34. Residential Counselor 101 pt. 1 - Science, Art, and Craft
Release Date: 03/20/2024
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_outlineThe Role of a Residential Counselor: Care and Treatment
CARE:
Relationships: A core responsibility is to attend to the care, well-being, and safety of the clients. This requires caring and respectful relationships between staff and clients.
Self: In order to take care of the clients, you have to be able to take care of yourself. This work is very stressful and your ability to become centered will strongly effect your ability to help the kids become centered.
Task Responsibilities: A Residential Counselor has numerous core tasks related to the implementation of program structures, care of the facility, and reporting requirements.
TREATMENT:
Emotions: In the East cardinal position of the treatment compass, this domain represents the parts of the brain, and the parts of the mind or psyche, that understand the world and communicate in terms of emotions. Part of a counselor’s treatment role is to help clients become emotionally centered when their feelings and moods become too extreme, too intense, too unstable, or too restricted.
Cognitions: In the South, this domain represents the parts of the brain and psyche that understand the world and communicate in terms of thinking. Part of a counselor’s treatment role is to help clients become cognitively centered when their thinking is disorganized.
Behaviors: In the West, this domain represents the parts of the brain and psyche that understand the world and communicate in terms of both external actions and internal physiological activity. Part of a counselor’s treatment role is to help clients become behaviorally and physiologically centered when their actions and bodies become too extreme or chaotic.
Executive Skills: In the North, this domain represents the parts of the brain and psyche that regulate the other parts of the brain and body. Part of a counselor’s treatment role is to serve as the kids’ executive skills, support their emerging skills, and inspire the development of their executive skills so that they can successfully self-regulate and no longer need residential treatment.
Self: At the center of the treatment compass is the self. In addition to needing to take care of themselves, so that they can care effectively for the kids, from a treatment perspective residential counselors need to be skilled at becoming centered themselves. Those abilities, to be highly resilient and to set the tone, will help the kids learn how to become centered.
Other Key Concepts
Counseling: Where therapy is has a strong interest in helping people make connections between their past and present, and tends to directly focus on issues related to grief and trauma; counseling tends to be more focused on the present – on how the client is functioning in-the-moment.
Neuropsychology: Neurology is the study of the brain and nervous system. Psychology is the study of the mind or psyche. Neuropsychology studies and explains the connections between neurology and psychology.
The Human Brain: This complex organ is made up of different parts that have unique shapes, functions, and ways of processing sensory data. Likewise, different parts of the brain have different ways of communicating to rest of the brain. Via the spine, nerve pathways, and blood vessels, the brain is connected to all the other parts of the body. There are glands throughout the body that produce various chemicals that change how the brain functions. Although only a metaphor, you can think of these chemicals as corresponding with feelings and moods, while the electrical system of the brain corresponds with thinking.
The Practice Effect: Anything you practice, your brain gets better at doing. This not only applies to actions, like bouncing a ball, but to feelings and moods. Practice getting angry and you’ll more easily be able to get into that state-of-mind. Practice being happy and you’ll ore easily be able to get into that state-of-mind.
Co-Regulating: This term refers to how two people who are doing the same activity, side-by-side, will start to synchronize their nervous systems. Human Beings start out life dependent on co-regulation to manage their infant feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. As those parts of the brain get used, the practice effect kicks in, and a person starts being able to better self-regulate.
The Artist: This is what I call the parts of the brain, and the parts of the psyche, that only understand the world and communicate in terms of emotions. The Artist wants to be seen, and the artist wants to be heard. The Artist communicates, via feelings and moods, to get its needs met, using the only “language” it has – emotions.