When is counseling dangerous? When it's done wrong

Readers of this blog know my history with life threatening events in my own personal life. All the training I've taken, research, listening to veterans as well as living with my own, along the way I learned what separated them from me. I talked every time after until I was done talking. People listened and some added their advice beyond just telling me to get over it. They got me to see it in a different way when it got to a point there was nothing new for me to discover about how the event "hit" me. I believe so much in this that I became a chaplain, trained on crisis intervention and will keep taking more training. We can get ahead of this but only if we do it right.

So please think of the fact that anything can do more harm than good depending on how it is done and how long it takes to do it. The key is to be there to listen and not to make them talk. Give them a ear they feel safe with hearing them and let them know you care.

When Counseling is Dangerous
Psychological debriefing after disasters may do more harm than good.
Published on January 19, 2010
By Susan Pinker

Now that another huge humanitarian disaster is upon us, teachers, psychologists, counselors and social workers should be reminded that talking--and encouraging those who have suffered losses-- to talk and talk more--about their painful experiences is not the route to recovery. In fact, asking people to rehash terrifying events can be dangerous. Strong research evidence shows that psychological debriefing not only is ineffective, it can exacerbate trauma.

"People who received psychological debriefing exhibited more severe symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder than controls; the intervention increased the risk of the stress disorder, and critical incident stress debriefing, in particular, was potentially harmful,"write Magdalena Szumilas, Yifeng Wei, and Stan Kutcher in an analysis of the research on psychological debriefing just published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
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When Counseling is Dangerous