
Alright, so you get the song reference. I love Salt N’ Pepper they changed my life. Their songs helped to define the 90’s and gave young women freedom to talk about taboo concepts like sex, relationships, and our own empowerment. This leads me to the topic of this posting - THOUGHTS.
I have been providing training on interrupting and reframing experiences. In any given experience (with another human) there is an interaction where one presents stimulus and the other responds. This can be gentle and kind or it can messy and difficult or any other number of adjectives. Now, for the ones that are messy - why are they messy? They are messy because something that was said or expressed caused a response. Most people assume that the behavior is the response, I suggest that it is not the behavior. If we slow down and break apart the interaction, we may find that there is a thought, then a feeling, then a behavior - and we are the observer of these three things within ourselves.
Part of the training is to have everyone slow down and notice, the thought, the feeling and then lastly the behavior. Try it out, you might find that you go right to the behavior. When we overlay an intersectional construct over this, meaning all points of identity, and ask folks what happens when a point of their identity is poked at in a given interaction, what the thought, the feeling and the behaviors are some interesting things are revealed. Most folks look at the behavior and think that is where the focus should be. It is where consequences happen. This is visible when working with direct care staff who serve adolescents - the young person shoots their mouth off, the direct care staff responds. But wait, what if we slow downs the entire process? If the direct care staff can see the thought, feeling and then behavior can they become better at their work?

This is where it gets interesting, if we take an intersectional approach to staff development we can help folks understand why they are reactive in any given circumstance. At which point we can mitigate clinical risk by helping people understand that long before their action there is a series of internal processes that occur. We can then disrupt the internal processes. Back to the training. When we look at “triggers” we can also look at positive “triggers”. What causes immediate joy? What causes a grin? What makes a feeling of peace wash over? These are thoughts that can be brought in as the initial thought emerges. As that happens we can rewire the response system.
If this is true and we can rewire our thinking - like we can rewire trauma response - maybe we can change the way we do behavioral health business.
More love, not less - no matter what, Tiffany
Comments