Building off of the recent episodes on superficial cutting, Episode 81 of the Becoming Centered Podcast begins an arc that presents a combination of counseling techniques, along with concrete tools, that can transform clients’ brain functioning to vastly improve their skills at self-regulating their feelings, thoughts, physiology, and behaviors.
Some of these interventions focus on reducing the psychological traumatic impact on the client of any self-inflicted injury. Other interventions focus on developing the clients’ self-monitoring skills, so that they become more aware of when their feelings, thoughts, physiology, or behaviors are starting to become dysregulated. Other parts of what’s been gathered together as The Distress Tolerance Kit focus on helping clients develop a concrete action plan for managing their unstable feelings, thoughts, physiology, or behaviors.
Download the document, either as a whole or in its 13 parts, at the Resources page of the Bear Clan, llc.com website or directly from The Distress Tolerance Kit page. It’s also linked on the Podcast page for this episode.
The Distress Tolerance Kit is a powerful package of techniques, with sample tools, that will give clients the skills they need to stop superficial cutting, or lots of other problem-behaviors that are driven by overwhelming feelings, thoughts, physiology, and behaviors. There’s also a page on the website containing audio-recording variations on 4-7-8 Breathing that can be used directly with clients.
Over the course of this arc, listeners will be coached on:
- how to perform psychological processing of self-injurious incidents;
- how to deliver psychoeducation around the psychology and the neuro-psychiatry of non-suicidal self-injury;
- how to use of physiological interrupts to change clients’ dysfunctional state-of-mind;
- how to teach and use the 4-7-8 Breathing practice to become physiologically centered by resetting an over-mobilized brain, grounding a dissociated brain, and stabilizing a brain swinging between over- and under-mobilized;
- how to develop clients’ skills at monitoring their own level of distress, using a Subjective Units of Distress Scale;
- how to develop a Distress Tolerance Action Plan;
- how to distinguish between non-suicidal self-injury and suicidal gestures;
- how to create a Safety Contract; and
- how to create a Safety Watch.
Used together, taught over the course of weeks, this approach will transform clients’ brains so that they permanently become significantly better at self-regulation!