MU611
Clinical Music Psychotherapy Skills IV: Verbal Counseling
0.5 Credit

This course helps students develop a balanced and integrated theoretical and practical approach to verbal counseling with a focus on skills development and students' integration of their learning into clinical work. Students begin to develop their own verbal counseling style by learning and practicing active, accurate, and attentive listening. They learn to understand and utilize non-verbal communications, encouragers, rapport-building, and therapeutic environment. Students learn a wide variety of verbal interventions such as reflecting, repeating, paraphrasing, clarifying, summarizing, perception checks, empathetic statements, and focusing. They also learn therapeutic questions such as lineal, circular, strategic, and reflexive questions, solution-focused brief therapy interventions, and person-centred therapy techniques. A special focus is on a trauma story assessment, narrative exposure therapy techniques, Yalom's group interventions, and verbal interventions needed for intake interview and assessment. Students also learn therapeutic interventions for silences in therapy and how to react on difficult group situations. After practising the applications of various verbal counseling skills, students are prepard to integrate a variety of techniques into their clinical work. Course materials include lectures, readings, clinical case examples, video observation/analysis, demonstrations, and class role-playing. This course is closely linked and integrated to two-year program students' concurrent MU604 - Music Psychotherapy Placement IV and it prepares one-year program students for their clinical work.