Behind the Clipboard
This process helps determine whether a client may require further evaluation for a potential substance-use concern.
What is screening?
This approach recognizes that cultural knowledge must be built collaboratively with clients rather than assumed or generalized from training alone.
What is cultural humility?
In this stage, individuals recognize a problem and begin weighing the pros and cons of changing, often feeling ambivalent.
What is contemplation?
This counselling framework organizes sessions into the stages of Relationship, Story and Strengths, Goals, Restory, and Action, providing a structured map for helping conversations.
What is the Five-Stage Counselling Model?
This type of experience overwhelms a person’s ability to cope, often leaving lasting emotional, cognitive, or physical effects.
What is trauma?
When done correctly, this professional task supports continuity of care, ethical practice, and legal accountability.
What is documentation?
This framework assumes that with enough education a practitioner can understand a client’s cultural background, which is why many helping professionals critique its limitations.
What is cultural competence?
A client in this stage typically responds best to rapport-building, raising awareness, and exploring their personal values rather than being pushed toward immediate change.
What is precontemplation?
In this stage, counsellors explore the client’s lived experiences, challenges, resources, and personal strengths to understand their narrative.
What is the story and strengths stage?
This trauma-informed principle emphasizes collaboration, choice, and predictable structure to reduce fear and enhance client safety.
What is creating a safe environment?
These situations require counsellors to override confidentiality to ensure safety and comply with legal obligations.
What are the limits of confidentiality?
This Indigenous teaching highlights aspects such as balance, interconnectedness, or harmony and explains how these support overall wellness.
What is a Medicine Wheel teaching?
In this stage, individuals decide to make a change and begin planning the steps required to move forward.
What is preparation ?
The client and counsellor focus on strengthening the working relationship, building trust, and establishing the foundation needed for deeper work.
What is the relationship (rapport-building) stage?
A counsellor notices they feel emotionally heavy after sessions, catch themselves thinking about a client’s story long after work, and begin absorbing the intensity of others’ experiences.
What is vicarious trauma?
During this early stage of service, counsellors gather background details such as demographics, concerns, history, risks, strengths, and initial goals.
What is an intake?
This approach emphasizes safety, choice, empowerment, collaboration, and awareness of the impacts of trauma across the lifespan.
What is trauma-informed practice?
“I’ve started cutting back significantly, and this week I followed the plan we talked about. I changed my routine after work, avoided the people I usually use with, and I’m practicing the coping skills we went over. It’s hard, but I’m doing it.”
What is the action?
A counsellor supports a client in identifying specific next steps, practicing new skills, and planning strategies for maintaining change outside of session.
What is the action stage?
This condition is characterized by emotional exhaustion, reduced empathy, and difficulty separating one’s own feelings from those of clients, sometimes mistaken for burnout.
What is compassion fatigue?
These two related clinical processes differ in depth: one flags a possible concern, while the other explores it more thoroughly.
What is the difference between screening and assessment?
This recovery model incorporates cultural teachings, community, spirituality, and traditional values as core elements of healing from addiction.
What is the Wellbriety model?
“I haven’t used in months, but I still get blindsided by cravings sometimes. I’m learning what triggers me and adjusting my routines, but I’m not letting setbacks derail the progress I’ve made.”
What is maintenance?
A client has clarified their goals and begun taking steps toward change, but their progress stalls when new information surfaces that shifts how they understand the problem. The counsellor returns to exploring experiences, strengths, and emerging insights before moving forward again.
What is returning to the Story and Strengths stage (recycling through the Five-Stage Counselling Model)?
A counsellor notices they’re carrying clients’ stories home, feeling more reactive in sessions, and recognizing the need to pause, reflect, reconnect to boundaries, and reach out for supervision before the weight becomes overwhelming.
What is managing vicarious trauma? (What are vicarious trauma prevention practices?)