Cost Effective Professional Development Conference

Date: 25-26 June, 2010
Location: Mercure Hotel, Parramatta, NSW

Counsellor Camps is a unique opportunity for counselling professionals including students, psychologists, counsellors, psychotherapists, mental heath nurses and workers, social workers and anyone else working with people!

Their aim is for participants to access a cost effective way to attain professional development, networking and burnout prevention through relaxation/retreat. It has been designed and created BY counsellors FOR counsellors.

Counsellor Camps is a two day professional development retreat to enhance a counselling professionals counselling and intervention skills as well as self care. The workshop program for this event includes a range of experiential workshops lead by counselling professional and practicing facilitators in their field of expertise.

The program features a combination of small group experiential workshops as well as 15 minute massages and an hour yoga session for complete relaxation; wine, cheese and supper all included in our cost effective conference fee.

URL: www.trainingskillscentre.com.au/counsellor-camps.html

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Despite how addictions may manifest, they have three characteristics commonly referred to as the three C’s of compulsive use, loss of control and continued use.  In this article, we explore compulsive use.
 
Compulsive use has three elements: reinforcement, craving and habit. Reinforcement refers to a process in which the behaviour to use is strengthened based on previous experience Such experience as relief from pain or stress, increased pleasure, and/or becoming more sociable, may strengthen the desire to use the substance (Coombs & Howatt, 2005). Being rewarded with pleasure or relief from stress and pain encourages substance use (Koob & Simon, 2009).When one continues to use the substance, tolerance develops.
 
Tolerance refers to the need for an increased amount of the substance/ behaviour to achieve a previously similar desired effect. Tolerance develops when normal brain functions adapt to compensate for the disruption caused by the substance in both the behaviour and the bodily functions.

Chronic exposure to the substance produces neuronal adaptation that results not only in tolerance but in the requirement of the presence of the substance for normal function (Harris & Buck, 1990; Coombs & Howatt, 2005; Koob & Simon, 2009). As tolerance increase, absence of the substance may lead to craving.
 
Craving is the physiological need for the substance triggered by relevant brain activity. The body and the brain send intense signals during the absence of the substance triggering withdrawal symptoms.
 
Withdrawal symptoms refer to a maladaptive behaviour change with physiological and cognitive effects that occur as a result of abrupt termination or substantial reduction of the substance in the body (Becker, 2008; Coombs & Howatt, 2005).
 
Habit refers to an automatic and compulsive, pattern of the behaviour that demonstrates poor self control and tends to continue despite negative feedback. This results from the deeply ingrained patterns in the memory of the nervous system (Coombs & Howatt, 2005). The brain’s normal circuits include the brain reward system that induces pleasurable feelings when stimulated.
 
To regain these rewarding feelings, the circuit encourages a repeat of the behaviours that stimulate pleasurable feelings that in turn encourages continued use of the desired substance (Coombs & Howatt, 2005).

Source: www.mentalhealthacademy.com.au

This article is an extract from MHA’s General Addiction course.

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The following tips can be used with clients who are highly stressed or experiencing anger management issues. If you’re under unusual stress, you can also take benefit from strategies such as relaxation and mindful thinking. 

Everyday Demands

Everyday stressors, such as work, children and tight schedules can heighten anxiety and contribute to feeling overwhelmed. When we are stressed, we are less likely to respond in a measured and considered fashion to provoking situations, choosing instead to respond with impulsive expressions of our immediate feelings.

To avoid this result, it can help to be mindful of your schedule. Avoid taking on responsibilities or favours that you don’t have time for. Use spare time to pursue leisure and relaxation activities. Prioritise your self-care and maintain a balanced lifestyle. Of course, the achievement of these aims can be difficult when the demands on our time are so great.

Nonetheless, without paying careful attention to our lifestyle habits, we are vulnerable to the effects cumulative stress can have on our ability to manage expressions of anger. 

Thinking Only of Short-Term Gains

A confrontational or provoking situation can ignite reactions in individuals that have far-reaching and long-term effects on relationships. This often occurs during the heat-of-the-moment as tensions and anxieties blind us to the longer-term consequences. It can therefore be highly beneficial to plan, plan, plan for an anticipated encounter.

An awareness of likely triggers enables you to predict which situations are likely to be challenging or confrontational for you. Imagine, for example, that you have just received another credit card bill in the mail - you have overspent and know that your partner will not be pleased. Instead of waiting for your partner to react before formulating your response, you could spend a few moments considering how you could best respond to this likely future event.

You may, therefore, decide it is best to take accountability, to apologise and offer a commitment to lessen spending in the future. This, of course, is preferable to a response made in haste that is defensive, attacking, or derogatory.

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A narrative approach to counselling examines the stories people have constructed to define their lives and identities. Using narrative techniques, the counsellor assists the client in modifying narratives (stories) that are unhelpful or ineffective.

If, for example, I have a dominant narrative that says that I am simply no good at cooking, it is likely that I have had many experiences over the course of my life to create and reinforce this narrative.

1. I may have judged my cooking negatively by my own standards,
2. I may have achieved poor grades in high school cookery,
3. I may have had friends avoid eating meals I prepared and so on.

As my story (or plot) of cookery incompetence thickens over the course of my life, it becomes less and less likely that I will find evidence to discount this story. If I manage a successful dinner dish, it is likely I will consider it luck or a once off. It is unlikely to alter my dominant narrative. Yet incidences that support the narrative (like burning toast or having a cake flop) will be remembered and selected to thicken the plot and reinforce the dominant narrative of my cookery incompetence.  

If my (perceived) limited cooking ability was a concern for me, it would be the role of my narrative counsellor to help me identify an alternative story and assist in thickening the plot of the new story by:

1. searching for alternative explanations (eg. the eggs that I put in the cake were bad – that’s why it flopped),
2. searching for unique outcomes (eg. remember the time I made a fabulous beef pie),
3. encouraging me to envisage a future in which I am a competent cook,
4. finding ways to create an audience who will perceive and support the new, alternative narrative (eg. telling people of my cookery success stories; inviting brave friends for a home-cooked breakfast)   

By creating an alternative story of cookery competence, I am opening my life to the possibility of alternative ways of behaving and potentially re-shaping my entire identity. A number of guiding assumptions underlies narrative practice. These assumptions are listed below and provide an important overview for the study of narrative concepts.

Assumptions that underlie narrative ways of working:

1. The problem is the problem (the person is not the problem).
2. People have expertise on their own lives.
3. People can become the primary authors of the stories of their own lives.
4. By the time a person consults a professional, they will have already made many attempts to reduce the influence of the problem in their lives and relationships.
5. Problems are constructed in cultural contexts. These contexts include power relations of race, class, sexual orientation, gender and disadvantage.
6. The problems for which people seek consultation usually cause them to reach thin conclusions about their lives and relationships. Often these conclusions have encouraged them to consider themselves as deficient in some way and this makes it difficult for them to access their knowledge, competencies, skills and abilities.
7. These skills, competencies and knowledge can be made available to them to assist with reclaiming their lives from the influence of the problem for which they seek help.
8. There are always occasions in people’s life upon which they have escaped a problem’s influence. Problems never successfully claim 100% of people’s lives or relationships.
9. Ensuring an atmosphere of curiosity, respect and transparency is the responsibility of the professional.

Source: www.mentalhealthacademy.com.au

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Anxiety that is produced as a result of an actual situation (e.g. being in the dentist’s chair getting a tooth drilled) can become associated to events that surround the incident even when the component that originally activated the fear (a noisy drill that results in pain) is no longer present. For example, just sitting in the dentist chair while having fluoride treatment may end up evoking the same level of anxiety as when having drilling done. This process is known as conditioning.

Conditioning is a type of learning process in which the person is conditioned to think or learns to associate the painful drill with, for example, the dentist chair or with the dentist’s office or maybe even with the suburb in which the dentist’s practice resides.  In such cases fear ends up being evoked by the chair or office or related suburb in the absence of any tooth drilling.

Such conditioning, known as classical conditioning, was first demonstrated by Pavlov and is defined as being the repeated pairing of a neutral stimulus (e.g., a stimulus which by itself has no real meaning or is neutral, for example the dentist’s chair, dentist’s office or dentist’s practice location) with an unconditioned stimulus (e.g., a stimulus which has meaning naturally or innately in its capacity to produce a response, for example pain). 

The unconditioned stimulus of pain might end up producing a response of anxiety because of the pain experienced. The two stimuli of 1) the dentist’s chair, dentist’s office or dentist’s practice location and 2) pain, end up being associated in a person’s mind when the neutral stimulus becomes conditioned to (or is learnt to be associated with) the unconditioned stimuli.

In this case, the person would now associate the neutral stimuli of the dentist chair, dentist office or dentist practice location with pain thereby potentially being at risk of experiencing anxiety in anticipation of the pain when entering the dentist’s practice location, the dentist’s office, or the dentist chair, even if pain was no longer the result (click to see figure below).

The original and most famous example of classical conditioning involved Pavlov’s dogs. During his research on digestion, Pavlov noticed that his dog salivated in the presence of meat powder, but later began to salivate in the presence of the lab technician who normally fed them. From this, Pavlov predicted that if a particular stimulus in the dog’s surroundings was present when the dog was fed, this stimulus would become associated with food and cause salivation on its own.

Pavlov began to use bells to call the dogs at mealtime and, after a few repetitions, the dogs began to salivate in response to the sound of bells. Consequently a neutral stimulus (the bell) became a conditioned stimulus after being consistently paired with an unconditioned stimulus (meat powder). Pavlov called this learned relationship a conditional reflex, now known as a conditioned response (Lavond, & Steinmetz, 2003).

Another form of conditioning is referred to as operant conditioning (or learning theory). This was developed by Skinner and involved the use of consequences to modify behaviour. Operant conditioning is distinguished from classical conditioning in that it deals with the modification of voluntary behaviour through the use of consequences, while classical conditioning focuses on the conditioning of reflexive or innate behaviour that occurs under new conditions (Domjan, 2003).

Source: www.mentalhealthacademy.com.au

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