Crisis Counseling: Revised Edition
Overview
Ministers—both clergy and lay—are often the first recourse for people in crisis, and people expect them to navigate through emergency, tragedy, disaster, loss. Often these persons are paralyzed and they expect help to get in motion again.
Crisis Counseling is written for persons who seek to provide such assistance, whether as ministers or hotline volunteers or pastoral counselors. Here, Howard W. Stone unites the historic skills of pastoral care and counseling with the recent methods of crisis intervention from the fields of psychology and psychotherapy. The insights of marriage and family systems also have been incorporated into this book, even though crisis intervention arose out of individual psychotherapeutic theory and practice.
This thoroughly revised book includes new material on suicide, working with the family of Alzheimer patients, crisis counseling by telephone, intervention in volatile or hazardous situations, and the minister's personal safety.
Top Highlights
“Two basic types of crisis exist: developmental and situational. Normal developmental crises are the predictable, though critical, experiences that everyone goes through in the maturation process, such as the turmoil attendant upon adolescence or middle age. Situational crises are exceptional and unpredictable; they are the upheavals resulting from unusual circumstances or events such as divorce or a disabling accident.” (Page 3)
“The second element of crisis development is the appraisal of the situation.” (Page 10)
“A crisis can be understood as a crucial time and a turning point. In the present context it is the term for an individual’s internal reaction to an external hazard. It involves a temporary loss of coping abilities, a paralysis of action. Any definition of crisis makes a tacit assumption that the emotional dysfunction is reversible. Persons in crisis are not necessarily mentally ill; they are simply responding to a hazardous circumstance. If they effectively cope with the threat, a return to former levels of functioning will result.” (Page 3)
“The third factor leading to the development of a crisis is coping methods and personal resources. Coping methods are the manner in which people respond to problems; they are the strategies or steps one takes to resolve difficulties.” (Page 11)
“Thus, a crisis is not an external event, although such an event usually is a precipitator. Instead, a crisis is what happens within people and families as a response to that event.” (Page 11)
- Title: Crisis Counseling: Revised Edition
- Author: Howard W. Stone
- Publisher: Fortress Press
- Publication Date: 1993
- Pages: 96