Presented for the Illinois Counseling Association 2015

1. Five Positive Techniques Every Counselor Should Know.Dr. Jeff Edwards, Professor Emeritus, NEIU.Past President, The Illinois Counseling Association (2009 -2010)Past President, the Illinois Counselor Educators and Supervisors Association (2012-2014) Presented for the Illinois Counseling Association 2015

2. Plans for the morning • Situating things to remember – • Video • Ice breaker to Positive Psychology • Five positive techniques • Lots of fun!! • Edwards, J.K., Young, A., & Nikels, H. (2016), Handbook of Strengths-Based Clinical Practices: Finding Common Factors. New York, NY: Taylor Francis, Routledge Press.

3. Things to know for today. Situating myself • Top down perceptions (thalamocortical networks) -Dan Siegel – Narrative part of the brain. (Mindful Brain, Siegel, 2007). (enslaved) • Perceptual Sets (bio-psycho-social-cultural-familial- spiritual) • Confirmational data or bias (opinion) • Resiliency – Ordinary Magic – one interested person. • Autonomic nervous system: - Sympathetic system prepares for emergency situations – Flight or fight. - Parasympathetic system restores, slows the heart and BP, - Calming. • Wheaton College, MFT over a problem focus, solution and narrative Rx, Mindfulness, AI, Adler, and spaghetti man

4. Multiple realities and perceptual sets.

5. Thomas Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). What are Scientific Truths? According to Kuhn, “When scientists must choose between competing theories, two (scientists) fully committed to the same list of criteria for choice may nevertheless reach different conclusions” (1977) Paradigm shifts. And Normal Science and New

6. Be Heliotropic

7. But of course the answer is:

8. Strengths Based work leads those involved in collaborative planning session, to find Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations and Desired Results. It is liberating the minds of the those involved. The process is generative and encourages creativity and innovation. Though never ignoring negative issues if they should be aired, the facilitator inquires what the future will look like if the issues were no longer important, ‘flipping’ the negative into a positive so that the therapy moves on to create new Strength based Opportunities, Clients feel engaged and ownership in wanting to make the desired outcomes (Results) happen. Thus all involved may flourish. (we practice what we preach on ourselves)Problem focused work, on the other hand may find results, however the process creates a negative mindset that brings forth objections, iatrogenic problem potential, and resistance, subtle or otherwise.

9. We will all experience disappointments and crushing events somewhere along the way, setbacks for which there is no "reason"; no one to blame. It might be a disease; it might be injury; it might be an accident; it might be losing a loved one; it might be getting swept away in a political shake up; it might be getting shot down over Vietnam and thrown into a POW camp for 8 years. What separates people, James Stockdale taught me, is not the presence or absence of difficulties, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life. -- Jim Collins

10. Shawn Achor Ted Talk

11. Positive Counseling • Froma Walsh (2003) begins the second chapter of her ground breaking book Normal Family Process by asserting that clinicians’ work has been subjugated by the medical model, training them to look for deficits and problems. • Positive Psychology founder Martin Seligman (2002) said, “I do not believe that you should devote overly much effort to correcting your weaknesses. Rather, I believe that the highest success in living and the deepest emotional satisfaction comes from building and using your signature strengths” (p.13).

12. In a study by Kolodinsky, et al, (2014) of Positive Psychology use in Counselor Education, almost 80% (79.5%) strongly agreed or agreed with the statement that “future CACREP standards should integrate positive psychology research.” • General George Casey, US Army Chief of Staff, enlisted the support of Positive Psychology Founder, Dr. Martin Seligman to begin culturally transforming our military from focusing time and funding on pathology, to being resilient. Join me as we learn how to change PTSD to Post Traumatic Growth, and five other positive techniques. But this workshop is more than about how to use these concepts with in the military. • Positive Psychology and Seligman put forth the notion that Evidence Based Practice lines up with the DSM and what is wrong, and leaves out much of what is helpful and right with any client.

13. Violence, for example, is not considered a “mental disorder,” but I expect that more lives are ruined annually by it in the United States than by depression. And why aren’t bad marriages, cowardice, explosive anger, dishonesty, lack of work ethic, and the like the focus of more federal prevention efforts? (Seligman, 2001) • The search for empirically validated therapies (EVT’S) has in its present form handcuffed us by focusing only on validating the specific techniques that repair damage and that map uniquely into DSM-IV categories. The parallel emphasis in managed care organizations on delivering only brief treatments directed solely at healing damage may rob patients of the very best weapons in the arsenal of therapy – making our patients stronger human beings. (Seligman, 2005, p. 7)

14. Positive Psychology Primer • Learned helplessness (1975) • Learned optimism (1991; 1996) • What you can change…and what you can’t. (1993) • Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, (2000). Positive psychology: An introduction. • Seligman’s article on Prevention (2001). Comment on “priorities for prevention research at NIMH.” Prevention and Treatment, 4, 24. Protective factors/Risk Factors 5-14

15. Positive Psychology Primer • Seligman’s article on Prevention (2001). Comment on “priorities for prevention research at NIMH.” Prevention and Treatment, 4, 24. Protective factors/Risk Factors • Seligman, M. E. P. (2002). Authentic happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. • Seligman, M.E.P. (2011). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being.

16. Positive Psychology Primer • Uses science and effective interventions to aid in having a satisfactory life, rather than “treating” Mental Illness. • Looks to increase pleasure or flow, values, signature strengths, virtues, talents and positive social systems and institutions (Happiness). • Satisfaction about the Past; Optimism about the Future; Happiness in the present. • Meaning and Purpose in one’s life.* Something bigger than one’s self. Does not, however, deny traditional Counseling Techniques where appropriate.

17. Positive PsychologyAuthentic Happiness(Life Satisfaction) {The Pleasant Life} Positive Emotions Engagement Gold Standard is having a pleasant mood. Meaning

18. Positive PsychologyTheory Change to Well-Being New Gold Standard is Flourishing In positive psychology, flourishing is “to live within an optimal range of human functioning, one that connotes goodness, generativity, growth, and resilience.”  Flourishing is the opposite of both pathology and languishing, which are described as living a life that feels both hollow and empty.

19. A few ideas and vocabulary words that will help. • Optimism (permanence vs temporal)(well-being) • Pessimism (Correlated with Depression) • Resiliency (ability to adapt to stress and adversity) ( Anne Masten, Ordinary magic) • Self-Efficacy (strength of one's belief in one's ability to complete tasks and reach goals) • Perceptual Sets (bio-psych-social-cultural-familial- spiritual. • Top down perceptions (thalamocortical networks) • Confirmational data or bias • Losada Ratio (Gottman; Losada; Boyatzis & McKee)

20. Five Positive Techniques • Best of the Best – a personal experience • Mindful Meditation (Jon Kabat Zinn) • Savoring – experiencing the moment. • Installing positives in your life by writing three positive events that happened in your life today, every day, journaling, gratitude, and random acts of kindness. • Post Traumatic Growth All are empirically based.

21. #1 Best of the BestChris Peterson (2006). • Story of plane ride with a policeman back from Pittsburg, PA • My Story - • Your stories -

22. #2 Mindful Meditation In this learning process we assume from the start that as long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than there is wrong…Jon Kabat-Zinn, p. 2. Jon Kabat Zinn, Professor of Medicine Emeritus and creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.  Kabat Zinn found that Mindful Meditation can help people cope with stress, anxiety, pain, and illness.

23. #2 Mindful Meditation • Huff Post Science (2/19/15) • Mindfulness Meditation Can Help You Fall (And Stay) Asleep • “It seems that a new study comes out every week pointing to another physical or mental health benefit of mindfulness. Recent research reveals that meditation may help prevent age-related cognitive decline among older adults. And another study recently found that the practice could help children improve their math skills. • Now, a new University of Southern California study suggests that mindfulness meditation can improve sleep quality for older adults with sleep disturbances, including trouble falling or staying asleep, or feeling sleepy during the day.” Let’s Practice for five minutes.

24. #3 Savoring Bryant, (2003); Kabat-Zinn, (1990) • Increases life satisfaction. • In our cultural life we tend to move quickly from one experience to the next. • The Raisin experiment. • Savoring a great clinical session you had. • Savoring something in your own life

25. #4 Installing positives in your life • Close your eyes. Call up the face of someone still alive who years ago did something or said something that changed your life for the better. Someone who you never properly thanked; someone you could meet face-to-face next week. Got a face? • Gratitude can make your life happier and more satisfying. When we feel gratitude, we benefit from the pleasant memory of a positive event in our life. Also, when we express our gratitude to others, we strengthen our relationship with them. But sometimes our thank you is said so casually or quickly that it is nearly meaningless. In this exercise … you will have the opportunity to experience what it is like to express your gratitude in a thoughtful, purposeful manner.

26. #4 Installing positives in your life • Your task is to write a letter of gratitude to this individual and deliver it in person. The letter should be concrete and about three hundred words: be specific about what she did for you and how it affected your life. Let her know what you are doing now, and mention how you often remember what she did. Make it sing! Once you have written the testimonial, call the person and tell her you’d like to visit her, but be vague about the purpose of the meeting; this exercise is much more fun when it is a surprise. When you meet her, take your time reading your letter.

27. #4 Installing positives in your life • Every night for the next week, set aside ten minutes before you go to sleep. Write down three things that went well today and why they went well. You may use a journal or your computer to write about the events, but it is important that you have a physical record of what you wrote. The three things need not be earthshaking in importance (“My husband picked up my favorite ice cream for dessert on the way home from work today”), but they can be important (“My sister just gave birth to a healthy baby boy”). • Next to each positive event, answer the question “Why did this happen?” For example, if you wrote that your husband picked up ice cream, write “because my husband is really thoughtful sometimes” or “because I remembered to call him from work and remind him to stop by the grocery store.” Or if you wrote, “My sister just gave birth to a healthy baby boy,” you might pick as the cause … “She did everything right during her pregnancy.” • Writing about why the positive events in your life happened may seem awkward at first, but please stick with it for one week. It will get easier.

28. #5 Post Traumatic Growth • Masten, A.S. (2001). Ordinary magic. • Bell Shaped curve distribution to human response of high adversity. • PTSD diagnosis must not have had symptoms prior to current trauma. • Begins with group – PTG Course & Penn Resiliency Program. • Research showed that most military personal knew about PTSD, but not resiliency, which is the most normal response to trauma.

29. Post Traumatic Growth • “Merely knowing that bursting into tears is not a symptom of PTSD but a symptom of normal grief and mourning usually followed by resilience, helps to put the brakes on the downward spiral. • In one study of 5,410 soldiers over a 5 year period, 395 were diagnosed with PTSD, and half of this population were in the bottom 15% of mental ad/or physical to begin with. This is most reliable – and one of the least quoted – facts in the entire PTSD literature (Seligman, 2011).

30. Post Traumatic Growth CourseDrs. Richard Tedeschi, University of North Carolina, Charlotte and Richard McNally, Harvard. • Course begins with the Ancient Wisdom that personal transformation is characterized by the renewed appreciation of being alive, enhanced personal strength, acting on new possibilities, improved relationship, and a spiritual deepening. Wisdom comes along through suffering. --Aeschylus 525-456 BC

31. Post Traumatic Growth Course • Data supports this as in one example 61.1% of imprisoned airmen tortured for years by the North Vietnamese said that they had benefited psychologically from their ordeal. Once more, the more severe their treatment, the greater the post-traumatic growth.

32. Post Traumatic Growth Course Five elements that are known to contribute to post-traumatic growth. 1. Understand the normal response to trauma: shattered beliefs about the self, others, and the future. (it is not, in itself a symptom of PTSD, nor is it a character defect). 2. Anxiety reduction: techniques that control intrusive thoughts and images.

33. Post Traumatic Growth Course 3. Constructive self- disclosure. Don’t bottle it up. 4. Creating a trauma self narrative. (this is a fork in the road. And appreciation of paradox. Grief and gratitude can both share the same space). 5. Over arching life principles and stances that are more robust to challenge are articulated.

34. Post Traumatic Growth Course These include new ways to be altruistic, accepting growth without survivor guilt, crafting a new identity as a trauma survivor or as a newly compassionate person, and taking seriously the Greek ideal of the hero who returns from Hades to tell the world an important truth about how to live.

35. Post Traumatic Growth Course Finally, keeping a gratitude diary, and all and any of the previous techniques we have talked about here will continue the growth and resilience to being more optimistic about life.

36. What makes any clinical method work is not just the cognition, or the aha moments in life, or the technique used – it is the reversal of the perceptual set along with a performance, (behavior) over and over again, until it is habitual.

37. References Bryant, F. B. (2003). Savoring Beliefs Inventory (Sbi): A Scale For Measuring Beliefs About Savoring.Journal Of Mental Health (2003) 12, 2, 175– 196. Edwards, J.K., & Chen, M.W. (1999). Strength-Based Supervision: Frameworks, Current Practic, and Future Directions: A Wu-Wei Method. The Family Journal, 7,4, 349-357. Fredrickson, B. L. (2013, July 15). Updated Thinking on Positivity Ratios. American Psychologist. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0033584 Hockenbury, D.H. & Hockenbury, S.E. (2011). Discovering Psychology, New York, NY: Worrth Publishers; 5th ed. Kabat-Zinn, J. (2009). Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of your body and mind to face stress, Pain, and Illness. (15th anniversary edition). New York, NY:ADelta Book. Kolodinsky, P., Englar-Carlson, M., Montopoli, G., Edgerly, B., Dubner, D., Horn, R., & Draves, P. (2014). Positive Psychology in Counselor Education: An Exploration of Counselor Educators’ Opinions. Vista On Line, American Counseling Association.

38. References Cont. Marini, I. & Chacon, M. (2002). The Implications of Positive Psychology and Wellness for Rehabilitation Counselor Education. Rehabilitation Education, Vol 16(2), 149-163. Masten, A.S. & Curtis, W.J. (2000). Integrating competence and psychopathology: Pathways toward a comprehensive science of adaptation in development. Development and Psychopathology, 12, 529-550. Masten, A.S. (2001). Ordinary magic: Resilience processes in development. American Psychologist, 56, 3, 227-238. Peterson, C. (2006). A Primer in Positive Psychology (Oxford Positive Psychology Series), New York, NY: Oxford Press. Seligman, M.E.P. (1975). Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman. Seligman, M.E.P. (1991). Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. New York: Knopf; Seligman, M.E.P. (1996). The Optimistic Child: Proven Program to Safeguard Children from Depression & Build Lifelong Resilience. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

39. References Cont. Seligman, M.E.P, & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Positive psychology: An   introduction. American Psychologist. Jan. 55,1, 5-14. Seligman, M.E.P. (2001). Comment on “priorities for prevention research at NIMH.” Prevention and Treatment, 4, 24. Seligman, M. E. P. (2002). Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: Free Press. Seligman,M.E.P. (2005). Positive Psychology, Positive Prevention, and Positive Therapy. In C. R. Snyder and S.J. Lopez (Eds.). Handbook of Positive Psychology. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Seligman, M.E.P. (2011). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. New York: Free Press.  Seligman, M.E.P. (1993). What You Can Change and What You Can't: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement. New York: Knopf.  (Paperback reprint edition, Ballantine Books, 1995) Siegel, D.J. (2007)The Mindful Brain, Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being, New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition

40. References Cont. Siegel, D.J. (2007)The Mindful Brain, Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being, New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition Siegel, D.J. (2010) The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company; Siegel, D.J. (2010) Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation. Bantam. Snyder, C.R. & Lopez, S. (2005). Handbook of Positive Psychology. New York, NY: Oxford Press.

41. Be Heliotropic