Adventures in Mental Health Land, Part 2
Now it’s not as dire as it sounds. The white room was in the white bungalow and had windows all around, so it’s not like I was trapped in some horrible stone building or in the basement of hospital.
Schedule-wise, for PHP, I was in for four sessions a day, five days a week. That basically broke into 2 different sessions of processing (whatever issues might have come up), 1 session of teaching, lunch (more on this later), and the last was some sort of crafts thing to sort of decompress (Mondays we did music, Tuesdays and Thursday some gardening, Wednesday a creative writing, and Friday a good meditation). It was a pretty full schedule, to tell you the truth. Add that hour-long commute to Pasadena from where I was living, it made for a full day.
In addition to this, I was still seeing my therapist on Tuesdays at 5, and I’d started a program through church called lay counseling, so I saw a lay counselor on Wednesdays. I still had EFM on Thursday, and GLASC group dinners on Tuesdays. Yeah, it was a full schedule all right.
I am not sure what to tell about PHP. What I did not know was that it was intensive group therapy. That meant other people, not just me. Sometimes it was the same people as they also progressed through the program, sometimes people would come for a session or two and disappear. It’s hard to share your ugly stuff with people you don’t know sometimes. Fortunately, a few people came regularly enough so that I could get to know them and their stories, and they got to know mine. A very few of those people I keep in contact with. Friendships and hanging out are discouraged while in the program, for probably good reason.
I don’t know about other PHP programs, but the one at ‘Las Encinas’ was CBT, which I learned was Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Apparently, this is a fairly common therapy. In very broad strokes, it follows a paradigm that goes like this: something happens (Trigger), and you have Thoughts about it, your Thoughts influence how you Feel about what happened, which in turn influences your Behavior. Like this: Trigger - Thought - Feeling - Behavior. So, how do I explain this in practice, or by example? Maybe like this,
TRIGGER: Someone cuts you off in traffic
THOUGHT: That person deliberately did that to get in my way
FEELING: Anger
BEHAVIOR: Aggressive driving. Road rage.
That’s VERY simplified, but it’s the idea. So, in order to change the behavior, the notion is to reframe the thought that ultimately generated it. You can’t stop Triggers, they just happen. You also can’t really stop your Feelings; whatever they are, they exist, and should be expressed. This leaves the Thought part, which is where the focus is, if you can RE-FRAME how you’re thinking about what happened, you can short-circuit the entire process.
So, in our example, if you re-frame the Thought:
THOUGHT: He didn’t do it purposely, he just had to get to his exit
FEELING: Neutral, maybe a little irritation.
BEHAVIOR: Continued driving
See how that works? It’s all about Re-framing what you’re telling youself.
There’s a lot more to it, of course, We each got a lovely binder:
[I don't think there are any proprietary items in there]
That was filled with all sorts of supplementary material, articles like, “Effective Group Feedback,” a Patient Handbook, and - for my money, the most valuable of all, “Safe Coping Skills.”
If nothing else, the phrase ‘Coping Skills’ entered my vocabulary; because I had never known or thought about that before. Much less knowing WHAT they were. But here was a handy-dandy list of them! 6 pages of them!
Now, I didn’t use them all, and probably won’t, but a few of them that worked for me are:
Ask for help: Reach out to someone safe
Leave a bad scene: When things go wrong, get out.
Cry: Let yourself cry; it will not last forever
Fight the trigger: Take an active approach to protect yourself
Pretend you like yourself: See how different the day feels
Rethink: Think in a way that helps you feel better
Identify the belief: Examples, shoulds, deprivation reasoning.
Detach from emotional pain (grounding): Distract, walk away, change the channel
For just a few. There are many, many more.
I’m still using them. A couple of weeks ago, a bad situation DID come up, and after bargaining as much as I could, my only recourse was to get the hell out of there, and I did.
The last one also touched on grounding, which was also an emphasis in the program. Mindfulness and Grounding are both very important. I’ll write more about this in Part 3.
Schedule-wise, for PHP, I was in for four sessions a day, five days a week. That basically broke into 2 different sessions of processing (whatever issues might have come up), 1 session of teaching, lunch (more on this later), and the last was some sort of crafts thing to sort of decompress (Mondays we did music, Tuesdays and Thursday some gardening, Wednesday a creative writing, and Friday a good meditation). It was a pretty full schedule, to tell you the truth. Add that hour-long commute to Pasadena from where I was living, it made for a full day.
In addition to this, I was still seeing my therapist on Tuesdays at 5, and I’d started a program through church called lay counseling, so I saw a lay counselor on Wednesdays. I still had EFM on Thursday, and GLASC group dinners on Tuesdays. Yeah, it was a full schedule all right.
I am not sure what to tell about PHP. What I did not know was that it was intensive group therapy. That meant other people, not just me. Sometimes it was the same people as they also progressed through the program, sometimes people would come for a session or two and disappear. It’s hard to share your ugly stuff with people you don’t know sometimes. Fortunately, a few people came regularly enough so that I could get to know them and their stories, and they got to know mine. A very few of those people I keep in contact with. Friendships and hanging out are discouraged while in the program, for probably good reason.
I don’t know about other PHP programs, but the one at ‘Las Encinas’ was CBT, which I learned was Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Apparently, this is a fairly common therapy. In very broad strokes, it follows a paradigm that goes like this: something happens (Trigger), and you have Thoughts about it, your Thoughts influence how you Feel about what happened, which in turn influences your Behavior. Like this: Trigger - Thought - Feeling - Behavior. So, how do I explain this in practice, or by example? Maybe like this,
TRIGGER: Someone cuts you off in traffic
THOUGHT: That person deliberately did that to get in my way
FEELING: Anger
BEHAVIOR: Aggressive driving. Road rage.
That’s VERY simplified, but it’s the idea. So, in order to change the behavior, the notion is to reframe the thought that ultimately generated it. You can’t stop Triggers, they just happen. You also can’t really stop your Feelings; whatever they are, they exist, and should be expressed. This leaves the Thought part, which is where the focus is, if you can RE-FRAME how you’re thinking about what happened, you can short-circuit the entire process.
So, in our example, if you re-frame the Thought:
THOUGHT: He didn’t do it purposely, he just had to get to his exit
FEELING: Neutral, maybe a little irritation.
BEHAVIOR: Continued driving
See how that works? It’s all about Re-framing what you’re telling youself.
There’s a lot more to it, of course, We each got a lovely binder:
[I don't think there are any proprietary items in there]
That was filled with all sorts of supplementary material, articles like, “Effective Group Feedback,” a Patient Handbook, and - for my money, the most valuable of all, “Safe Coping Skills.”
If nothing else, the phrase ‘Coping Skills’ entered my vocabulary; because I had never known or thought about that before. Much less knowing WHAT they were. But here was a handy-dandy list of them! 6 pages of them!
Now, I didn’t use them all, and probably won’t, but a few of them that worked for me are:
Ask for help: Reach out to someone safe
Leave a bad scene: When things go wrong, get out.
Cry: Let yourself cry; it will not last forever
Fight the trigger: Take an active approach to protect yourself
Pretend you like yourself: See how different the day feels
Rethink: Think in a way that helps you feel better
Identify the belief: Examples, shoulds, deprivation reasoning.
Detach from emotional pain (grounding): Distract, walk away, change the channel
For just a few. There are many, many more.
I’m still using them. A couple of weeks ago, a bad situation DID come up, and after bargaining as much as I could, my only recourse was to get the hell out of there, and I did.
The last one also touched on grounding, which was also an emphasis in the program. Mindfulness and Grounding are both very important. I’ll write more about this in Part 3.