Tuesday, April 16, 2024

Field Experience

Field Experience 1
Work a shift at Karlis' Aurora facility
Research "neutrality" as it pertains to supervised visitation 
Research and analyze dual relationships
Research therapeutic self-disclosure
Do a literature review on supervised visitations
Summarize the challenges facing children who use supervised visitation services
Read and discuss A Child Called "It" with TS
Compare Karlis' policies with those of a similar organization
Supervise two first/second visits

Field Experience 2: CBT
BrainWise

Misc.

Evolutionary Psychology
Evolutionary Psychology
Tribe (Junger)




Therapy


Diagnosis

Mindfulness

Motivational Interviewing

Schema Therapy

SFBT

MSW

Direct Practice/Interventions
Evaluation Project
Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT)
Multisystematic Therapy (MST) 




International:
Malnutrition in Somalia 



Familiy Therapy:
SFBT 

Field #1:



Wednesday, November 25, 2020

Students/Children

Aggression

Assessment/Research
Behavioral, Social, and Emotional Assessment of Children and Adolescents

Problems
ASD






Schema Therapy, Part 2

Breaking Negative Thinking Patterns (Jacob et al.)

To understand modes you need to understand that people experience themselves different at different moments -- e.g., feeling emotional one moment, cold and detached the next. There are six modes: Vulnerable Child, Angry Child, Happy Child, Parent, Coping, and Healthy Adult.

Child modes are triggered when we feel rejected, abandoned, or stressed. Child modes are activated by small incidents, and their intensity is disproportionate to the event. The Vulnerable Child Mode comes when one feels sad, anxious, or alone. The Angry Child Mode comes when you feel that your needs are not respected, and you react in an angry or entitled/spoiled way. In the Happy Child Mode, "we do things that are funny and pleasant, like playing, visiting theme parks, or going to the cinema." It would not be appropriate to always be in this mode (your default mode should be the Healthy Adult Mode), but "it is very important to notice when you are feeling the need for fun and recovery from your everyday life."

Dysfunctional Parent Modes are those inner voices that can make you feel like a failure, make you feel guilty, make you feel worthless and unwanted. The Demanding Parent Mode pushes you to be perfect, telling you you're a failure otherwise. The Guilt-Inducing Parent Mode tells us that we have to sacrifice for others and that we should feel bad about ourselves when we fail. The Punitive Parent Mode devalues or denigrates you.

Coping Modes. First, surrendering involves surrendering to a parent mode and thinking negatively about yourself. Second, avoidance involves avoiding emotions and problems so you don't have to deal with them. Third, overcompensation involves acting the opposite of your parent mode or vulnerable child mode (e.g., someone who feels inferior overcompensates by acting overly-confident).

Healthy Adult Mode. When you're in this mode, you're keeping balance between your needs and the needs of others. Moreover, you're not being overwhelmed by negative feelings.

* * * * *

Healing Vulnerable Child Modes

Two steps: get in touch with your vulnerable child mode; take good care of it.
  • Imagine a recent time when you had recent feelings possibly linked to your Vulnerable Child Mode. See if the feelings are related to how you felt in the past.
  • Imagine the adult you encounters your childhood self. What does your little self need? What do you want to give your little self?
  • When your Vulnerable Child Mode appears, you can imagine your older self comforting your little self. 
  • Write a letter to your little self. 

Gaining control over Angry and Impulsive Child Modes

Two steps: identify the needs associated with this mode; learn how to express these needs in a healthier way.
  • Imagine a situation when your Angry or Impulsive Child Mode appeared.
  • Chair dialogue.
  • Learn to control anger: observe early signs, express anger stepwise, take a little break, use a calming signal, practice alternative behavior in imagery. 
  • Imagine what you would need to feel less angry -- e.g., a good friend putting an arm around your shoulder. 

Get in contact with your Happy Child Mode

Start by recalling happy memories from childhood.

Setting limits to Dysfunctional Parent Modes
  • Imagine a situation when you felt under strong pressure even though the situation did not objectively demand it. When did you feel strongly rejected, unlikable, forced to do something you didn't want to do.
  • Make a list of messages, explicit and implicit, you heard as a child -- e.g., "No pain no gain," "You're a loser when you make a mistake." Rewrite those maladaptive messages -- e.g., "If you don't take care of others you're a bad person" becomes "It's good to take care of others, but your needs are also important. I want to find a good balance."
  • Carry a small item with you (e.g., a stone, a stop sign) as a symbol and reminder to talk back to your Dysfunctional Parent Mode. E.g., a stop sign on your desk reminds you not to say yes to every assignment.
  • Find an Inner Helper; e.g., a kind aunt, a loving partner. When you the Punitive Parent Mode speaks to you, imagine telling your Inner Helper about it and wait for them to respond. 

Changing coping modes
  • Identify which coping styles you use. List the pros and cons of these coping styles.
  • Enter a safe situation in your imagination. Then enter a difficult situation and try to take with you the feelings of safety. Note whether this exercise changes your feelings in the difficult situation. 
  • Reducing the surrender mode: imagine your new behavior with vivid detail; take small, realistic steps in a relatively undemanding situation. 


Promoting your Healthy Adult Mode

The Healthy Adult Mode comforts the Vulnerable Child Mode, gives the Angry Child Mode the opportunity to express its emotions and needs more adequately, sets reasonable limits for the Impulsive or Spoiled Child Mode, reduces Avoidant Coping Modes, neutralizes Dysfunctional Parent Modes.
  • Imagine a situation where you normally back down but should stand up for yourself. Imagine how you would like things to go. 
  • Be aware of situations that get you into Healthy Adult Mode. 
  • Behavior experiment: pick specific situation; ask how a caring person would encourage you; reward yourself for success. 

* * * * * 

Breaking Negative Relationship Patterns (Bruce Stevens)

Schema therapy holds that bad childhood experiences have left us all with schemas, or deeply-held maladaptive assumptions we hold about ourselves and others. When looking at the list of schemas, I think that I possibly have four. (1) I often feel defectiveness-shame, believing that as others get to know me, they will find me unworthy of love and reject me. (2) I impose unrelenting standards (or perfectionism) on myself. (3) At least in my most recent relationship, I felt the need to self-sacrifice for her. (4) I tend to be approval-seeking, acting as though my own worth must be validated by others.

My most recent partner shared two of my schemas: (1) defectiveness-shame and (2) approval-seeking. She also possessed (3) abandonment, expecting to be abandoned by those she loves and (4) mistrust-abuse, expecting that others will eventually hurt her. My penultimate partner held the following schemas: (1) approval-seeking, (2) unrelenting standards, (3) self-sacrifice, (4) approval-seeking.

Schemas provide us one way of examining relationships. Couples often choose one another on the basis of their schemas. As an example of this, Stevens gives an example of someone with a defectiveness-shame schema (who consequently developed an eating disorder) who was attracted to someone with a unrelenting standards and punitive scheme (and reinforced her poor self-image).

I like the mode map on page 160. 

Identify conflicts that keep occurring in your relationship; they're liking based on "interlocking schemas and coping styles." Identify your relationship's trigger points. 

Sunday, November 22, 2020

Stoics

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (William B. Irvine)

Negative visualization:

  • We tend to be happy because we're insatiable; called hedonic adaptation; see study of lottery winners.
  • Spend time imagining we have lost the things we value (e.g., imagine wife left us, child has died). 
  • This makes us value those things more. 
  • Also contemplate our own death, the loss of our possessions. 

Control:
  • Focus on changing things we can control, namely our own desires. 
  • Three categories: things over which we have complete control, things over which we have some control, things over which we have no control. 
  • We can have complete control over our internal goals. E.g., I can have some control over whether I win a tennis match but complete control over whether I play my best.

Fatalism:
  • We can preserve our tranquility by taking a fatalistic attitude towards what is going to happen to us.
  • The Romans saw life as a horserace that had been fixed: the Fates already knew who would win and who would lose. Nonetheless, they worked hard to effect events. Why? Because they were fatalistic regarding the past. 
  • We should work to be happy with whatever life has given us. We could spend our time wishing this moment were different or we could embrace it. 
  • This is the reverse of negative visualization: "Instead of thinking about how our situation could be worse, we refuse to think about how it could be better."

Self-denial:
  • Not only should we visualize bad things happening to us, but we should sometimes live as if they had happened. 
  • We should periodically engage in acts of voluntary discomfort. We should also sometimes forgo opportunities to experience pleasure. E.g., sometimes pass up the opportunity to drink wine to learn self-control. 

Meditation:
  • Not like Buddhist practice. Instead actively think at night about the day -- what disrupted my tranquility, did I experience anger, etc.? Am I practicing the techniques recommended by the Stoics? 

Social relations:
  • How to experience tranquility while dealing with people? Prepare before dealing with them. Avoid people with corrupted values. 
  • Marcus on dealing with annoying people. 

* * * * * 

Seneca, "On the Shortness of Life"

Seneca's thesis is that life is not in fact short but that we squander our time. 
  • "It is not that we have a brief length of time to live, but that we squander a great deal of that time."
  • "We are besieged by vices that encircle us, preventing us from rising up and lifting our eyes to contemplate the truth, and keeping us down once they have overwhelmed us, our attention fixed upon lust." 
Things we waste our time one:
  • Men "who spend many hours with their barber, having any hairs that grew the previous night plucked, as a formal debate is held over each separate lock, as hair out of place is restored to its proper position or thinning locks combed forward to the forehead from this side and that." These men "flare up in a rate" if "anything is lopped off their mane," if "every lock does not fall back into its proper ringlet." 
  • Scholars: "No one will doubt that those men are energetic triflers who devote their hours to the study of useless literature...It was a foolish passion once confined to the Greeks to inquire into the number of oarsmen Ulysses had, whether the Iliad or Odyssey was written first..."
  • Paulinus, stop caring so much about your corn! "[I]t is better for a man to know the accounts of his own life than those of the corn-market."
  • Multi-taskers: "It is generally agreed that no activity can be properly undertaken by a man who is busy with many things."
  • "The greatest waste of life consists in postponement: that is what takes away each day as it comes, that is what snatches away the present while promising something to follow."
The problem:
  • Not prepared for death: "When finally some weakness has reminded them of their mortality, how fearfully they meet death, as though they were not quitting life but being dragged away from it!"
  • "They shout repeatedly that they have been fools, as they have not really lived, and if only they escape from that illness, their lives will be devoted to leisure; that is when they reflect on how pointlessly they have toiled to gain what they do not enjoy."
The answer:
  • "Only men who find time for philosophy are at leisure, only they are truly alive...The ones you should regard as devoting time to the true duties of life are those who wish to have as their intimate friends every day Zeno, Pythagoras, Democritus..."
  • "These men will set you on the road to immortality." For "what philosophy has made sacred cannot suffer harm; no age will destroy those works."
  • Seriously, stop thinking so much about corn! Think instead "holy and lofty" things, like God, the afterlife. "Come, leave the ground behind and direct your mind's gaze on those things."
  • "Many things worth knowing wait for you in this manner of life -- the love and exercise of the virtues, the ability to forget the passions, the knowledge of living and of dying, a state of deep repose."