencing during the interaction, i.e. if you feel the
other person has assumed a physical position that is uncomfortable
(as being too close or too distant), be genuine with her/him
about it.
- Respect - communicating caring and valuing of the person's
unique feelings, experiences and potentials.
- Concreteness - using purposeful questions and summary
statements to provide clarity of the interaction.
- Stage 2: Focused Exploration
- Additive Empathy - communicating accurate understanding
of the underlying feelings, assumptions, behavioral patterns and
consequences which the other person may have implied but not
expressed directly.
- Self-disclosure - sharing past experiences and feelings which
may be similar to the other person to encourage deeper
explorations between you two.
- Confrontation* - challenging specific
discrepancies in one's behavior.
- Immediacy - exploring issues which arise between you as the
relationship develops.
- Stage 3: Action Planning
- Problem-solving - identifying a person's specific problem(s) and
defining goals for behavior change.
- Support - identifying personal and community resources available
in resolution of problem.
Confrontation
Goals:
- To help a person explore areas of feelings, experiences,
and behaviors that she/he has so far been reluctant to
explore.
- To help a person understand modes of self-destructive
behavior and discover unused resources.
- To help a person learn how to confront her/himself.
Types of Confrontation:
- Experiential: identifying discrepancies between a
person's experience and your experience of her/him.
- Strength: identifying the person's resources which are
misused, underdeveloped, or unrecognized.
- Weakness: identifying personal liabilities and need
areas that have not been recognized or evaluated.
- Didactic: clarifying a person's misinformation or lack of
information about relatively objective aspects of life.
- Encouragement to action: facilitating a person acting
in some constructive manner and discouraging a passive
role in a situation.
Guidelines for Confrontation:
- An empathy base should be established before
confrontation.
- Motives for confronting should be examined - whose needs
are being met? Do you have a hidden agenda? Is there
commitment to processing and deeper involvement?
- A person's readiness to hear confrontation must be
assessed.
- Confrontation needs to be gradual, and proportional to
the depth of the relationship.
- Confrontations are given in terms of specific, verifiable
behaviors or facts.
- Strength confrontation should be used frequently.
- Always follow confrontation with stage 1 skills,
especially empathy and respect.
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