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The two main evidence-based practices that we use at my agency are psychoeducation and group interventions. We recognize that with the population we work with, building a trusting
and collaborative relationship can be extremely difficult. A lot of our clients come from traumatic backgrounds and trust is challenging for them. Creating a safe environment for our clients is crucial because we want them to feel safe being vulnerable with us. The goals of psychoeducation are to "ensure basic knowledge and competence of clients about their behaviors, provide insight into the behavior, promote prevention, and engage in crisis management" (Sarkhel, et al., 2020, p.1). We use psychoeducation because we want our clients to be educated and have awareness of the issue at hand. For example, I lead an anger management group, and rather than just talking about our emotions in group, we go through a curriculum that is trauma-informed and educates our clients on the root causes of anger, where it comes from, how to manage it, and how to cope. The hope would be that our clients then walk away from the program understanding how they can manage their emotions when they are in high-intensity situations and they can then use their healthy coping mechanisms to prevent the behavior that got them here in the first place. Using psychoeducation builds a trusting and collaborative relationship with our clients because they get
to see the entire process. They get the book before the group starts and can look through the content we are going to cover and what topics will be discussed. Right away this gives them consistency and they are always aware of what group is going to work through. From there, clients can determine how much or how little they want to share in group and can take the book home with them to continue working through the content. The trust part comes in with the evidence-based practice of group intervention. Building trust can be hard in a one-on-one setting, but I have noticed in my work so far that having group
