Imaginary Rope

* Stand up and put at least an arm’s width between you and the persons nearest to you.
* Visualize yourself holding a 5-10 foot length of rope, and imagine a client standing in front of you.
* Now swing your whole arm back and then forcefully forward to use the rope as a whip. Get your whole arm involved! Really whip that client into shape!
* Now make a loop in the rope, then twirl the loop over your head like a lasso. Again get your whole arm involved—get that lasso spinning! Now toss it and lasso the client standing in front of you. Now reel the client in…
* Now, untie the loop. Step forward as if to be stepping onto the same paving block as your imaginary client is standing on. Offer the client one end of the rope while you hold on to the other. Ask what direction the client would like to move in, and begin moving with the client. The connection with the rope will let you know if you are moving with or against the client or trying to pull the client somewhere that he or she isn’t ready to go.
* Each of these three methods moves the client from the position that he or she is in and may be stuck in. We will be working with some strategies that are in the spirit of the last way that we used the rope.

Allan Zuckoffs comments: One of the things I find most gratifying is when someone who I’ve trained from scratch in MI becomes taken enough to start being creative in talking or teaching about it. A therapist in our project to adapt MI to engage depressed mothers and pregnant women into therapy, Sharon Geibel, gave a talk about our work and came up with this brief exercise, which illustrates the spirit of MI. With her permission, here’s the exercise, laid out as a series of instructions to the participants