William R. Miller, Ph.D.

Reprinted from Addictive Behaviors, Vol 21, No 6, “Motivational Interviewing: Research, Practice, and Puzzles,” pgs 835-842, with permission from Elsevier Science.  

Link to the Addictive Behaviors home page at: www.elsevier.nl/locate/addictbeh

Motivational interviewing began in a barber shop in Norway.  Actually, the haircutter for the Hjellestad Clinic outside Bergen had vacated the room to make space for a visiting professor from the United States, and I found myself in a lovely corner office looking out into the dense forest above a fjord.

Among my tasks that semester in 1982 was weekly supervision of a group of bright young psychologists, most of them newly trained, who had been hired to treat alcohol and other drug problems at Hjellestadklinikken.  Because even toddlers quickly grew impatient with my Norwegian, these meetings were conducted mostly in English, and one devise that we used was role-play enactment of therapeutic methods.  As I demonstrated how I might work with clients in a variety of settings, I soon found that these psychologists had learned in the course of their training to ask excellent and challenging questions: "What are you thinking as you say that?  Why have you taken this line of approach rather than another?  Why that particular word?  What underlying model is guiding your methods?"  They required me to make explicit the approach I had learned from my clients.

One result of these discussions was a concept paper entitled, "Motivational Interviewing with Problem Drinkers."  I had not intended to publish it, but a copy fell into the hands of Ray Hodgson who urged me to do so.  He published the edited-down version in Behavioural Psychotherapy (Miller, 1983), and I rather expected that to be the end of it, in part because the article contained not a scrap of empirical data.

To my surprise, I found in the ensuing years that the concepts and methods of motivational interviewing were quite appealing to practitioners, and in some countries were catching on to the extent of approaching common practice.  Out of curiosity and, if nothing else, sheer embarrassment, I was compelled to begin studying the processes and outcomes of this approach that I had inadvertently introduced.

Reference
Miller, W.R. (1983).  Motivational interviewing with problem drinkers. Behavioural Psychotherapy, 11, 147-172.

In cooperation with the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers (MINT), William R. Miller, Ph.D., and Stephen Rollnick, Ph.D.

Revised 1/03