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Anthony Quintiliani, Ph.D, LADC

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July 23, 2017 By Admin

Relapse Prevention Plans – Basics (T. T. Gorski) Anthony R. Quintiliani, Ph.D., LADC

Relapse Prevention Plans – The Basics

T. T. Gorski, Anthony R. Quintiliani, Ph.D., LADC

The following information about how to develop effective relapse prevention plans has been paraphrased from the Work of Terrence T. Gorski.  It is highly practical and a concrete way to develop your skills in relapse prevention interventions. Intermediate (Marlatt and Gordon) and advanced relapse prevention (MBSR, ACT) strategies will follow in future posts. The core steps are noted below.

  1. Stabilization: After detox and a few days without using substances, the core issue is WHAT do you need to do so you will not use substances today? This is very early abstinence, so best to be highly respectful, gentle, concrete, and proceed slowly with your client.
  2. Assessment of Realities: A primary rationale for assessment is to discover the client’s patterns of problems and related behaviors that most often lead to relapse.  Key areas to examine are patterns of use, recovery effort history, sources of emotional dysregulation, and details about repeated self-medication to reduce experienced suffering. You will most likely discover areas involving childhood trauma, various forms of person abuse, unhelpful familial patterns, serious losses, peer group problems, and insults to the integrity of the self.
  3. Education: Key areas of client education include that relapse is a normal part of recovery process; extremes of guilt and shame need to be combatted; identification and counteracting the progressive warning signs; and, instilling a strong sense of hope.
  4. The Warning Signs: It is important to individualize the plan for each client. Although common core categories of unpleasant life experiences leading to self-medication exist, each person’s response to them differs in the details. Your best bet for success is to include both self-help and clinical applications regarding the warning signs of relapse. Help the client take a personal inventory about their known warning signs. Some signs may not be in awareness.
  5. Dealing with Warning Signs: It is important to teach the client skills for managing their warning signs.  It is not enough to simply talk about the skills (generic talk therapy); it is important that clients practice the skills – a bit more Behavior Therapy.  Behavioral approaches help to concretize ways of being and doing that counteract automatic unhelpful sequences forming from warning signs. Often poor responses come after unhelpful thinking patterns. So it may be helpful to use some Cognitive Therapy to help client understand and counter unhelpful, automatic negative thinking. Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy may be helpful in helping clients modify self-defeating behaviors, and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction may be helpful in improving mind-body emotional dysregulation and behavioral urges. If you know how to do Dialectical Behavior Therapy, it can be highly effective here. Last but not least, use whatever might be helpful from AA’s 12 steps. Do not expect that one shoe fits all; do not expect that your favorite approach is the correct approach. A varied and skilled application of various approaches tends to work best.
  6. Recovery Plans: Clients will obtain the best outcomes by participating in both self-help and clinical applications of recovery and relapse planning. A concrete relapse prevention plans, founded on good personal information and scientific interventions, tend to be most successful.
  7. Personal Inventory: It is often helpful for clients to learn how to do morning and evening inventory work. This is similar but not the same as Psychosynthesis, in which people use preview to prepare to deal with expected challenges and joys of the day, and review in the evening to see what worked and what did not. If clients become anxious after evening review, they will be helped by MBSR’s body scanning technique.   It may help people enter sleep and remain  in sleep.
  8. Family Role: Supportive family involvement is strongly encouraged, but only if it is supportive in nature. Don’t try to force family roles if systemic support is lacking.
  9. Follow-Up: We need to check in with clients to see what is working and what is not working.  This should help us to monitor progress and revise relapse prevention plans as needed. A periodic urine screen may be helpful to work with both self-report and evidence of progress.

For more information refer to Gorski, T. T. (2003). How to Develop an RP Plan. At the Addictions Web Site of Terrence T.Gorski. See www.tgorski.com; www.cenaps.com; and, www.relapse.org.

Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, VermontChiYinYang_EleanorRLiebmanCenter

Author of Mindful Happiness  

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Filed Under: Addiction, Featured, Ideas & Practices, Meditation, MIndfulness, Prevention, Relapse Tagged With: ANTHONY QUINTILIANI, MINDFUL HAPPINESS, MINDFULNESS, PREVENTION, RELAPSE, RELAPSE PREVENTION PLAN

May 25, 2017 By Admin

Using Cognitive Defusion in Mindfulness Psychotherapy

Cognitive Defusion in Mindfulness Psychotherapy

A well-meaning therapist might ask: What is cognitive defusion. Well this practice, as used in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, is beyond cognitive restructuring of cognitive distortions and automatic negative thoughts ( I call “Red Ants”). The practice concretely de-literalizes the personal truth and meaning of unhelpful, repetitive thoughts and words. As The Buddha warned: We probably should NOT believe the distinctions of thoughts in our heads. Our strong thoughts may be our best friends or our worst enemies. In neuroscience the fact that more negative than positive thoughts occur in humans implies we are more attached to limbic reactivity and fear than to positive thoughts and emotions. When we get stuck in negative cycles of thinking, feeling and doing our right brain and limbic area dominate. A very old mindfulness belief is that you are not your thoughts, your emotions, or your behaviors; these parts of you are simply associated with your life experiences. When a client learns to defuse a though it means they have changed its linguistic structure and removed it from being cemented into their CABs, or cognition-affect-behavior cycles. In all good therapies, especially Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and various mindfulness therapies (MBCR, DBT, MBCT, MBRP, ACT), helpers often work on truth-analysis of unhelpful, repetitive, negative thoughts patterns – especially those embedded into CABs cycles of ineffective experiences. Self-medication, isolation, and avoidance are commonly associated with these realities. Sometimes this work includes meta-cognitive analysis regarding your thoughts about your thoughts or the patterns of your thoughts. The clear logic is that the words we often tell ourselves in times of stress or fear are NOT often true. Of course, if indeed you are seriously endangered best to allow your limbic brain area to save your life. The list below will note various approaches used to defuse thoughts from our experience of being, our CABs cycles.

  1. Stay the thoughts out loud and mindfully notice the sensations, images, emotions, and associated CABs cycles that arise. Now say the words over and over again for at least half a minute. Note any changes that follow.
  2. Use scrambling of the phrase to change it grammatical brain-connections. Your brain should react a different way to the “scrambled” message. It is like changing the code of the phrase. For example: try saying “am person a bad” or “person I a bad am” instead of “I am a bad person.”  Notice what your brain-mind does now.
  3. Speed up and then slow down the rate of inner and outer speech. Try all four options; notice any relief you have obtained.
  4. Reduce then intensify your energy level when saying the phrase. Notice, again.
  5. Elongate the sounds of the key words in your phrase.  Keep elongating and notice what happens. Elongate and slow as far as you can.
  6. I like this approach. Change the most important one or two words in your phrase.  Now say the phrase out loud with one or two slightly less harsh words.  You will need to repeat this technique for effects. For example: “I am so worthless” helps solidify your brain plasticity about personal meanings and images. Try this: “Sometimes I feel worthless” or “When really bad things happen, I can feel worthless”  or “My unpleasant feeling can relate to feeling less worthwhile.”
  7. Change the language code of your key word/s. For example: change “I am a terrible person” to “I am a spanty person.” Spanty being Czech for terrible or bad.  Notice how the brain/mind/body responds to this simple change.
  8. You could also sing your statement, or say it in a foolish voice tone.
  9. I have used defusion and added body movements to the process. Here are four examples.

A) Find a spot on the floor where you try to project all your bad feelings about your repetitive phrase. You are consciously projecting the bad feeling into the spot on the floor. Now stand in it and notice how your mind body reacts. Slowly, but with some bodily energetic force, step out of the spot on the floor.  Notice the effects.

B) Stand in the same spot, and pretend you are taking off a pair of pants – BUT when you are out of the imaginary pants, immediately step aside. Notice.

C) Find a pleasant place to go for a brief walk. Enjoy the environment, but say your statement to yourself. Split your attention in two: attention to the beauty of the walk (and watch your step), and attention to repeating your phrase. Notice any changes and shifts that occur.

D) This one is out-there but fun. Energize yourself (if healthy enough) into a rapid skipping movement. At the same time say your phrase, and pay attention to where you are skipping. Your body will respond by contrasting the negative statement against the body-memory of good-old skipping. For most adults, skipping was a fun thing to do. Notice the effects.

For more information refer to: Blackledge, J. T. (2015). Cognitive Defusion in Practice: A Clinician’s Guide… Oakland, CA: Context Press/New Harbinger, pp. 3-42, 87-109, 159-162.

Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, VermontChiYinYang_EleanorRLiebmanCenter

Author of Mindful Happiness  

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New Edition of Mindful Happiness in Production…Coming soon!

Filed Under: Clinical Practice, Clinicians, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Featured, Ideas & Practices, Meditation, Meditation Activities, Mindful Awareness, MIndfulness, MIndfulness Activities, Mindfulness Training, Psychotherapy, Therapy, Therapy Tagged With: ANTHONY QUINTILIANI, COGNITIVE DEFUSION, MINDFUL HAPPINESS, MINDFULNESS

April 1, 2017 By Admin

The Power of Interpersonal Mindfulness

Interpersonal Mindfulness

Various forms of mindfulness-based compassion training help us to care more about the needs, happiness, and health of other people. However, direct applications of interpersonal mindfulness activates these influences into direct action on behalf of others.  Thus, if lucky, we learn to care more about others and less about ourselves.  The self-centered ego gives way to compassionate tolerance. Buddhist practices and meditations may improve our interpersonal relations, both intimate and distant.  Today our world, nation, regions, and families are locked in bitter conflict; the entitled view of “my ideas are right” holds sway and prevents any forward movement for negotiated co-existence of different ideas and people.  If we hope to save ourselves as well as our world, we MUST practice more interpersonal mindfulness. Such practices of random acts of kindness, general compassion, taking in suffering and giving out joy, tolerance, openness to differences, general gratitude and others all support  more inter-personally cooperative thoughts and behaviors. Such thoughts and behaviors will improve self, dyads, relationship, family, community, race, ethnic group, religion, state, nation, and world. The need for this shift is highly urgent! We must change our being from greed, aversion, and hate to generosity, inclusivity, and love. If not our species and our world may fail.

In some ways this conflictual existence is the outcome of our old limbic brain structures (my own survival above all else), and our aggressive greediness as a species. According to very old Buddhists writings, one thing we can do right now if practice deep, active listening. By listening more to others and their opinions, and talking less about ourselves, we may achieve an emotional balance of mutuality. Basic mutuality (we are BOTH important) may lead to more deep listening and personal reflections of what is happening right now in this present moment.  What, exactly, is it that is upsetting me? What, exactly, is it that may lead to mutual satisfaction here now?  Begin your changes by starting with yourself.  Notice what conflictual inner self-messages continue to play and re-play themselves over and over again in your own mind.  Begin by listening to your own inner conflicts, and work at listening and reflecting deeply on both sides of this dynamic. Work on a solution, even if it is not a perfect one. First practice more radical acceptance with your own inner conflicts, then gently move to outer conflicts – begin gently with significant others.  Practice, practice, practice and practice more.  There cannot be a winner! Once you feel the sensations and emotions of successful compromise, begin to practice beyond intimate circles and into your general world environments. It is all about sharing your love and acceptance of self with others, and being for the betterment of others. On this path also practice good self-care.

Practice letting go of harsh self-centered judgments and learn to appreciate both similarities and differences – even BIG differences. After all, impermanence is real – as is the time-limited life you now have. Better to work at compassion and openness NOW. Better to work on caring about others and loving people NOW. Our total interdependence causes great energetic frictions at times. Learn how to find the MIDDLE WAY and encourage others to follow that path. The subtle energies of love and the very powerful energies of hatred both have immense influence in our lives. Live for love! Live to reduce hatred and reed! Be authentically intelligent and kind-hearted in your relatively short life.

For more information refer to Musho Hamilton, D. (2017). The Zen of You and Me: A Guide to Getting Along with Just About Anyone. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications.

Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, VermontChiYinYang_EleanorRLiebmanCenter

Author of Mindful Happiness  

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New Edition of Mindful Happiness in Production…Coming soon!

Filed Under: Benefits of Mindfulness, Featured, Ideas & Practices, Leadership, Meditation, Mindful Awareness, MIndfulness, Mindfulness Training, Therapy, Thoughts & Opinions, Training Tagged With: INTERPERSONAL, MINDFULNESS, TRAINING

March 26, 2017 By Admin

How to Improve Client/Patient Collaboration

Improving Client/Patient Collaboration  in Treatment

To improve collaboration between you and your clients/patients, simply practice the following behaviors as your norms.  See the

list below, and practice, practice, practice.

  1. Present with an attitude of helpfulness and authentic caring. Empathy and authentic concern are required.
  2. Recognize the reality that clients/patients are at different levels of readiness to make changes – almost alway NOT where you are in the process.
  3. Know how to use cognitive-behavioral therapies, mindfulness-based stress reduction, deepo psychodynamics in alliance building, and other effective approaches.
  4. Complete a cost-benefit analysis grid with the person, and work with pros/cons of staying the same vs changing.
  5. Do whatever you can to enhance the quality of the clinical relationship.
  6. Act within an understanding of equality; you are not able to control any person who is suffering.
  7. Provide psychoeducation where needed.
  8. Anticipate barriers to making desired changes; offer concrete support and help in doing so.
  9. Your clinical interventions should be evidence-based for a higher probability of success.
  10. Use the person’s personal hopes, goals, and motivations.
  11. Use task analysis as a behavioral method to break down larger tasks into smaller, more manageable tasks.
  12. Be willing to try harm reduction when people appear pre-contemplative in stages of change.
  13. Provide direct feedback, with more emphasis on reinforcing praise rather than scolding.
  14. Remain in the Middle Way regarding too much/too little expected change, as well as the timing and time required for any changes to occur.
  15. Be highly mindful of both your own emotion regulation and that of the person you are working with. Practice emotion regulation skills often.
  16. Intervene quickly in anxiety, depression, substance misuse, and trauma.  Intervene carefully, intelligently, and again with evidence-based actions.
  17. Remember in crisis situations that  safety is first, stabilization is second.
  18. Identify people, places, and things that help and hinder progress into healthier life patterns.
  19. Monitor serious symptoms and act accordingly.  If medications are required, be part of the monitoring system and do “check-ins” often.
  20. Use self-help groups if the client/patient finds them helpful.  One needs to participate to know the correct answer here.
  21. Do GOOD self-care and get effective clinical supervision when needed.

For more information refer to Daley, D. C. and Zuckoff, A. (1999). Improving Treatment Compliance: Counseling and Systems Strategies for Substance Abuse and Dual Disorders. Center City, MINN. Hazelden.

Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, VermontChiYinYang_EleanorRLiebmanCenter

Author of Mindful Happiness  

Mindful Happiness cover designs.indd

New Edition of Mindful Happiness in Production…Coming soon!

Filed Under: ANTHONY QUINTILIANI, Clinicians, Counselor Activites, Featured, Ideas & Practices, Leadership, MIndfulness, Practices, Self -Kindness, Self Care, Self Compassion, Self Esteem, Stress Reduction, Therapist, Therapy, Thoughts & Opinions, Training

May 26, 2016 By Admin

Meditation on the Feeling of Letting Go

Meditation on the Feeling of Letting Go – Pacification!

Pacifying the mind is a desired outcome of regular, stable meditation practice.  Pacification may be done via meditating on the breath, general mindfulness awareness, vipassana, and various other forms of  meditation.  However, the wise mind skill of “letting go” of unhelpful, negative, and harmful thoughts and emotions may bemindfulhappiness-meditation-monkey-mind more difficult for many people, even many meditators. In this post I hope to teach you how to LET GO.  Since letting go is much more than a cognitive action, it is necessary to examine other human processing channels – especially sensation, body movement, and emotion.  “Monkey Mind” can be pacified! Pacifying “monkey mind” when it contains strong negative objects of awareness will require a bit more practice and determination. Discernment of finer details in thoughts, sensations, body movement, and emotions will be necessary. Let’s begin.

  1. Begin with a comfortable but functional meditation posture.
  2. Pay close attention to your breath just as it is. Do not try to control it.
  3. Now slowly begin to slow and deepen your breathing, noticing breath passing in and out of the nostrils, the chest area, and how your lower belly moves in and out.
  4. Continue with abdominal breathing as long as it does not cause the opposite effect – making you anxious.
  5. Now become aware of your mind, and the thoughts that are passing through it right now.  Practice bare attention without making any evaluations or stories about the thoughts.  Just let them pass.
  6. Check your personal stability in posture, breath, and clear seeing regarding the coming and going of your thoughts.  Still no judgments or analysis – just moving thoughts like a leaf in a stream.
  7. At this point make a conscious effort to produce a negative thought you would rather not have in your mind.  Just notice it!  Drop judgment and the need to respond to the thought.   Just allow it to be.
  8. Notice that it tends to produce unwanted sensations and/or emotions – feeling associated with negative thoughts.  Just notice.  No need to respond.
  9. It is important that your realize just how easy it was to intentionally produce a negative thought in your consciousness.  Yes, we have automatic negative thoughts, and we have intentionally created negative thoughts.  Both are unhelpful, unwanted and uncomfortable.  The important thing is that thoughts – like breathing – can be under both voluntary and involuntary control. Positive thoughts are the same way.
  10. Now give yourself a SUDs score (0 to 100) regarding the negative thought. The higher the score on Subjective Units of Discomfort, the stronger the unpleasantness is.
  11. Let’s practice. Make the negative though more clear in your mind, then let it go. Just use your intention to let it go cognitively.  Add sensation: get the thought going again, and feel it in your body.  Intentionally let it go, and focus on the subtle change in sensation.  Do it once again, but this time focus on the emotion the negative thought produces in your body. Focus on the thought; let it go, and notice the subtle emotional shift.  Let’s add body movement to this process.  This time let the thought go, and make an arm gesture as if gently flicking the thought away.  If it helps use both arms at once.
  12. Now practice it all at once. Produce the thought. Intentionally let it go cognitively, and notice the subtle shifts in sensation and emotions.  Add you arm flicking movement.  Really get into letting it go, over and over again.  Do it one more time. Include cognition, sensation, emotion and the body movement. Now give yourself another SUDs score from 0 to 100 to see if the overall discomfort has been reduced.
  13. Practice this skill often!!!!! If you relapse into autopilot mind, STOP and intentionally make a new thought.

By Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, VermontChiYinYang_EleanorRLiebmanCenter

Author of Mindful Happiness  

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Filed Under: Activities, ANTHONY QUINTILIANI, Benefits of Meditation, Featured, Ideas & Practices, Letting Go, Meditation, Meditation Activities, MIndfulness, Mourning, Practices, Training Tagged With: ACTIVITY, LETTING GO, MEDITATION, MINDFULNESS, MONKEY MIND, PACIFICATION

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