I certainly hadn’t much knowledge of the different modalities of helping people when I started street work in Southill in Limerick City in 1990!
I had completed a basic counselling skills course at that time – and on that course I was exposed to a different method of learning that is, experiential learning that I had not heard of up to then. I found this kind of learning very liberating and exciting. The element of it that I found hardest to accept (though also very exciting) was the idea of self-assessment, which I will discuss later. (Because of the script of my childhood, I always thought that assessing oneself would be at bit like praising oneself – that it wasn’t real assessment or real praise – it had to involve fooling oneself)!
I am mentioning this because I think that self-assessment has more of an emotional than a cognitive dimension to it – and this Sub-Chapter (as the name suggests) mainly concerns our cognition.
Getting back to our modalities, having been educated within the formal education system, the basic principles of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, or CBT as it is generally known, (though I didn’t know its name), were actually quite familiar to me – as they are to most people.
CBT is one of two modalities that I believe are helpful to families in our Focus Group. And there is ample information on the nuts and bolts of CBT (and others that I mention) available from a wide variety of sources.
In the website my basic descriptions of the modalities will be very brief but I will focus on their usefulness in respect of our aim to include families affected by imprisonment in some depth.