When starting out supporting people in mental health, students often get caught in cyclic minimal encouragers.
This is particularly easy the more the help seeker talks. As you can imagine… This can become problematic. Multiply passive crisis support listening skills by non-stop help seeker rambling skills and you have the formula for… a very ineffective interaction (read: hang up).
There’s pretty simple way out of this…
The crisis supporter can replace the minimal encouragers with echoes now and then.
If you’re the sort of crisis supporter who uses a lot of minimal encourages and slips into that passive space, probably you don’t find it very easy or natural to throw in an echo.
This makes sense as echoes almost feel like they’re interrupting.
And that’s how you can tell whether you’re echoing correctly; does it feel like an interruption?
When you’ve mastered the skill of echoing… It will actually slide beneath the help seekers words the same way a minimal encourager will.
Notice how you don’t have to wait for a break or a pause in the conversation in order to drop a mmm or a hmmm.
That’s because you’re not actually trying to be heard, you’re only trying to acknowledge. There is a subtle difference between wanting to be heard and wanting to simply acknowledge.
When we want to be heard… It feels different, the words we say sound different.
The implicit expectation beneath our signal shifts the meaning we make of them.
However when we’re simply acknowledging something, the feeling of our intention is infused in our tone and pace and particularly in our inflection.
So… If you’d like to take a little more control of your interactions, if you feel you have a hard time getting a word in edgewise… Try actively challenging yourself to throw in some echoes where you normally would put in minimal encouragers.
This post is written specifically for crisis support and mental health work, if you’d like to read more, click here.
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