Healthy Helpers
This practice involves intentional actions counsellors take to maintain their physical, emotional, and psychological well-being.
What is self-care?
These peer-led meetings provide abstinence-focused support based on shared lived experience and a structured recovery framework.
What are mutual-help groups?
This skill accurately reflects what a client says and feels at the surface level.
What is basic empathy?
This structured set of skills—open questions, encouragers, paraphrasing, reflection of feeling, and summarizing—promotes client exploration.
What is the basic listening sequence?
This model emphasizes meeting people where they are, reducing harm without requiring abstinence.
What is the harm reduction model?
This practice helps counsellors maintain appropriate emotional distance, protect the helping relationship, and avoid becoming overly involved in a client’s personal experiences.
What are professional boundaries?
This mutual-help approach is grounded in cognitive and behavioural principles, emphasizes self-management and empowerment, and does not rely on spiritual framing or the concept of powerlessness.
What is SMART Recovery?
This empathic skill names a client’s emotional experience to deepen awareness.
What is reflection of feelings?
This skill pulls together client statements to ensure shared understanding and guide transitions.
What is summarizing?
This perspective focuses on client abilities, resources, and resilience rather than deficits and pathology.
What is the strengths perspective?
This reflective process helps counsellors recognize emotional responses, blind spots, and early signs of stress related to client work.
What is self-awareness or reflective practice?
This concept refers to the internal and external resources, such as relationships, housing, culture, spirituality, and coping skills, that strengthen a person’s ability to sustain recovery.
What is recovery capital?
These brain cells activate when observing another person’s actions or emotions, helping the counsellor attune.
What are mirror neurons?
This component of the BLS deepens client exploration by accurately restating the essential content of their story in a concise form.
What is paraphrasing?
This view of addiction emphasizes biological, psychological, social, and environmental influences working together.
What is the biopsychosocial model?
This support strategy is essential when counsellors notice increased emotional reactivity, fatigue, or difficulty leaving work at the office.
What is seeking clinical supervision?
This structured service offers individual or group sessions with a trained professional to help clients explore substance use, develop coping strategies, and strengthen motivation for change.
What is counselling or therapy?
This deeper form of reflection links a client’s experiences to values, beliefs, or life themes.
What is reflection of meaning?
This advanced BLS skill reframes client patterns to help them generate new stories.
What is interpretation–reframe?
This approach to relapse emphasizes reflection, adjustment, and growth rather than punishment or moral judgment.
What is a non-judgmental, strengths-based view of relapse?
This principle recognizes that maintaining counsellor well-being is a professional responsibility because untreated stress and burnout can negatively affect client care.
What is ethical responsibility for self-care or professional sustainability?
This type of long-term support helps individuals maintain progress by linking them with community resources, monitoring relapse risk, reinforcing routines, and supporting life transitions after formal treatment.
What is continuing care or aftercare?
This advanced skill offers a new perspective on client material without invalidating their experience.
What is interpretation–reframe?
This BLS skill becomes complex when it identifies emotions that are implied rather than directly stated, helping clients deepen emotional awareness.
What is reflection of feelings?
This formal, court-supervised treatment alternative for individuals with substance-related offences focuses on accountability, recovery, and reintegration.
What is Drug Treatment Court (DTC)?