As a social science discipline, psychology is very young and has been acknowledged as a legitimate field of study for not much more than a century. Most of the move toward being an empirical science has been in the second half of this period. The primary empirical question has been what works with psychological interventions and the follow up question why it works. Jasper Mountain is able to take advantage of all the scientific work not only in psychology and therapy, but also advancements in understanding the human brain. From theoretical foundations of the efficacy of psychological treatment as well as the practice-based evidence gained over the last four decades of work, Jasper Mountain has developed significant insight into the questions of what works with our population and why it works. With this understanding we can work to enhance the right approaches and conditions for positive brain change and remove elements that are ineffective or even contraindicated.
To explain what works we must start with the lowest foundational element of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – physiological needs. Food, water, shelter and other conditions promoting survival are often cited but non-material basic needs are often deemphasized or ignored. The exception to this is the need for safety, but how does a child experience safety?
Goal 1 Love, Acceptance and Attachment–These Result in True Safety. Connecting with the child beneath the protective layers requires love.
Steps to Reach This Goal:
Any treatment that results in the young person experiencing being loved will be considerably more effective in producing positive brain change.
One aspect of love is wanting long-term success for the young person, not just short-term improvement.
Teaching a child to form an attachment is one of the most important things you can possibly do for future success.
Assessing the ability of a young person to bond and attach will inform the treatment immeasurably and lead to interventions that work in the long-term.
Our system of care for children must understand true safety requires stability of placement, not just lack of abuse.
Children change slowly at their own rate, beware of methods claiming quick fixes. Do not look to the latest approach that promises quick results. Despite the advertising and marketing research, there is no quick method to positive brain change.
Goal 2 Healing Involves Disconfirming Negative Perceptions of Self, Others and the World.
Steps to Reach This Goal:
Behavior is the outgrowth of perceptions and emotions, to change behavior work to first change the young person’s perception.
The young person must experience a much more supportive and positive experience with you, if not, negative perceptions of adults and the world will be reinforced rather than changed.
Real change in a young person is deep inner change, not quick and easy superficial change. Unless perception change alters the child’s brain, it will not be lasting change.
Use opportunities today to teach lessons for the future. A long-range view for children is the most helpful.
Interventions can stop problem behavior, prevent misbehavior, or teach helpful lessons. Learn to develop and evaluate interventions that do all of these and do each well.
We must see when our efforts make the situation worse by confirming negative perceptions, it is very easy to do.
Goal 3 We Must First Enter Their World of Trauma/Anger/Sadness to Invite Them into Our World of Health/Joy/Contentment.
Steps to Reach This Goal:
You must start the process of helping a young person with an appraisal of what has happened in the child’s past and how this has impacted the individual.
What appears on the surface to be illogical behaviors (self-harm, bullying, destructiveness) makes much more sense when we employ the understanding of putting ourselves in the shoes of the child.
The key aspects of any plan to help the child must include: understanding, patience and persistence.
What does the young person see when looking at your world? Is it one characterized by contentment, happiness, success and enjoyment?
Begin to prepare the child for the future by bringing it into the present in a way to encourage planning, enthusiasm and optimism.
Modeling is the most effective learning strategy. What is the model you present with your energy, your openness, your optimism and all aspects of your life? Are you prepared to model making personal changes by learning about yourself in the process of helping children and making needed improvements?
Goal 4 Healing Takes an Expressive Environment Integrating All of the Child’s Needs.
Steps to Reach This Goal:
We heal our emotions through expression; you must encourage the very expression that others have discouraged from the young person. Environments make a huge difference, either positive or negative. Expressive and positive environments promote healing and learning.
Theories and approach do not change people, environments and interactions other people produce real change.
One way to create a healing environment is to avoid what troubled children have been through and to provide things they have missed out on.
Expressive environments promote healing, and healing environments create the conditions that build health in mind, body and spirit.
Modeling is the best form of teaching. What do you and the environment model for the young people you help?
Regardless of the challenges you face in helping a young person, never give up hope because the child often needs to learn to be hopeful from you.
Goal 5 The Environment Must Teach/Model/Promote Stress Management. Stress is part of living, it can improve or impair performance, it comes with some of life’s best moments, and it can also impair or even kill if not managed well.
Steps to Reach This Goal:
Teaching a young person to relax, to cope and to be resilient can be the most important lesson you can possibly teach for long-term stress management.
Relaxation is important to everyone, particularly children, because it can reduce stress and return us to a state of calm following stressful situations.
Coping allows the individual to take a difficult situation and make it a positive rather than negative experience.
Resiliency is the ability to bounce back from adversity and can be an important way to cope with difficult situations and gain increased self-confidence.
Research is very clear what works and what does not if our goal is a healthy life—manage your own stress, now pass that on to a child. The best way to teach stress management is to model it to young people. They will give you plenty of opportunities to demonstrate coping!
Goal 6 Play/Fun/Laughter Assist Healing and Learning.
Steps to Reach This Goal:
Trauma can remove the natural drive to play, and traumatized children must be taught to play once again. Every treatment plan should encourage play.
Healing and learning are enhanced when a young person (or an adult) is having fun.
Although childlike play has no purpose, it is inherently healthy and something adults should encourage in all children, particularly struggling young people.
Humor has many positive qualities and should be an aspect of a healthy environment for children.
Adults must model play, humor and positive enjoyment if they expect troubled children to reflect these qualities.
Adults must set the tone; if the adults are serious, reactive and negative, then what you send out will likely come right back to you, only amplified.
Goal 7 Positive Brain Change Is Essential and Neurological Reparative Therapy Is Key.
Steps to Reach This Goal:
Because behavior comes from processes within the brain, helping children and teens is fundamentally about understanding and promoting positive brain change.
Most troubled young people have had adverse experiences in childhood including trauma, abuse, neglect, abandonment and chronic threat of harm. Understanding the effects of trauma leads to solutions.
Behavior change starts with shifting perceptions, that in turn modifies emotional responses, resulting in changing behavior.
Neurological Reparative Therapy is a roadmap to understanding the path to positive brain change, and then leaves the rest to the helper to use their experience and skills to lead the healing journey.
Troubled young people may only reach their full potential with your high expectations, patience and support.
The brain is capable of positive change at any point in life, so never give up on a young person.
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The last three goals on this list are less about interventions that assist individual children and more systemic goals of our system of care, our needs as helpers as well as those we help, and finally how to optimize the gains of our work for both ourselves and those we work with.
Goal 8 We Must Be the Voice for Children to Bring Needed Change to Our Institutions and System of Care.
Steps to Reach This Goal:
Young people deserve a system of care that provides them all their basic needs and not just the absence of abuse.
Children do not have a voice designing or evaluating our systems of care, we must speak out for them even if our voice is not always appreciated or valued.
Children need touch as well as safety. Do not let regulators prevent you from meeting this need in children.
We must raise our expectations, not just of the children we help, but also for ourselves, and our programs.
We will not be there to help in the future, so young people must build a sense of internal personal worth for when life gets difficult.
If you do not advocate for the long-term needs of young people, who do you expect to do so in your place?
Goal 9 A Meaningful Life Requires Spiritual Health– Including Morality, Sense of Purpose and a Code to Live By.
Steps to Reach This Goal:
Spiritual health cannot be completely separated from physical and psychological health. It includes individual (internal moral code) and collective (being a part of something greater than the self) components, and both are important.
Spiritual health has not been fully recognized as a critical aspect of well-being. It can be one of the key elements of long-term happiness in life. Happiness is an outgrowth of living a life filled with pleasure, engagement, meaning and purpose.
The absence of attention to spiritual health is an unhelpful holdover from the past when psychology distanced itself from spiritual beliefs. It is our job to reincorporate spiritual health as a focus in helping children.
Helping children understand this may be the most important help we can provide them.
Find ways to integrate an understanding and growing development of spiritual health in the help you provide.
The first goal is for you to make sure you have spiritual health in all its forms, because you cannot give to another what you do not possess yourself.
Goal 10 Professionals Who are ‘All In’ Give the Most and Get the Most in Return.
Steps to Reach This Goal:
The more you invest in what you do, the more you get out of it. Engagement increases satisfaction and personal happiness.
Look beyond the money and benefit, the greatest return from any helping role is the satisfaction of changing for the better the life of a child!
The reward of personal satisfaction is even greater if the challenge is great. Hang in there with very troubled children and plant the seeds of success.
Helping traumatized children is an excellent reason to be your best self.
Every worthwhile endeavor comes at a price. Bear the burdens in solidarity with the young people and model resiliency.
For the future of troubled children and society as a whole, we need more helpers to be ‘all in.’ You are invited to be one of us!
The brief answer to the question What Works? is love, acceptance, attachment, handling stress, healing and positive brain change. The direction is clear the details rely on each of us and the environment we create to set a new and more positive course for the life’s journey our children will embark on when they leave us. Be all in and be the change you want to see in the children you help. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to make a positive change in the lives of damaged and troubled children, use this opportunity wisely.
Test
- Modern psychology as a social science can be traced back to the age of the enlightenment and the French Revolution. T or F
- Jasper Mountain has developed the understanding of what works with our population from which of the following?
- Theoretical foundations from psychological research
- Federal and State Governmental Monographs
- Practice based evidence
- a. and c.
- List the three most important ways children in our programs experience safety?
- Nourishment, praise and choices
- Exercise, education and therapy
- Love, acceptance and attachment
- None of the above
- Disconfirming is the process of altering negative perceptions of self, others and the world. T or F
- The most effective learning strategy is:
- Modeling
- Repetition
- Patient instruction
- Removing all stress
- Expressive and positive environments promote healing and learning. T or F
- Jasper Mountain uses which of the following as a roadmap to understanding the path to positive brain change:
- Therapeutic recreation
- The Code of Ethics of the American Psychological Association
- Council on Accreditation Standards
- Neurological Reparative Therapy
- What is true about the use of humor at Jasper Mountain:
- It will be misinterpreted by children as being made fun of.
- It may be good for staff but not the traumatized children.
- It should be a part of our healthy environment.
- It is an appropriate way for staff to manage stress.
- Spiritual health includes:
- Being a part of something greater than the self.
- Being a moral person
- Having a sense of purpose
- Is directly connected to happiness in life.
- All of the above
- Being ‘all in’ involves an understanding that the more you invest in service work for others, the more you receive in return. T or F
Answers:
1 – F
2 – d
3 – c
4 – T
5 – a
6 – T
7 – d
8 – c
9 – e
10 – T