Motivational Interviewing in the Intervention Setting: Techniques Every Professional Interventionist Should Know

Matt Brown • 2026-04-09

If you've been doing intervention work for any length of time, you already know that walking into a family system in crisis requires more than a script and a treatment center bed. You need tools — relational tools — that can meet ambivalence without triggering defensiveness. Motivational interviewing (MI) may be the single most transferable clinical framework for the intervention setting, yet many interventionists were never formally trained in it.