- Shame/guilt — The person in crisis often feels incompetent and out of control. S/he may experience feelings that are not acceptable or usual to her/him. The pain may be further complicated by being ashamed of one’s plight.
- Confusion — Crisis may interfere with one’s ability to think straight, problem-solve, or event accurately perceive one’s experience. This distortion in itself may be frightening and the persons in crisis may fear s/he is “losing his mind”.
- Fear — The fear may be of actual components and possible outcomes of the crisis situation, as well as of the powerful effects listed above.
We may begin to sense that a person is in crisis by the intense feelings of fear, anger, sadness, pain, etc. which s/he expresses. In addition to the feelings of the person in response to the painful event, there may be another group of feelings as a result of his reaction to being in crisis. For example, a caller may say, “I’m so angry I never want to see her again…but I should not feel this way”. Through empathic, reflective listening we accept the caller and his/her feelings and also identify and clarify the feelings. In a sense we say, “But you do feel that way and that’s ok”. Help the caller sort out what is going on, what the crisis is about.
If the caller is talking loudly or wildly, the counselor may be swept up in his sense of urgency and react to the impulse to do something, to fix it before adequate information has been gathered or adequate relationship established. In such a case, the first step would be to get the person to slow down, to take his time, and to communicate our concern and willingness to help. It is also important to remember that options for the situation, if there are any, already exist. The counselor does not invent them and a thorough exploration is the initial step in discovering important feelings and information.
In a crisis situation a here-and-now focus is helpful. It is highly unlikely that we can resolve a large or complex problem in one phone call, but we can help the person to reduce their level of anxiety to a more manageable level and to develop short-term plans aimed at beginning to work him/herself out of the crisis. The plan should be simple, concrete and behavioral (something he can do and see the results of quickly).
