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Author Archives: Russ Bloch, MSW, MBA
Podcast Episodes 11-15
You can already access, on all major podcasting platforms, episodes 11 and 12 of The Becoming Centered Podcast. In episode 11, you’ll learn about the central role of neurological co-regulation in powering your efforts to teach child-clients how to better manage their feelings, thoughts, and behaviors; while developing the executive skills to become more independent. Episode 12 explores the importance of setting firm limits in a consistent and predictable fashion. Discussion includes powerful techniques for being an effective limit setter and holder of program structures. Episodes 14 and 15 will become available in the first half of October (although you can listen in advance from the Residential Tools & Techniques page on the website). These episodes discuss how to use Time Outs in a sophisticated and effective fashion, and three tools / techniques for helping kids process feelings: the Feelings Intensity Thermometer, Feelings Maps, and Empathic Listening.
Podcast Episodes 7-10 Physical Restraints
Episodes 7 -10 of The Becoming Centered Podcast explore issues surrounding physical interventions and especially physical restraints. The focus is on how to minimize and be resilient to the stress of having to perform this type of work. Learn about some of the core dynamics involved in all physical interventions and how they produce stress hormones and neurotransmitters that stay in your body and brain. Prior to physical interventions, anticipation and training can reduce the impact of these harmful chemicals. During physical restraints, body awareness can help you begin to flush your system of stress chemicals. Afterwards, debriefing, processing, relaxation, meditation, and mindfulness exercises can help your brain and body return to a healthy baseline.
Episodes 4 – 10 of the Becoming Centered Podcast
Episode 4 of The Becoming Centered Podcast is now available on major streaming channels. This episode focuses on teamwork, an essential aspect of operating an effective residential treatment program. Since teamwork is also a key component of all sorts of endeavors, this episode has wide applicability.
If you don’t want to wait for future episodes of The Becoming Centered Podcast to be released (every Wednesday), you can preview episodes on the www.BearClanllc.com website. In addition to Episodes 5 and 6 which complete the Residential Counselor Orientation series, you can access the first podcasts in the Residential Treatment Issues series that focus on physical interventions. These podcasts present listeners with a framing for understanding the use of physical restraints (and other physical interventions), and how to reduce the traumatic impact on your nervous system of having to perform restraints.
Episodes 2 & 3 of The Becoming Centered Podcast
It’s rewarding to see that some people have been checking out the Becoming Centered Podcast! The first six episodes make up an orientation course for Residential Counselors and really anyone who works with children and youth to help them learn how to become centered. Episode 1 presented a particular way to understand the role of people who teach kids how to become centered. Episode 2 lays out the basic professional boundaries associated with such work. Episode 3 will drop this Wednesday and focuses on powerful ways to form a therapeutic relationship with kids. It introduces the concept of the Domain Compass and presents:
3 relationship qualities that support kids’ emotional life,
2 relationship qualities that support kids’ cognitive development,
3 relationship qualities that support kids’ learning how to regulate their behaviors, and
1 key relationship quality to support kids’ executive skills and social skills development.
Becoming Centered Podcast Launches!
I’m pleased to announce that the Becoming Centered Podcast is now available on all major podcasting channels! While the Becoming Centered Book (available at Amazon in Kindle and paperback) is a field guide to self-counseling, the podcast is more focused on people who work in residential treatment of children and youth. Since that work requires being personally centered, there’s certainly an overlap between the book and podcast; however, the podcast is more focused on how to help other people become centered.
If you’ve enjoyed the Becoming Centered book, you can be a big help by leaving a book review at Amazon. That sort of social proof is key to getting more people to check out my work!
If you’re interested in the podcast, you can find it and subscribe at all major podcast listing services and all episodes are available at my website (along with supporting materials): www.BearClanllc.com.
The first six episodes are an orientation course for new residential staff. The next episodes will focus on understanding and reducing the use of and need for physical restraints. Thanks for your continued support and interest!
Becoming Centered Book Published!
A lot’s been going on behind the scenes at Bear Clan, llc and this is the first of what will be several exciting announcements!
For the past two years, I’ve been retired from 40+ years of directing residential treatment programs, social service programs, and serving as a therapist for children and parents. I’ve focused instead on fully developing my integrated approach to therapy and counseling so that it can be more effectively shared with others.
One result is the publication of my first book, Becoming Centered: A Field Guide to Self-Counseling. It shares a powerful way to understand your own personal psychology, and tools and techniques for navigating your way through life’s challenges.
Integrating ancient traditional practices, multiple approaches to psychotherapy, principles of wilderness awareness, and perspectives from modern neuro-psychology, Becoming Centered teaches you how to use conscious and unconscious aspects of your brain to find your balance and find your path toward being the best version of yourself.
Through stories, concrete exercises, and eye-opening perspectives, you’ll learn effective ways to return to center when you become emotionally unbalanced; to become cognitively organized when you become confused; to walk the path of behavioral health; and to effectively tap into the conscious and unconscious abilities of your brain to manage your own life.
Becoming Centered: A Field Guide to Self-Counseling has just become available on Amazon in both paperback and kindle formats. I hope you’ll check it out and I hope it helps you see that you can be, and are, the hero of your own life-story!
Especially as a new author, if you find value in this book, I hope you’ll leave a review at Amazon and share its release with your network and tribe of people!
Big Changes at this Website!
I’m excited to let people know about some major development that have occurred at Bear Clan, llc. Having retired from full time work, I’ve been able to devote the past couple years to creating some new vehicles for sharing my approach to helping people.
Along with completely revising the content of this website, I’ve written a book, that will be available in May 2023 on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback formats. I’ve also developed a podcast will launch that same month. You can learn more about both projects on the new Start Here page of this website.
Both the book and the podcast focus on sharing what I’ve learned over the course of my career on how to become more resilient and how to help others, especially children and youth in residential treatment, to become centered.
I’ve also begun to add to this website resources that will help residential treatment programs train staff and better administer aspects of their operations.
So, please take a look at the new website material, check out the book and podcast, and I hope you’ll join me on this next adventure!
Anxiety as a Regulatory Trigger Mechanism
Increasingly, in my work with children and in current literature, clinical levels of anxiety has become a common problem and diagnosis. Does this observational data reflect something actually having changed in our children? Or, perhaps it’s a function of society and therapists simply changing the way anxiety is seen?
Regardless, I certainly work with many children who struggle with anxiety, to the extent that it impacts their emotional, cognitive, and behavioral health. I teach many techniques for better managing anxiety; but, I found that I lacked insight on the functional purpose of anxiety and how anxiety is different from other feelings.
Should it even be conceptualized as a feeling? I’ve been certified in one approach to crisis management that defines anxiety as a behavior. That doesn’t seem correct to me, but it underscores the difficulty professionals have in how to even frame the concept. Anxiety seems to have a lot in common with other feelings; but in some ways, it seems more like a mood in how it persists in the background of a person’s brain functioning.
I teach that the brain is composed of many specialized parts. These parts need to work together. That means there needs to be a communications network between these different parts.
Here’s the problem:
Only some of the brain parts communicate in English (or any other spoken language). Only some parts of the brain understand what we commonly think of as “language.” So how do the other parts of the brain communicate?
One form of communication is feelings. Something “feels” a certain way, and that cues you to focus on a part of the body or part of your environment. Some parts of the brain communicate more with images, some with dreams, and some with intuition.
From this perspective, anxiety is a mechanism of communication within one’s own brain!
Emotions grow more complex and nuanced as one gets older. Anxiety seems like a very early emotion, present even in newborns. Therefore, it must be a very basic form of internal communication. It seems to me that what it is communicating is the message “something is wrong.”
In the Bear Clan Meta-Compass perspective, using the Archetype Compass, we are all born Artists. As newborns, we have relatively few behaviors (The Warrior can’t even turn over yet) and relatively few thoughts (The Scout seems to mostly be interested in exploring ways to get basic needs met). The closest we have to executive skills (The Chief) are regulatory mechanisms in the brain that keep our heart beating, our lungs processing oxygen, and all the other tasks grouped into the autonomic nervous system.
The autonomic nervous system is, I believe, the origin for The Chief, and for executive skills that will develop over a person’s lifetime. Let’s imagine that the part of that newborn’s brain that monitors oxygen levels in the blood detects insufficient oxygen. How does that part of the brain communicate this situation to the parts of the brain that can take action to address that problem? To further complicate the situation, there are multiple parts of the brain that could resolve the issue. Is this simply a time to take a relatively deep breath, a time to burst into tears and screams, or a time to change body position?
The oxygen-sensing part of the brain needs to communicate with multiple other parts of the brain. Perhaps it sends an electrical / biochemical signal that triggers anxiety (or perhaps on a molecular level is anxiety). Something is wrong. Other parts of the brain focus on that “wrong feeling” and a particular corrective action is initiated.
In this conceptualization, anxiety starts out as a communications vehicle of the brain’s regulatory mechanisms. Thus anxiety is a necessary phenomenon that focuses parts of the brain on some dysregulation. So why does it sometimes go so wrong and what can we do about it?
On the level of the Bear Clan Archetype Compass, the answer is to strengthen The Chief!
Kit Learns Cougar Muscle Relaxation
Kit thought for a long time about the story of Monster Bear and how the most fearsome of all the bears was overwhelmed by a flood of humans working together.
“Bear,” said Kit, “you said that you changed after Monster Bear was no longer part of the bear spirit. Do you ever miss that part of yourself?”
“Over time, all creatures change,” said Bear. “You have not spent much time around Grizzly Bear, and none at all with Polar Bear. The Bear Spirit is still plenty fierce! But now, I have become more thoughtful. I do not miss Monster Bear’s rage. More than anything, that rage made it too hard to feel the Spirit-That-Moves-In-All-Things. Just as all the bears share the Bear Spirit, all the creatures of the earth, all the plants, all the rocks, even the waters are connected by a single spirit. The world is not only rock, it is not only water, it is not the plants, it is not the animals… all things together are the Earth.
“Monster Bear’s arrogance, Monster Bear’s anger, prevented the Bear Spirit from being able to appreciate the gift of Humility. Beneath the fur, Monster Bear was no different from other bears. But Monster Bear feared that others would realize that. So even more than fur, Monster Bear wore a cloak of fear. Monster Bear was so fearsome that most humans thought Monster Bear was not even made of flesh and blood. This cloak of fear did not make Monster Bear brave. The gift of Bravery is being able to take action despite fear, not because of fear. This made Monster Bear a bully and a coward. So no, I do not miss Monster Bear.”
“Bear…,” said Kit.
“Yes,” said Bear.
“I am no bully… but I think that I might be a coward.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Bear.
“When I still lived with human beings… some things happened… bad things. I did nothing that stopped it. I am still afraid a lot of the time. I was so afraid of Wolf, even though Wolf had promised to help me, that I didn’t even ask about the Two Wolves that live inside all human beings.”
“Fear-of-Animals, the fear of being attacked, Fear-of-Water, the fear of being overwhelmed, are powerful,” said Bear. These fears live in our muscles. They live in the large muscles in our arms and legs and chest. They also live in the small muscles needed for speech.
“If you wish to be Brave, if you wish to feel the Humility that lets you sense the Spirit-That-Lives-In-All-Things, then you must walk The-Path-of-The-Warrior.
“The true Warrior is not just a fighter. The true Warrior accepts the fears all creatures feel, and takes brave action anyway. The true Warrior knows that there are always more powerful forces, and humbly takes action anyway. The true Warrior knows that no one can, every time, be successful; but still the true Warrior takes action.
“The true Warrior acts not to make others feel fear. The true Warrior’s actions inspire others to feel courage. The true Warrior acts not to receive praise from others, but because The Chief has given a mission, necessary to the good of the whole community.”
“Can you show me this path?” asked Kit.