Getting Started With Intentional Interviewing And Counseling 7th Edition
This is one of those textbooks that shows up in every intro counseling practicum across the country. If you are a graduate student right now, you are probably holding it or about to buy it. Here is the straight version of how to actually use it without losing your mind. The book is built around three stages of the counseling process—exploration, understanding, and action—and each stage gets its own chapter cluster. Harriman breaks down microskills like reflecting, questioning, and opening into concrete behaviors you can practice in role-plays before you ever sit in a real session. The exercises at the end of each chapter are not filler. I have seen students skip them and then struggle badly in lab.
Intentional Interviewing And Counseling 7th Edition
What makes this edition different from the earlier ones is the heavier emphasis on the counselor's intentional stance throughout. Earlier editions treated the skills almost like a toolkit you grab from. The 7th edition keeps coming back to the idea that you choose your moves deliberately based on where the client is in that moment. That shift matters when you are actually doing the work. When I first used this book in my own training, I kept treating the stages like a checklist. Exploration first, then understanding, then action, done. That did not work because clients do not follow checklists. I spent weeks getting stuck in reflection loops because I was afraid to move forward into action. The workaround was simpler than I expected—I started using the "intentionality grid" on a sticky note and literally wrote down which stage I was in and which skill I was pulling. It made the process visible to me and helped me notice when I was looping. That was about six months ago, and I still do that now. One thing the book does not make clear enough is the overlap between stage two and stage three. Understanding and action bleed into each other a lot in real sessions. You can be doing goal-setting work while the client is still unpacking something emotional. If you wait for perfect exploration before any action, sessions stall. Harriman touches on this, but not with enough examples to make it stick for beginners.
The listening exercises are where most people hit friction. The book provides transcripts you listen to, then identify which skill is being used. It sounds straightforward until you realize that some responses can fit multiple categories depending on context. I found myself second-guessing answers for exercises that should have been straightforward. The fix was less about memorizing definitions and more about looking at the client's prior statements in the transcript. The surrounding context usually resolves the ambiguity. If you are reading this as preparation for a lab course, do not try to absorb the whole book cover to cover before sessions start. Read the relevant stage chapter one week ahead, practice the microskill exercises the night before, and come to lab with the specific skill from that week on your radar. Trying to learn everything at once just creates a flat list of terms you cannot distinguish under pressure. There is also a separate companion website with video cases. Some programs assign the videos as prerequisites. I ignored that at first and went into the video analysis assignments cold. That was a mistake. The videos assume you have already been introduced to the skill vocabulary. Watching them without that foundation makes the feedback paragraphs feel arbitrary.
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A common pitfall I keep seeing is students overusing open questions during the exploration stage. The book mentions this, but it does not warn hard enough about how open questions can derail a session when the client is in a fragile affective state. A string of open questions can feel interrogative, even when you mean well. Short reflective statements usually do more work in those moments. I learned that after a practice session where my partner shut down completely, and it took the rest of the lab period to get the conversation moving again. Another thing people miss is how much the book leans on the counselor's self-awareness. It is not just about learning techniques. There are recurring prompts asking you to examine your own biases, triggers, and assumptions. Some students roll their eyes at those sections and skim them. That is counterproductive because the intentionality framework depends on you knowing what you bring into the room. If you skip the self-reflection pieces, the later material on deliberate choice becomes theoretical rather than practical. The edition is not perfect. The chapter on multicultural considerations was updated, but it still reads as a separate layer bolted onto the main model rather than integrated throughout. In practice, cultural factors influence every stage simultaneously. The book's structure makes that harder to see unless you bring that perspective to it yourself. Pairing this text with something like Sue and Sue's work on multicultural counseling helps close that gap.
If you need the digital copy, most university bookstores carry the paperback. The ebook version is available through major academic vendors. Check whether your program requires the package that includes the video case access code, because the core text alone does not give you the full companion content. Bottom line, this book works if you treat it as a training manual rather than a reference to read straight through. The stages give you a map, but the real learning happens in the practice sessions, the self-reflection prompts, and the moments when you mess up and have to figure out why. That is where the intentional part actually becomes intentional instead of just a word in a chapter title.
