Strategy of the week: June 22nd Edition

Kid strategy of the week:

  • Calming color meditation: Practice the following guided meditation with child clients. Share your screen/video with them and do it together. Encourage them to reflect on how their body felt during and after the meditation.

  • Sample Progress Note: The focus of this session was… The therapist engaged the Ct in a calming guided meditation (Color meditation). Ct (engaged/did not engage in the activity), and they reported that the activity was (helpful/difficult/not helpful).

Couples strategy of the week:

  • Guidelines for keeping the relationship: Relationships are complicated, but there are some ways that we can all help our relationships thrive. The following acronym from Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is used to help us remember ways to tend to our relationships:

  • Sample progress note: The focus of this session was… The therapist used psycho-education about interpersonal effectiveness skills (GIVE) to help the couple reduce relationship distress and enhance communication strategies. The couple reported that the psycho-education was (helpful/not helpful), and they were (able/not able) to explore how the psycho-education could be applied to their past and future experiences.

Adult strategy of the week:

  • Reducing vulnerability to unpleasant emotions: While all emotions serve a function and have meaning, sometimes it can be helpful to find ways to protect ourselves from “spiraling” and feeling overwhelmed. The following acronym from Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is used to help us remember ways to reduce our vulnerability to “spiraling:”

  • Sample progress note: The focus of this session was… The therapist used psycho-education about emotion regulation skills (PLEASE MASTER) and process their experiences related to emotion regulation. Client reported that the psycho-education was (helpful/not helpful/annoying/etc), and they were (able/not able) to apply the psycho-education to their experiences.

Mindfulness/meditation of the week:

  • Sit up tall, get comfortable, and close your eyes.

  • Take 3 cleansing breaths: inhaling slowly through your nose and exhaling audibly through your mouth.

  • Now bring your left hand to your heart and right hand to your belly. Inhale through your nose in 3 parts—first to expand the belly, then the ribcage, then the chest. Hold at the top for a count of 3, then open your mouth and let it out with a sigh. Repeat 3 to 5 times. You will feel your hands rise and fall as you breathe.

  • Relax your hands into your lap, palms facing down, and inhale through the nose on a count of 3, then exhale through the nose on a count of 6… focusing on the exhale. Pause briefly at the bottom of your exhale before starting a new breath. There’s no need to rush to the next breath, let it come to you. Continue breathing with this pace.

  • With each long exhalation, focus on leaving something from your day behind to clear space for your evening. If there are specific thoughts or worries that are lingering, bring them to your attention and then on an exhale, imagine them sinking down into the chair or earth beneath you, leaving your body and leaving the space around you.

  • Continue at a slow, steady pace for a few minutes, focusing on the exhalation and sense of release with every cycle.

  • Now imagine there is a giant door in front of you. As you take a deep breath, you open the big door and notice it’s heavy. You hold it open and as you exhale, you walk through the door and close it behind you. With this, you leave all of the stress from the day behind you—the conversations with your boss, complaints from coworkers, office gossip, pressure from deadlines, and difficult projects. All of the worries from the day remain behind the closed door as you continue walking forward and away from your workplace stress, allowing yourself to disconnect from the business of work for the time being.

  • Finish your meditation with a few deep, cleansing breaths.