60. Care vs Treatment, Behavior Management, and Respect
Becoming Centered
Episode 60 continues along the Group-Level Interventions Pathway. Building on the last episode, other foundational perspectives for going beyond only providing quality Care to providing transformational Treatment are presented. These include making a distinction between Care and Treatment, and understanding that behavior management techniques, while often times essential, are part of Care and not Treatment. Several organizational traps of becoming too focused on behavior management are explored, including the key distinction between interventions that inspire mindless...
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59. Season 3 - Overview and Intentions
Becoming Centered
Episode 59 of the Becoming Centered podcast marks the start of Season 3. This Season will contain two learning pathways. One series will focus on working with kids in varying size groups. Group work ranges from simple interactions in a living room or classroom to managing various activity groups to running group meetings focused on various aspects of team-building and congregate living. Another series will focus on physiological centering by presenting a program for listeners to gain a basic level of competence at mindfulness / relaxation / meditation; in preparation to...
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58. Supervision14 - Weekly Staff Meetings
Becoming Centered
Episode 58 of the Becoming Centered Podcast provides a vision for how to design and facilitate an extremely challenging structure in residential treatment programs – the weekly unit staff meeting. This episode covers a lot of ground. Along with presenting a general team-building strategy, an outline is suggested for how to do simple case presentations, for how to organize an issues agenda-driven portion of the meeting, and for how to deliver trainings specifically geared toward the needs of direct-care staff. In addition, a general model for how to develop your program’s...
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57. Supervision13 - Meeting Fundamentals
Becoming Centered
I’m very excited about Episode 57 of the Becoming Centered podcast! It provides guidance in an area that most human service agencies simply can’t fit into their training programs; how to design and facilitate internal staff meetings. Middle managers, such as Unit Directors, are tasked with running some of the most technically difficult meetings. With only the training provided by their own experiences, they are responsible for a program structure, that if you were to add up the hourly wages of all the participants, is an incredibly expensive use of time for agencies...
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56. Supervision12 - Resilience pt.2
Becoming Centered
Episode 56 of the Becoming Centered podcast is part two of a two-part arc focusing on the concept of resilience. Resilience is the ability to stay centered even in the face of various stressors and triggers. It's related to, but different than, self-regulation which is the ability to become centered when emotionally dysregulated, cognitively disorganized, behaviorally chaotic, and physiologically / neurologically elevated. There are four qualities that support emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and physiological / neurological resilience. A sense of belonging. A sense of purpose. A...
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55. Supervision11 - Resilience pt. 1
Becoming Centered
Episode 55 of the Becoming Centered podcast focuses on the concept of resilience. Resilience is the ability to stay centered even in the face of various stressors and triggers. It's related to, but different than, self-regulation which is the ability to become centered when emotionally dysregulated, cognitively disorganized, behaviorally chaotic, and physiologically / neurologically elevated. There're four qualities that support emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and physiological / neurological resilience. A sense of belonging. A sense of purpose. A sense of agency. A sense of...
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54. Supervision10 - Choices, Breaks, Support Center, Physical Intervention
Becoming Centered
Episode 54 concludes a four-episode arc, within the Unit Supervision Pathway, that presents the 10 techniques that make up the Hierarchy of Interventions. This episode focuses on how to implement these interventions in a way that goes beyond surface behavior management to supporting the development of self-regulation in children and youth. This episode particularly focuses on the Forced-Choice and related Weighted-Choice techniques. These interventions leverage a program's consequence system to help child-clients make choices that determine whether or not they receive a...
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53. Supervision9 - Change Environment and Limit Setting
Becoming Centered
Episode 53 reviews the first four tools and techniques that make up the Hierarchy of Interventions (Distraction, Engaging, Verbal Redirection, Labeling) and presents the next two steps in the Hierarchy, Changing the Environment and Limit Setting. A major emphasis is placed on using these techniques to not only manage behaviors, but also to help clients develop their abilities to self-regulate. Behavior Management is a necessary component of providing Care to troubled children and youth. All kids sometimes exhibit behavior problems. However, kids in residential treatment,...
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52. Supervision8 - The Aspect Compass and Labeling
Becoming Centered
This episode is the second in a three-episode arc that presents the Hierarchy of Interventions. This grouping of 10 interventions forms a core curriculum of counseling skills used by residential staff to encourage the development of kids' self-regulation abilities. Last episode focused on using Distraction, Engaging, and Verbal Redirection to interrupt and prevent kids from going down an off-track path toward increased emotional, cognitive, and behavioral dysregulation. This episode introduces the Aspect Compass model of the human mind. Understanding this metaphor for...
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51. Supervision7 - The Hierarchy of Interventions
Becoming Centered
This episode on the Unit Supervisor Learning Pathway moves away from a focus on managerial skills and switches to a focus on counseling skills to be taught to direct-care Child Care Counselors. It presents 10 interventions, or techniques, for Counselors to use with kids when they become off-track, dysregulated, and uncentered. Skillful use of this package of interventions starts with understanding the ways in which they can be thought of as forming a hierarchy. That includes the higher up interventions being increasingly disruptive to the group environment of the residential...
info_outlineThis podcast episode is the second part of a series that addresses how to intervene when dealing with suicidal ideation in children and youth.
It emphasizes the importance of training for counselors and aims to make discussing this sensitive subject more approachable. An important focus is for counselors is to help clients understand suicidal ideation as a symptom rather than delving into the "why" behind it, which is a task for therapists. The episode emphasizes the need to distance clients from these thoughts and work on developing their executive skills, especially stress tolerance.
The counselor's role involves empathetic listening, establishing a sense of belonging, and helping the client tolerate their negative feelings and thoughts without using harmful behaviors. If suicidal ideation includes gestures, attempts, or plans, the counselor should assess the situation in terms of risk and rescue factors and consult with an on-call clinician.
After a check-in around suicidal ideation, there are important communications and documentation to the rest of the team. There may also be structural interventions put in place such as Scheduled Check-Ins, Increased Structure, Staff Shadowing, Re-entry Plans, and various restrictions that can be documented on a Safety Watch form. That documentation helps everyone on the immediate team, and involved in follow up the next day, to work as a team to help keep the client feeling and acting safe.
Another powerful intervention is the creation of a Safety Contract, which serves as a formal agreement between the at-risk client and staff to ensure safety and offers personalized support.
The episode also underscores the partnership between therapy and counseling, with therapy addressing the "why" and counseling addressing the "how" of maladaptive behaviors.
Lastly, the podcast reminds listeners of the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (988) as a resource for those needing guidance and emotional support outside of their work lives.