InsaneJournal

Day 3
Day 3 was supposed to be a 2 session day, on a Saturday.  This however was the day that Clue was flying to San Francisco and thus I missed the morning session.  That session, Child Sexual Abuse, I will cover later in the order that took the training.  I did make it in time for the second session of the day.



Surprisingly, with the number of actual counselors in the training we spent more time on the intervention skills.  This was relieving to me since I will primarily be dealing with crisis, not with any real counseling.  It is useful to know what the full process and offerings our service has to offer.

One of the major take aways are the 'traits of an effective advocate'; empathy, respect, warmth, genuineness, concreteness and sensitivity are the major ones.  Most of these are exactly what they sound like.  In empathy however we are taught that we do NOT understand.  While we may have been through our own traumatic experience, we do not have all the same factors as this individual, do not have their living situation, etc and thus can not 'understand'.  The reasoning for concreteness is to provide the victim with some stability and clear guidance to help them work through any possible disorientation they may be experiencing.  The sensitivity is the most interesting one since it has more to do with cultural factors, social conditions and personal identities.  What gender does the individual identify with.  Are they from a culture where being raped, even though it is not their fault, could get them killed if it were disclosed.  There's a lot to be aware of in this work and an open mind is really required.

The other major topic we covered was Basic Communication Skills required; Active Listening, Using Open-ended Questions, Paraphrasing, Reframing.  Active listening is about showing the person through words, and/or actions, that you are paying attention to what they are saying and listening to their statements, not just formulating your next response.  We spent a lot of time, in this session and future sessions, on open-ended questions.  It is really important to get people to a mindset of answering with more than yes/no.  Are you feeling ok? should be rephrased How do you feel?  Those sorts of things.  There are some questions that should be closed, "Are you in a safe place right now?".  Paraphrasing is pretty obvious.  Reframing is really a developed art as it is helping the person reframe the situation, give them options, help them see that perhaps all is not lost.  That sort of thing.  With this we have to be sure not to tell the person 'how it is' or lead them along but use references like 'have you thought about...', 'do you think...', etc.

We discussed the Sexual Assault Counseling Model, but that is really more reference for me since I won't be dealing with the long term steps.

Crisis Intervention steps were next.  We received our objectives; helping the victim regain control, ensure their safety, reinforce that the offender not the victim is responsible for what happened and support the victim in any decisions they make.  There are more, but those are the big ones.  We have a brief outline for how to work through assisting the victim with the immediate crisis and help through a course of action.

We talked through 5 printed pages of "Do Say/Don't Say" which was really informative.  We also talked a little about suicide prevention.  This is not our primary function but surprisingly while the SACVAP lines are manned 24x7 the suicide prevention lines are not.  Most do not have weekend coverage either.  I found this appalling but the various programs do what they can with the staff they have available.

By the end of this session, we were starting to feel more comfortable with each other and started to settle into our 'assigned seats', which is really quite funny since we had a room full of seats and we could have chosen anywhere.  Just a comfort level thing I suppose.