Episode 77 of the Becoming Centered Podcast begins an arc focusing on self-injurious behaviors.  Actions such as superficial cutting and head-banging are so frequent in residential treatment centers, especially those working with adolescents, that residential counselors are likely to encounter these issues.  However, there tends to be little dedicated training in how to comprehensively respond to these problem-behaviors.  The professional literature tends to focus on describing and interpreting these behaviors but doesn’t speak to how they impact the staff at a treatment program.  Not enough attention is given to how staff are traumatized when having to respond to kids who become intent on harming themselves.  Anticipation and training are two of the most effective preventive strategies for protecting the residential staff who are exposed to these extremely troubling client behaviors.  This episode arc is for those staff. 

This episode introduces the topic and looks at how to effectively respond to relatively light head-banging in two treatment populations, kids struggling with emotional mental health issues and kids suffering from psychosis.  Future episodes will focus on how to respond to light head-banging among neurodivergent kids on the autism spectrum, intense head-banging, and superficial cutting.

Episode 76 of the Becoming Centered Podcast concludes the Milieu Counseling episode arc by considering the role of relationships in giving residential counselors leverage to transform their clients’ beliefs.  It takes a look at five categories of maladaptive beliefs that can start to emerge in childhood that drive a dysfunctional life.  Residential Counselors are uniquely positioned to form relationships with clients that challenge these negative beliefs and support healthier beliefs.

These negative beliefs frequently are formed when children and youth experience adverse childhood experiences, such as neglect, abuse, deprivation, trauma and dysfunctional family situations.  However, before adulthood, these beliefs are not yet ingrained in most clients.  There’s opportunity for these young people to experience an emotionally corrective environment that provides evidence that these damaging beliefs are not true.

That’s not going to happen through residential staff having a passive approach to forming relationships.  Instead, the effective residential counselor is frequently having purposeful interactions to plant seeds that alternative, positive, beliefs are a more powerful truth.

Episode 75 of the Becoming Centered Podcast is all about how Residential Counselors can help kids become more cognitively self-regulated.  Residential Counselors are uniquely positioned to help children and youth clients develop their executive skills.  These skills help kids to structure and regulate their own thinking.  Residential treatment provides frequent opportunities for kids to practice planning, prioritizing, organizing, sustained attention, time management, working memory, and flexibility.  Supported by beliefs in the importance of these skills, practice is what develops the self-regulating regions of the brain.  This is done by repeatedly asking clients to plan ahead, to make thoughtful choices, to organize their physical environment and their thoughts, to pay attention when others are speaking to you, to pay attention to time constraints, to be thoughtful about how to complete sequences of tasks, and to be mentally flexible to daily disruptions and being able to identify more than one possible explanation for why something has happened or why another person has acted in a particular way.  As your clients become more skilled at these executive skills they will become more thoughtful people with more thoughtful behaviors.     

The Becoming Centered Podcast has now been downloaded over 6000 times (6570 as of this writing)! I’ve been posting an announcement for every 1000 downloads, but there were so many this month that it blew through 5000 and then 6000 all within a few days. Thank you to everyone who’s recommended the podcast to colleagues. I don’t really do anything to market the podcast, so any growth is due to word-of-mouth. It’s a good bit of work to produce each episode, so it definitely means a lot to me that people are listening and are encouraging others to check out my words. My hope is that this work is helping people create a transformative experience for kids in residential treatment, and ultimately is helping a bunch of kids to overcome the incredible challenges in their lives!

The latest episode of the Becoming Centered Podcast, Episode 74, explores three factors that blend together to create a treatment environment in a residential treatment program.  The first factor is the way in which various Care activities are organized.  For example, this episode compares feeding kids cafeteria-style versus family-style and looks at some aspects of how household chores are implemented.  The second factor is how residential counselors instill beliefs in kids that support treatment.  Some of these beliefs are more general, such as understanding that when a person becomes increasingly emotionally upset, that person’s ability to think and to use words degrades.  Other beliefs are specific to the value of exercising and practicing executive skills.  For example, believing that it’s a good idea to have a plan in anticipation of various social and task challenges.  The third factor is how residential counselors prompt kids to have to practice and exercise their executive and social skills instead of just giving kids simple orders and directives.  It’s these sorts of practices that elevate direct care staff from being Caregivers to being Counselors. 

Episode 73 of the Becoming Centered Podcast continues to look at how direct care staff can incorporate treatment interventions into every part of the residential day.  A lot of that involves interacting with the kids in a way that is consciously intended to promote in them a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, a sense of agency, and a sense of meaning.  These qualities will make kids more resilient to the stressors and triggers in their lives.  Most staff have a good intuitive understanding of what sorts of structures and interactions are likely to make a client feel that sense of belonging.  How to help children and youth experience a sense of purpose in their residential experience is less intuitive.  It involves staff having a shared understanding of how to frame the residential treatment experience for the kids, how to explain it to them, and how to demonstrate that each kid is growing and learning from their experiences living in a treatment program. 

This episode of the Becoming Centered Podcast begins a new arc that focuses on how to build treatment structures and interventions into every minute of the residential shift.  In a treatment program, there will typically be some treatment structures like individual therapy, or even group therapy, that pull kids from the everyday residential structures.  That’s certainly of treatment value, however, there can also be treatment structures and interventions that are baked into every part of the residential day, from how kids wake up to how activities and meals are run to how kids go to bed at night.  These structures, and ways staff interact with the kids, build resilience, self-regulation abilities, teach concrete social and life-skills, and teach kids how to develop and maintain healthy relationships.

This episode is from the archives that are available at www.BearClanllc.com.  It’s a re-cast of Episode 18, addressing how counselors can stabilize kids after an incident involving suicidal ideation or gestures.

The role of a counselor is fundamentally different than the role of a therapist in these situations.  The counselor’s focus is on helping the client see the suicidal ideation or gesture as a symptom and then helping the client cope with that symptom.  It’s not about understanding where the symptom comes from – leave that for the individual sessions with a therapist. 

Next episode I’ll be back with the beginning of a new episode arc in the group-level interventions learning pathway.  The focus will be on how to incorporate treatment interventions into every part of the residential shift.    

In the meantime, I hope this episode helps you, and your program, to effectively intervene and support your most overwhelmed clients when they are in crisis. 

For the first time I’ve re-released an earlier episode (in this case Episode 17 on Residential Counseling in response to Suicidal Ideation).

While all the episodes are available at the www.BearClanllc.com website, there’s a lot of new listeners this season, who are tuning in from their cars, and are tending to listen to new episodes within 48 hours of their being released. I can’t maintain a weekly release schedule for new episodes, but I can make it a little more convenient for listeners who are interested in tuning in each week. Thank you for your interest in your own professional development and for choosing to spend a half-hour considerng my material (and of course for applying it to help kids)!

Episode 69 of the Becoming Centered Podcast, building off of the previous two episodes, presents listeners with a powerful tool for residential treatment programs – Expectation Contracts. 

Episode 67 presented the underlying conceptual difference between using point systems, behavior contracts, and other “behavioral” change techniques to impact performative surface behaviors versus impacting inner systemic change.  Both have their place. 

Episode 68 expanded on these distinctions by introducing the idea of a “behavior-management” system versus a “feedback-incentive” system.  Both use the same elements of tracking some behavior or other aspect of performance, giving it a score (or coupon or other token), the accumulation of which results in a pay-out.  However, feedback-incentive systems are a fundamentally different intervention aimed at cognitive change in how kids manage themselves, their beliefs, their values, and their relationships with others.  The focus is not on discrete behaviors but on increasing the efforts kids make to develop themselves.

This episode takes that understanding and explores concrete ways to take the feedback-incentive model and turn it into a focused Expectation Contract.  A structure is presented to empower listeners to create customized Expectation Contracts for their residential units or for individual clients.